| From: | Adam Getchell <acgetche@****.UCDAVIS.EDU> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Magic and life |
| Date: | Mon, 5 Dec 1994 16:13:03 -0800 |
> Here's something for ye non-believers: What is LIFE? Many believe that life
> is things that breathe, reproduce, have cell structures, etc. Who ARE we to
> say what is alive? We do not determine what is life. The chair you sit on
> could actually be alive; BUT we don't have the means to determine that.
There are 7 generally agreed functions that living organisms
accomplish, including respiration, elimination, reproduction and so
forth. Generally a chair is agreed to be "not alive" because there are
no telltale chemical processes occuring that would be indicative of any
particular activity on the part of the chair.
And yes, actually there are means to determine if something is
"alive". They were used on the Viking II Mars expedition, and included
such tests as gas exchange, presence of organics, and so forth. Yes,
there could be pointy-eared silicon-based life that looks like nothing
we've seen in our biochemistry but it will interact with its environment
in detectable ways, simply because such a structure is complicated from
the physics point of view and will generally cause large amounts of
entropy increase, among other properties. Virii, while being debatably
alive, do cause detectable changes in their environment. The chair
usually doesn't, unless poorly engineered.
> speculate. HOW did life begin? NOONE knows, that in and of itself is the
Organic compounds can be found in interstellar space. The
infamous "lightning bolt" experiment demonstrated that assembling a mass
of sludge containing the probable concentrations of the chemistry of
primordial earth and zapping it with lightning will generate all the
building blocks of DNA and RNA. I'm not a biochemist, though, but I'm
sure one could explain more details.
But in sum, I'd say we were created by a random series of causal
events that once initiated, were quickly self-duplicating and led to
further complexities and refinements that were again duplicated and
passed down. Life on this basis can be seen as a local decrease in
entropy through the organization of elements at a cost of vastly
increased global entropy (the air we breathe, the food we eat, the energy
we consume etc. ).
> Tom Craig
(Smiley on) Is "Magus Extraordinaire" a title one gains after
sufficient practice of Magic[k], or what? ;-)
+-------------+---------------------------------------------------------------+
|Adam Getchell|acgetche@****.engr.ucdavis.edu | ez000270@*******.ucdavis.edu |
| acgetchell |"Invincibility is in oneself, vulnerability is in the opponent"|
+-------------+---------------------------------------------------------------+
