Aliens Exist?

[the phenom]

Best way to look smart:

Agree with dawnghost

Fuckin' fix'd.

 

[ZaraHeroin]

At first I thought you were trolling people but turns out you are a 15 year old girl. You will (hopefully) learn more in school.

So I'm not allowed to post and have my opinion respected because I'm 15?

And what do you mean "HOPEFULLY" ?!

 

[viewerfromnihil]

you're a 15 year old girl?

suprising, but not as suprising a splatterday_night_fever being a chick

 

[ZaraHeroin]

^ yeah I am. ^_^ 16 in feb.

Alot of people say it's surprising, yeah.

 

[viewerfromnihil]

February what? my birthday is february 18

 

[ZaraHeroin]

9th

 

[Leandro]

I have, and I still don't agree that believing in something that we know isn't true, whether you call it an informed belief or whatever, is the right option or the best shot. Sorry, but you're just deluding yourself.

No, you are. Your ever-so-wishful god paradigm takes only so many more complications into question. It's not even worth discussing. If I'm deluding myself, so is every influent biologist in the area (including Dawkins, whom you went out of your way to try and discredit). Your opinion doesn't work against that.

Yes, "more fruitful". Still, right-handed amino acids, methane and ammonia, not a single protein, not even CLOSE. My argument stands undefeated.

No, it lies defeated, long ago. Protein are the last step and had many billions of years to be generated.

A dishonest use of analogy to attempt to prove a point you know you can't. Look, if you have the science to back up your claim, just present it and we'll be done with this whole discussion. Show me how a protein is formed from a mixture of chemicals, in a lab. A single one. You can't, so you come up with analogies. Show me how all the other structures needed for life could arise spontaneously from chemicals. I won't hold my breath, of course. More on why your human eye analogy fails when we talk about the genetic code needed to produce proteins.

No, it's not a dishonest analogy. It just shows how crackpots you ID defenders are. How you all know very little or nothing about evolution, origin of life and the stochastic processes which govern chemical reactions. The clockwork argument is the most refuted fallacy, used over and over by you guys and which form the whole foundations of your argumentation. Sorry, you'd have to try harder than this. A simple google query will give you thousands of links showing why your common-sense is absolutely wrong (yes, because you're arguing on common sense with absolutely nothing to back it up). You took citations out of context and from false experts just to convince yourself you're proving something. You make personal attacks to look smart. Dude, just take your time and study a bit, eh? The beauty of science is it doesn't care what you believe, though.

Straw man. I never even included in my response the difficulty imposed by carbon dioxide and nitrogen.

That's ok, because my response wasn't about carbon dioxide and nitrogen either. Please don't stray from the point in hand.

And particularly, I chose the format of "even if... but in fact" for a cause. If it was possible to produce life in the lab, this "just right" condition could be easily demonstrated in the lab, alas it can't, and hasn't. Probability itself is against it, even if all chemical conditions are "just right".

The "just right" conditions aren't known and are likely not even replicable in a lab. I suggest you read my replies more thoroughly before attempting a response.

That particular claim was actually just used to explain their experiment.

No. It was a different experiment. Read again.

Even so, the fragment you posted does nothing to overcome the burdens I presented with the rest of my argument.

What's this? A "you'd think so, but you'd be wrong" line? You'll have to do better than that.

Sorry, but no. In the very link you posted there is another source of oxygen production, which is photochemical dissociation.

Responsible for 1 to 2% of the current levels. A pretty small proportion. So, my point stands.

But even so, as Dimroth and Kimberly explain (Dimroth, E. & Kimberley, M.M., Can. J. Earth Sci. 13 1161, (1976):

'in general, we find no evidence in the sedimentary distributions of carbon, sulfur, uranium or iron, that an oxygen-free atmosphere has existed at any time during the span of geological history recorded in well preserved sedimentary rocks'

(...)

'the sedimentary distributions of carbon, sulfur, uranium, and ferric and ferrous iron depend greatly upon ambient oxygen pressure and should reflect any major change in proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere or hydrosphere. The similar distributions of these elements in sedimentary rocks of all ages are here interpreted to indicate the existence of a Precambrian atmosphere containing much oxygen.'

