Ruminations on origin of life; Paul Davies (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, August 15, 2015, 14:34 (3387 days ago) @ David Turell

Always with bright challenging ideas. We should intensely study microbes to see if truly different forms of life exist on Earth:-http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/are-we-alone-paul-davies-on-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-life/6685530-For starters he thinks SETI is don all wrong:-"The major problem, Professor Davies says, is that the current strategy only picks up messages deliberately being sent to Earth—and that doesn't make sense.-"'The strategy so far is to point a radio telescope at a hopeful star for maybe half an hour, and then hop from star to star in the hope of picking up a message,' he says.-"'The question is, is ET on a planet, around a star, beaming a message at us? That's not credible. It's not credible that a civilisation 1,000 light years away would be beaming messages at Earth. Why should they?-"'If they can see Earth, if they have super-duper advanced technology, they have the ability to see our planet and to figure that there is intelligent life on it—moderately intelligent life on it—but they see Earth as it was 1,000 years ago. There were no radio telescopes; there was no radio.-"'In another 1,000 years they will hear the words I'm speaking now [and say], "Aha! There is intelligent life on Earth! We'll send them a message!" But it's too soon, and so we shouldn't be looking for deliberately directed messages, but looking for beacons instead.'-(BBella, this is why I doubt alien intrusion, the time it takes to travel.)-So he says lets study life here:-
"For Professor Davies, the big question is whether Earth-like planets are likely to have life on them. And that can only be answered, he says, if we understand how life began in the first place.-"'Is it the case that a planet that is like Earth is likely to have life on it? We can only answer that question if we know the mechanism that turns non-life into life,' he says.-"'If we knew what did it, we could estimate the odds. We don't know what did it and so we've got these two points of view: [either] it's a bizarre fluke, it won't happen twice, [or] somehow it's built into the nature of the universe, and life will pop up all over the place.'-"He says the idea that needs to be tested is whether life is, in fact, 'a cosmic imperative', as Nobel prize-winning biologist Christian de Duve believed.-"'If life does pop up obligingly in Earth-like conditions, no planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself, so shouldn't life have started many times over right here on our home planet? How do we know it didn't? Has anybody actually looked?' asks Davies.-"'When I worked on these ideas with my friend Charley Lineweaver at the ANU some years ago ... [it] turned out that really nobody had even thought of this possibility.'-"He argues that the focus should be on examining microbes, since most life on earth is microbial. The right kind of investigation could unearth what scientists describe as a 'shadow biosphere'.-"'You can't tell by looking what are microbes made of. You don't know how it ticks, you've got to delve into its biochemical innards to work that out, and if you go looking for life as we know it, you're not going to discover life as we don't know it,' he says.-"'Those teeming microbes—of which probably only about less than 1 per cent have actually been characterised, let alone cultured and sequenced—we don't know what they are. There's plenty of room at the bottom for microbial life that would be radically alternative to known life.'"