Higher math and Darwin (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, April 14, 2010, 22:55 (5336 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: Why do I want to know the origin of life? I truthfully submit that I will not know the answer to origins. But I want to know any and all of the potential processes that may have given it to us, in my case because we need the technology. We have a limited life on this planet, and we need to get off of it purely for survival's sake. The power to engineer life is one that will allow us to colonize worlds we would never have dreamed of otherwise. -You wrote in an earlier post that "the goal should be to create life ... any kind of life, even if it doesn't resemble our own ... and then work from THAT point." If your motive is to prepare us for mass evacuation, I'd have thought that when the time came, we would need to know how to adapt our own form of life to different conditions rather than how to engineer different forms! If we can't reproduce ourselves normally on Planet Z, there seems to be little point in going there, but if it can sustain us, it should be able to sustain other forms of earthly life as well. I suspect that logistics may turn out to be more of a problem than "engineering life". -Earlier you say that "to truly understand something, you need to build it". Others might say you need to truly understand something before you can build it.-MATT: Philosophically I've had a unique path. I've been a theist, atheist, and now agnostic. And I recognize at each point that I was able to argue convincingly for each position, which informs me that--very likely--there is no true position. There's one painfully honest one. But no one likes to admit they can never know. And in my framework, knowing trumps everything.-There does have to be an ultimate truth, but like you I've been through the three ...isms and am no nearer knowing what that truth is. I don't find it painful any more, though, and have no qualms about admitting my ignorance. I'm only roused when I'm confronted by intolerance and arrogance, but generally so far we've been fortunate to escape this on our forum. I should add that for me personally, the exchanges with yourself, David, George, BBella and others who have come and gone have been a genuine education, but I don't expect my hand will ever hold the trump card of "knowing".