(...)

'we know of no evidence which proves orders-of-magnitude differences between Middle Archaean and subsequent atmospheric compositions, hydrospheric compositions, or total biomasses.'

Again, this hypothesis that the primitive atmosphere was oxygen-free is just an attempt at producing an environment in which abiogenesis would be more possible. It is the a priori assumption that abiogenesis was true being used as the premise for the theories about the primitive atmosphere.

Sadly for you, http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/g...first_billion_years/first_billion_years.html:

The dominance of Banded-Iron Formations (BIFs; see picture) before 2.5Ga indicates that Fe occurred in its reduced state (Fe2+). Whereas reduced Fe is much more soluble than oxidized Fe (Fe3+), it rapidly oxidizes during transport. However, the dissolved O in early oceans reacted with Fe to form Fe-oxide in BIFs. As soon as sufficient O entered the atmosphere, Fe takes the oxidized state and is no longer soluble. The first occurrence of redbeds, a sediments that contains oxidized iron, marks this major transition in Earth's atmosphere.

http://www.palaeos.com/Vertebrates/Units/150Tetrapoda/150.150.html :

Fortunately oxygen was, at the time, a very small component of the atmosphere.

And from the link I posted, proving you should do your homework:

Iron (Fe) i s extremely reactive with oxygen. If we look at the oxidation state of Fe in the rock record, we can infer a great deal about atmospheric evolution.
Archean - Find occurrence of minerals that only form in non-oxidizing environments in Archean sediments: Pyrite (Fools gold; FeS2), Uraninite (UO2). These minerals are easily dissolved out of rocks under present atmospheric conditions.
Banded Iron Formation (BIF) - Deep water deposits in which layers of iron-rich minerals alternate with iron-poor layers, primarily chert. Iron minerals include iron oxide, iron carbonate, iron silicate, iron sulfide. BIF's are a major source of iron ore, b/c they contain magnetite (Fe3O4) which has a higher iron-to-oxygen ratio than hematite. These are common in rocks 2.0 - 2.8 B.y. old, but do not form today.
Red beds (continental siliciclastic deposits) are never found in rocks older than 2.3 B. y., but are common during Phanerozoic time. Red beds are red because of the highly oxidized mineral hematite (Fe2O3), that probably forms secondarily by oxidation of other Fe minerals that have accumulated in the sediment.

No a priori assumptions. Geological evidence.

What? Did you even read what I posted? or did you just Google "oxygen, catch-22" and posted that link? I was writing about proteins and DNA being dismantled by UV, and you post:

"But researchers have long been puzzled as to how the cyanobacteria could make all that oxygen without poisoning themselves. To avoid their DNA getting wrecked by a ******yl radical that naturally occurs in the production of oxygen, the cyanobacteria would have had to evolve protective enzymes."

Did you even read that link? Or did you just stop at the first paragraph?

You are kidding, right? Over simplification? I'm talking about the difficulties of abiogenesis, and you're presenting a scenario with cyanobacteria already developed? And "struggling to evolve" enzymes to protect them from oxygen?? Check this quote from your article:

"This trickle of poison could then drive the evolution of oxygen-protecting enzymes in a variety of microbes, including the cyanobacteria." (emphasis mine, because it is just, again, a silly conjecture).

Poisoning the well. If you read what I said, there was an 'for example' remark. Which means, it didn't deal exactly with the subject at hand but it presented a process which could allow proteins to gradually form while oxygen slowly populated the atmosphere. But even then, it is oversimplification because it assumes abiogenesis occurred in a test tube. For example, let's supposed it happened in a pool of mud. Mud is a more or less good conductor (it's water mixed with minerals and salts), so the skin depth (the depth at which the amplitude of an electromagnetic wave is 1/e of it's original value) is about one sixth of the wavelength (actually, it's less than that, since the condutivity depends on the frequency). Ultraviolet light has a very small wavelength (400nm at most) which means only a thin layer over the surface of the mud would be affected and your oversimple model fails

This answer of yours, along with another I will address soon, has made me abandon this discussion altogether. Sorry, but I don't have time for this.

Creationists usually run out of arguments really soon usually. Sad.

