https://youtu.be/cUyLODoZiVM
The linked video talks about panspermia, the idea that life on Earth could have arrived here via alien interstellar spaceship billions of years ago, first proposed by Francis Crick himself, the co-discoverer of DNA, in his book, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature, which I just ordered.
Very interesting and scientifically credible theory.

Great answer to my ExMo Xtian friend who frequents this forum.
I hope he will volunteer his opinion here in a semi anonymous forum.
Any sufficiently advanced race would be gods to us.
We would be to them, what dogs and cats are to us if they were a million years more advanced than us.
But they came here billions of years ago, or sent a starship full of bacteria
Or virus inside an ice comet that land all the time in our oceans, pushed through space by Hawking Radiation, solar winds, plasma, slowed down acreated here on these accretion disks around every black hole
Where the singularity lives
And time doesn’t matter
Only the singularity

Intentionally sending "a starship full of bacteria?" (That just sounds nasty.)

Even "dogs and cats" don't do that; we actually attempt to sterilize our spacecraft before sending them to other planets.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/mission/technology/planetary-protection/

No evidence for panspermia.

Just don't let Ockham near this thread. There would be blood everywhere.

If life originated elsewhere, then why wouldn't it originate here on Earth as well? Earth is in the "Goldilocks zone," and has a lot of land, fresh, and salt water in favorable and not so favorable zones. If it's one thing that we've learned by observing our planet, it's that life will find a way wherever it possibly can.

Yup. All this theory does is push us one turtle down on the endless stack.

Turtles will not be Mocked.

Yes, but their vengeance is slow and can be delayed further with rotting vegetables.

Sounds like the infamous kimchi gambit.

summer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If life originated elsewhere, then why wouldn't it
> originate here on Earth as well? Earth is in the
> "Goldilocks zone," and has a lot of land, fresh,
> and salt water in favorable and not so favorable
> zones. If it's one thing that we've learned by
> observing our planet, it's that life will find a
> way wherever it possibly can.

The question of the origin of life involves determining (1) the specific environmental conditions that existed when life began; and (2) the specific bio-chemical mechanism that produced life from those conditions.

The prebiotic conditions are generally known and understood. However, the mechanism that lead from these conditions to life is not. Moreover, given the constraints imposed by (1), and what is known about living organisms and bio-chemical mechanisms generally, scientists are puzzled as to how life did in fact arise.

Your suggestion that the Earth was a "Goldilocks zone" for life may be true as to the maintenance and proliferation of life once it took hold; but not necessarily true with respect to the conditions existent at the origin of life. If it were true, then arguably scientists could produce life simply by artificially recreating the prebiotic environment, and then "jump-starting" such prebiotic "soup" through some natural triggering mechanism; however statistically improbable such events might be. Obviously, nothing like this has happened.

As for Ockham, the simplest explanation for some mysterious phenomenon might well be intelligent design; especially when natural mechanisms themselves seem to require more complexity and "mystery" (and are more improbable) than natural laws seem to provide. After all, if Ockham were to find a watch on the beach, a naturalistic, evolutionary, explanation for the existence of the watch would be far more complicated than the simple explanation that some intelligent agent produced it. That is in fact the gist of Crick's panspermia hypothesis.

https://mercatornet.com/whats-in-a-name/20492/

In a time when we have public arguments about the removal of statues and plaques that commemorate people who are now regarded as racist, why has a high profile, massively funded, European “superlab” been given the name of a British scientist who was an unashamed eugenicist?

Crick’s personal letters showed his belief in eugenics, even suggesting that the Nazis had simply given eugenics “a bad name”, adding that: “I think it is time something is done to make it respectable again” (letter to biochemist Dr John T Edsall on June 10, 1971).

Crick famously threatened to leave a scientific group after researchers protested against a racist research proposal that posited finding evidence for supposed differences in the IQ of black and white people. Crick actually agreed there were racial IQ differences and suggested these were as a result of genetics.

He wrote in another letter to Edsall and six other members of the American National Academy of Sciences in February 1971 that:

“…In brief I think it likely that more than half the difference between the average IQ of American whites and Negroes is due to genetic reasons, and will not be eliminated by any foreseeable change in the environment. Moreover I think the social consequences of this are likely to be rather serious unless steps are taken to recognize the situation…”
This was years after he aired his views to Lord Snow. When Lord Snow asked him about a BBC programme, Crick wrote on April 17 1969:

“As far as I remember I said that the biological evidence was that all men were not created equal, and it would not only be difficult to try to do this, but biologically undesirable. As an a[s]ide I said that the evidence for the equality of different races did not really exist. In fact, what little evidence there was suggested racial differences.” (emphasis in original).
Crick even went so far as to advocate bribery and sterilisation of certain groups of people!

His 1970 letter to Dr B. Davis at Harvard Medical School to offer financial incentives to families to separate twins at birth for research said that people who were “poorly genetically endowed” should be sterilised:

“…My other suggestion is in an attempt to solve the problem of irresponsible people and especially those who are poorly endowed genetically having large numbers of unnecessary children. Because of their irresponsibility, it seems to me that for them, sterilization is the only answer and I would do this by bribery. It would probably pay society to offer such individuals something like £l,000 down and a pension of £5 a week over the age of 60. As you probably know, the bribe in India is a transistor radio and apparently there are plenty of takers.”

Definitely not very PC, but basically the same conclusion Charles Murray arrived at, based upon the statistical analysis of standardized test scores in, “The Bell Curve”, which got him cancelled on every college campus in America except Liberty U and BYU.
Unfortunately nobody has really come up with a refutation of the reasons behind the statistics, except to say the standardized tests are biased against non-whites, which is belied by the fact that Asians consistently score better than whites, which is why Harvard is getting sued for discriminating against Asians.
Why is that?
I think it has more to do with cultural expectations.
In Asian or Jewish families you bring shame upon your entire family if you bring home a ‘B’ in math or science.
Nobody ‘expects’ Black/Hispanic/Native American kids to get straight A’s, because fathers are absent and Moms are holding down 3 jobs to make rent.
So everybody labels them ‘at risk’ and just expects them to get kicked out of school early and wind up in prison or dead, and the criminal justice system is all too glad to meet those low expectations.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/30/2021 11:54AM by schrodingerscat.