Timeline for Can we expect machines as extraterrestrial forms of life?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 20, 2016 at 15:00 | comment | added | LarsH | Indeed, who knows. But notice your scenario starts with pumping up the complexity of the units ... something that is external to the "shaking the bag" process, never accomplished by that process. Penrose et al. got more interesting behavior by introducing more complex, cleverly engineered units from outside, not by continuing to agitate simpler units for long periods of time. | |
| Aug 20, 2016 at 10:03 | comment | added | hmijail | So, some guy put some simple chemicals in a bottle, applied some sparks, and some hydrocarbons formed. So what? That's not life! Right? You dismiss the wooden pieces as "complex, cleverly designed units". But carbon atoms, and oxygen, and hydrogen, and etc etc, are much more interactive than any wooden piece you can engineer. Pump up the complexity of the wooden piece (add magnets? electrical charges?), add eons of time (how many atomic collisions happen per second in any aqueous solution?), and... who knows what would happen. | |
| Aug 19, 2016 at 21:32 | comment | added | LarsH | Sorry, I was unclear as to what I meant by "it." They did something, and it happened, but not life. Special units were carefully engineered to connect, disconnect, and spread this configuration to others through physical contact. The construction is clever, no doubt about it. But that's just it ... no interesting behavior arose without complex, cleverly designed units introduced from outside. Merely spreading tilt angle from one unit to another is hardly "self-replication," any more than a toppling line of dominoes. Calling the connected pieces "life" doesn't make it so either. | |
| Aug 19, 2016 at 17:45 | comment | added | hmijail | @LarsH, "we can expect" because they DID it and it happened. See the video, or take a look at the link. It's actually an absurdly easy example. Regarding the "prearranged": the beauty of the process is that it's simple enough that once two units connect at random (which is easy enough), it will cause other units to connect in the same way. | |
| Aug 19, 2016 at 14:41 | comment | added | LarsH | It's not clear that we can make the leap from "in fanciful terms, we visualized" to "we can expect" it to happen. Why should we expect the units in the bag to assemble into replicas of the seed structure? And how far does the process have to advance before it's capable of shaking the bag, inserting "prearranged" connected seed structures, and any other external inputs required? | |
| Aug 19, 2016 at 12:59 | history | edited | hmijail | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 13 characters in body
|
| Aug 19, 2016 at 10:31 | history | answered | hmijail | CC BY-SA 3.0 |