Again, Straw Man. I never said anything about the energy source for the reactions,

So I'm only authorized to reply to your preposterous arguments but not to bring anything new to the table?

and even if UV was used, oxygen would be needed to form the ozone screen and protect proteins and DNA from the radiation. Catch-22.

Read above.

Surely you wouldn't want to mess with your chances. It's amazing how you're so blindly drawn to believe it must have happened, that no matter what the difficulties, you'll just wave at them, smiling, and turn a blind eye. My point is that those substances are NOT available, one of them is too dissolved to even have a use, and the other is stuck deep down in sedimentary clays and unreachable!

Read again. Concentration of reactants effects only the speed of reaction. Study your chemistry or leave. Poisoning the well won't work here either.

But even if you want to believe what you posted, you'd certainly wish the speed of the reaction was the fastest and as plentiful as possible, because those are, again, used just to assemble a simple amino acid, I am not talking about the other, more complex structures needed for life, such as, ahem, a protein.

I could reply to this by showing that yes, it could happen. But since all the sources I found for the lack of ammonia and methane in the early atmosphere were creationist websites, I choose to leave my current line of argument here for a moment: Did you even read the reference about aminoacids being brought in by comets? Even if aminoacid formation was impossible (no one ever prove that), they'd still be available.
And protein formation is the last step. Quit mentioning it, the clockwork argument's just making you sound like a broken record.

Argh. It works BOTH WAYS. That's why the article concludes: "Why there was a slight excess to start with is another question."

Again. The chances of producing right and left-handed amino acids are 50:50. As you are well aware, you need a LOT of such amino acid productions if you hope to, someday, produce a single protein. And, the longer you replicate an experiment with a 50:50 chance, the closer you'll get to an equal 50:50 proportion.

It's like playind head or tails. Play it once and you have a 100:0 proportion. Play it four times, maybe 75:25. Play it a billion times, ~50:50. That's a huge problem for you.

Or is it? Right handed aminoacids are only poisonous because our proteins are made of L-isomers. If our proteins were made of R-isomers (specular images of our current ones), it'd be the left handed aminoacids that'd be poisonous. If chance favoured the L-isomers, I don't care. It doesn't matter. What matters is that only one type of optical isomer is present in a solution after a while. That shatters your reply.

Thank you. So you are saying a nucleic acid assembles proteins from amino acids? Now that's something we can agree on. Too bad you forget that in order for that nucleic acid to produce a protein, GENETIC INFORMATION is required in the first place. LOTS of it. If I still had patience for this, I could get home and give you a probability figure of that ever happening spontaneously, but I don't. Anyway, you leap 1000 miles forward to explain how something basic, to begin with, has come to be. Nice try, but at least you admit: "Spontaneous protein generation isn't observed".

Genetic information comes to play due to natural selection, no matter how much you cry about it. And I fail to see where I said spontaneous protein generation was observed so I need to "admit it". You're arguing with a different person, one in your imagination, not me.

Red herring? You haven't provided any scenario for nucleic acids ever translating anything into anything, and you're throwing in coacervation?

Do you even know what coacervation is? For goodness's sake, read that link.

Also, water is still an issue. As I said earlier, it tends to break not only amino acids, but also proteins. And now you write it yourself. It doesn't matter if the process is slow, as I said, if you need billions of years for the process to happen, they will break.

You misunderstood the whole thing AGAIN. The process itself doesn't take billions of years, well, that's blatantly obvious, no modern organism lives for billions of years. The fact that there were billions of years just make its occurrence more likely.

I wasn't aware everything in abiogenesis, no matter how unproven, could simply be dismissed with "clockwork argument". Hm. It must require lots of faith to believe in it, indeed.

Perhaps if you didn't come up with widely refuted clockwork arguments all the time, it'd be easier to reply with something else.

No, your prejudice makes it void. His conclusions are still perfectly valid. You may fret as much as you want, but unless you can replicate the origin of life in a lab, and you can't because chemistry itself is a huge burden, you can't go about telling everyone life just came to be spontaneously.

No they aren't, he didn't put forth any kind of data to back him up. He stated his opinion and that is meaningless.

That's bad science.

What about saying that god designed us all?

This is it. To quote Dawkins is... I just don't know what to say. The guy knows ZERO about information theory, and his WEASEL program proves that for anyone that wants to see. The kind of intellectual dishonesty that is required for someone to present that as proof of information-building via natural selection is incredible. It's really incredible. By the way, a little gossip. Did you see Dawkins running from Dinesh when Al-Jazeera invited him for a debate? Turns out Dawkins didn't know who his opponent would be, and when they revealed it to be Dinesh, the poor old man insisted on a format in which he could not be rebutted.

Whoa, that's a humongous load of poison down the well. Just read the article and reply to it if you can. But you can't, apparently, so you resort to that childish banter.

Anyway, we could start a whole new discussion on Information Theory here, which is a subject I actually love and know a bit about, since I also coursed Computer Science, but I won't because it is simply not relevant AT ALL to the subject at hand and I don't have time.

Too bad pretty much no computer science course in this country includes information theory in its curriculum. Actually, in my university, it's a leaf subject for staticians with about 4 chained prerequisites before it (probability 1, probability 2, inference 1, inference 2).

Let me just say you are mixing things up really badly here. Natural selection does NOTHING to help with abiogenesis. NOTHING. The problem isn't in "amino acids which are not fit for survival and replication", or proteins, or DNA for that matter. That would actually be quite an absurd proposition.

I see no argument here at all.

Dismissing everything as a "clockwork argument" leads to this, confusion about the roles of each process in the whole of evolutionary theory.

Stop using clockwork arguments and I'll stop dismissing them. It's THAT simple.

Abiogenesis HAS to be taken as a random process, PERIOD. Every step of it is random, there's no "buts" about it, and this is simply science.

Only according to ID sources which are partial to life being designed by santa claus. It's not a random process as much as evolution is a random process. And there are no buts about THIS.

You could start ANOTHER conversation on how GENETIC INFORMATION could be altered by mutations to produce different sets of proteins. That's a WHOLE different story. Don't mix things up. We are talking about abiogenesis. It isn't a guided process at all. It is random. Present how it happened. Replicate it in the lab. It is THAT simple.

You're the one mixing stuff up badly here. Abiogenesis isn't random as the molecules generated have different rates of survival, and that's enough for natural selection to work. A simple stochastic calculation shows that in that scenario, longer lasting compositions will prevail. Now, you can't use the fact that 'no one has done it yet' to 'prove' it can't happen. An example: Prove that the equation a^n + b^n = c^n, n>2, has no integer non trivial solutions. It was unproven until little time ago. That doesn't consitute proof of its falseness. Just because nobody replicated every step in a laboratory, that doesn't invalidate the hypothesis. To quote Jerry Coyne (professor of the department of ecology and evolution in the University of Chicago), If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance 'God'."

Poor analogy. Read it again, it has nothing to do with your semantic paradox. It's not a paradox at all, it's just that water makes it difficult for proteins to form, and you need time and water. It's simple as that.

"No u!"

Saying more time and more chances would make the process more difficult is absurd, sorry.

Just show how it happens. Please. Show us the science:

- DNA
- Proteins
- Cell membrane
- Cell wall

Show us the experiment. Please, where is the science? Should we start calling science "clockworklol"?

Show us how santa claus randomly appeared out of nowhere, pulled out his magic wand and zing, life. That is of course science, eh?

Cells are too complex for laboratory generation, and you know that. There's a REASON why it took billions of years, so it's no surprise it wasn't yet replicated. Taking it as a proof against it is futile. All those experiments ARE evidence for abiogenesis - for crucial steps in it. So the overall score is positive.

An unguided process needs billions of years to occur. Because it's subject to random, uncontrolled events. That's why you need time, not because the chemical reactions itself need time, its because the odds are so overwhelmingly against abiogenesis, that you need all the time you can get for a "miracle" to happen. In a lab, it's different. If it could, it would be replicated.

Is that your best shot? "If it could, it would be replicated?" Geez, drop that bible. Science is an ongoing work in every field. AND, it's not unguided.

Don't call it that, if it uneases you. It's not what you call it that discredits it, it's the lack of objective evidence that does the job.

Objective evidence is all around you.

Unfortunately it is preached as being something certain and taken for granted, when scientists have absolutely no clue about how it happened.

Because it's the only way. The only alternative would be ID, which is a joke.

That is the fact. You are waiting for the magic bullet, you need it but it hasn't come. All you have are chemical process that go AGAINST it, so you just cling to faith that "you might be wrong", even though the processes themselves are very well estabilished.

Science is all about falseability. Do you know anything at all about epistemology?

I have, let me repeat it then, the whole of it, even though it's only about proteins:

quote from Evolution[/B]

Hence the role of natural selection. Which I'm sure was the intention of the author when putting forth those numbers.

I have. I've shown the chemical processes that work against the formation of proteins. That alone suffices. If I had to paste that again in here, I'd have to repeat my entire argument.

No you haven't. You have argued against current conceptions of how it happened. The problem is that abiogenesis is as much of "just a theory" as gravity is "just a theory". It did happen, even if we had no idea how (and we do). Because it's a broad term, it includes every possible process. Your list of arguments is nowhere near exhaustive (and it couldn't be, as the number of possible processes is countably infinite)

In bold, your leaps of faith exposed.

I now leave this discussion. Goodbye.

No leap of faith there. Simple semantics. Abiogenesis = generation of life from non life. The universe had no life in the beginning. It has some now. Then, abiogenesis did occur. That alone is proof.

With your "arguments" shattered, I bid you a good day.

 

[viewerfromnihil]

9th

damn, so close. i almost got excited

 

[OvSeth]

^Holy shit. I'm impressed. Both at the magnitude of your intellect and the fact I read the entire post and understood a lot of it (not that there were parts that I didn't understand, they were just REALLY wordy and I sort of lost interest). I wish I could respond to what you wrote with something meaningful but sadly I do not know enough about the subject, and even if I did educate myself it surely wouldn't help because you have a firm grasp on this and anything I would have to offer to the conversation probably wouldn't even stimulate you.

Same here.

This thread is very nice to read and try to understand to be honest. I love these types of discussions.

 

[(__Joonas__)]

As miraculous as the world is, I don't believe it is possible for any alien aircraft to venture as far as here - at least yet it has not happened. That article is fake, first of all, you don't need to be Einstein to understand that. And if the Area 51 bullshit was true, that they have aliens captured, then explain to me how they ended up there without no-one else seeing. And why would this kind of information be made secret.

 

[the phenom]

As miraculous as the world is, I don't believe it is possible for any alien aircraft to venture as far as here - at least yet it has not happened. That article is fake, first of all, you don't need to be Einstein to understand that. And if the Area 51 bullshit was true, that they have aliens captured, then explain to me how they ended up there without no-one else seeing. And why would this kind of information be made secret.

Think logically now.

2 words called MASS CHAOS!
That's what would happen. All damn religious stuff would go crazy and everyone would to be honest.

 

[ScandinavianMetal]

Think logically now.

2 words called MASS CHAOS!
That's what would happen. All damn religious stuff would go crazy and everyone would to be honest.

The arena 51 thing is simply not real. You are deluding yourself. There were simply some experiments made there that some idiots went "LOLALIENS". It's nonsense. There is a dude here I know who thinks he was abducted and offers alien help

Think about it. If aliens dropped down on earth, it so happens that only the government and their awesome funding was the only thing to see it? No.

Mass chaos? OMG ALIENS. No, there wouldn't be mass chaos. We are humans, and we will simply don't care unless it influences us in any way. The religious lunatics will simply deny it like they tend to do with everything. Life moves on.

And to add to that, governments have been shown again and again to have incompetent people in it. To cover something like that up would be bloody impossible for them. To do that, they would have to control the aliens, which in that case, aliens are no threat. If aliens had this amazing technology (saying that they do so exist), I don't think they would come to earth to make some fancy patterns on the ground.

As miraculous as the world is, I don't believe it is possible for any alien aircraft to venture as far as here - at least yet it has not happened. That article is fake, first of all, you don't need to be Einstein to understand that. And if the Area 51 bullshit was true, that they have aliens captured, then explain to me how they ended up there without no-one else seeing. And why would this kind of information be made secret.

I agree.

@Ph

I see what you are saying about why they would keep it secret. But I disagree that it would create mass chaos. It might be big for a week, but will blow over rather quickly unless it has direct influence over them, which it does not. Besides, people are great at deceiving everything.

 

[the phenom]

Seriously...i never said anything about Area 51 being real. I just said there WOULD be mass chaos. Believe me there would be!!! Especially if some of them were hostile....

The thing is that if there were aliens they would influence our lives by their mere existence.

 

[(__Joonas__)]

Think about it. If aliens dropped down on earth, it so happens that only the government and their awesome funding was the only thing to see it? No.

This is what I was persuing. If an alien drops on my backyard, I ain't just gonna pack it up and send it to Nevada and not tell anyone.. Only theoretical possibility for this is the USA fucking government asked the pope how to lure the alien aircrafts to Roswell and make them land.

 

[ScandinavianMetal]

Seriously...i never said anything about Area 51 being real. I just said there WOULD be mass chaos. Believe me there would be!!! Especially if some of them were hostile....

The thing is that if there were aliens they would influence our lives by their mere existence.

I disagree. Even if the governments said, "Hej, there are Aliens!", many will simply deny it and go about their lives.

And if they were hostile, same thing. It's like saying "Snakes are dangerous". They might be scared, but would not produce chaos..at least uncontrollable chaos. Like telling a child "The forest is filled with bad snakes". The child will be a little frightful about being in the forest, but will soon not care because, the snakes haven't bit it. When it does, and only then, will he alone panic because he got bitten. But not until one is in immediate danger will one go into a wild panic.

 

[ScandinavianMetal]

This is what I was persuing. If an alien drops on my backyard, I ain't just gonna pack it up and send it to Nevada and not tell anyone.. Only theoretical possibility for this is the USA fucking government asked the pope how to lure the alien aircrafts to Roswell and make them land.

Exactly

 

[Stonecoldsoul07]

I disagree. Even if the governments said, "Hej, there are Aliens!", many will simply deny it and go about their lives.

And if they were hostile, same thing. It's like saying "Snakes are dangerous". They might be scared, but would not produce chaos..at least uncontrollable chaos. Like telling a child "The forest is filled with bad snakes". The child will be a little frightful about being in the forest, but will soon not care because, the snakes haven't bit it. When it does, and only then, will he alone panic because he got bitten. But not until one is in immediate danger will one go into a wild panic.

Thats not the same thing,snakes are from the same planet as we are and they are predictible animals.With aliens we know nothing about them other they are not from earth.

 

[ScandinavianMetal]

Thats not the same thing,snakes are from the same planet as we are and they are predictible animals.With aliens we know nothing about them other they are not from earth.

I'm sorry, but I don't see how it would create mass chaos. No one is ever likely to even see an alien..highly unlikely, almost guaranteed. It would be different if they came with laser beams and actually did something.

 

[(__Joonas__)]

And if they were hostile, same thing. It's like saying "Snakes are dangerous". They might be scared, but would not produce chaos..at least uncontrollable chaos. Like telling a child "The forest is filled with bad snakes". The child will be a little frightful about being in the forest, but will soon not care because, the snakes haven't bit it. When it does, and only then, will he alone panic because he got bitten. But not until one is in immediate danger will one go into a wild panic.

It's actually been said the reason for all those new alien "encounters" in recent months, especially in Britain, is the human psychology; we know there's bad things going on in the world and if it goes on like this, it's game over, with all the threat or war and effects of pollution etc, that we like to focus that sense of threat into something illusionate.

 

[ScandinavianMetal]

It's actually been said the reason for all those new alien "encounters" in recent months, especially in Britain, is the human psychology; we know there's bad things going on in the world and if it goes on like this, it's game over, with all the threat or war and effects of pollution etc, that we like to focus that sense of threat into something illusionate.

That's really interesting, and it also makes a lot of sense. But that also adds to my point. This is something real--a real threat. And if things do go to the wrong directions and there is an immediate threat..that would be a cause of a panic. But not something that one is never likely to see--such as aliens.

I wasn't aware that there had even been recent alien sightings in years. The last I read in the news was that someone had saved a baby porcupine in Oulu.