A secret I share with the world...

Probably we will never know unless we find life on some other planet.

From what?

So far we could take a close look only at the Earth's moon. Mars and Mars has been explored only by machines. There are still some opportunities to find something under the surface or Mars. Other possibilities could be some moons of the bigger planets.
We don't need to find living things, it would be sufficient to find evidences of ancient life forms.

Anyway yes, it seems the conditions for make life possible are not common. But scientitst say there are so many stars in the universe that there can possibly be million planets that could hold life forms.
Unfortunately they are out of reach due to the distance.

Naaa, you don't get the scale of the thing.
Imagine A LOT of chemicals that boild under different pressure conditions, different temperatures, exposed to rays coming from the outer space and the Sun. Imagine volcanoes that erupt gases and chemicals from the dephts and all sort of comets and meteors fall from the sky in that boiling soup taking more water and chemical combinations from outside.

All this going on for million years.

We can't even imagine all the possible combinations that were produced during time. The basis of life are the chains of atoms that together make bigger moleculas, then the proteins. There is a border between "life" and "non-life" that is blurred today, think for example of viruses or even prions.

The problem is we can't reproduce the above conditions, exactly the same as the evolution theory, we can't observe it because it is too slow for your time scale. Finding evidences of life on other planets could confirm that not only the theory is "possible" but that it actually happened at least in 2 different situations.

Note: science doens't have any "static" truth. There are only theories that are valid until somebody finds a better theory. This better theory must either demonstrate the previous is wrong or give a better explaination/description of the phenomenon. In theorical physics there are a lot of theories that exist only as mathematical expressions and can't be demonstrated because they were supposed to explain "holes" in other theories.

Well, first let me say that there are very good probabilities that somewhere there is an alien civilisation.
But from what we know now you can't travel faster than light and there are very few stars that are close enough, so the probability that aliens come to us is very very low.

About being atheist, I've been raised catholic. The catholic church does not say life was "created" by God like it is written in the Bible.
They say things happen because God has got a general plan for everything, so if the life was born on earth because of physical phenomenons that was part ot God's bigger plan for the universe.

Anyway, I don't know if I am atheist but for sure I am not a beliver. Besides being catholic I have also studied the last 3000 years of philisophy and science and that tells me religion is mostly a nonsense. But it is not the same of being atheist. I don't think you can be really atheist. It is a difficult topic anyway.

Yes, just another end of the world.
What if in 2012 nothing happens?

Ok, I am writing it down in case I forget the meeting with the end of the world.
Thanks for the information.

Since we are speaking of profecies, can you also give me some hints about stock options?

Noah, you're making all the classic mistakes:

1. Cells didn't evolve on their own, all the components evolved as well. Organic monomers and polymers, amino acids and all the other hundreds of things in a cell's food chain evolved, one step at a time, to get to the point where cells became viable.

2. You totally don't understand how long millions of years can be. If we live to be 100 years old, that's only 0.01% of ONE million years. Our brains have trouble coping with even that much time. Hundreds of millions of years is a span so long that frankly we can't deal with it.

3. You don't understand cellular biology. You don't study the science of the stuff, so you're totally unqualified to say that this is how it happened. Some smart people spend their entire lives learning and researching and experimenting on this stuff and you're here to say that you know mor than them?

4. You fail the imagination test. Since you can't understand how cellular evolution is possible, you make up an answer: It must be god! Just because you don't know the answer doesn't mean that there's a mystical solution.

You're young. You'll learn. Your mind will change about many things in time. Maybe you'll maintain your belief in god, maybe you won't, but keep an open mind. The universe is a wonderful place with or without any imaginary deities.

"That is all too silly to study and waste your life away on stupid things."

Well, nuff said then.

I'll put it another way for you:

I believe we, as a people, become stronger through knowledge. We become greater by learning. You babble on about things you don't understand and then say "oh well, we shouldn't try to learn things anyway". Your idea that we should ignore knowledge, sit back and wait to die disgusts me, and I'm not willing to continue this conversation on these grounds.

Noah, the point is pretty simple.
Faith requires you to suspend your rational judgement to belive the un-rational.
For example, lets say Jesus.
We know he lived in some place some time and then he died.
The belivers accept the fact at some point he, being sono of God, resurrected, his body disappeared from his tomb and he joined his father.
We say "father" because we know Jesus had a real mother, Mary, so at least in this situation God acted like the male counterpart, via the miracle of the "Immaculate Conception", that means the baby Jesus was born without any sex involved.
At this point somebody belives there is God and the son of God.
Some others belive there is also the holy spirit, so actually "God" is composed by three different natures, God him/her/itself, Jesus the son, the Holy Spirit.

Jesus was jew, he lived in Palestine and spoke aramaic. Jews have their own idea of God, that is the God of the ancient Bible, the Torah. Their God speaks to the prophets in different forms, for example a burning tree over a hill and he wants people to do some things and don't other things. More than everything, he really likes the Jews and if the Jews follow the rules God exterminates their enemies in funny ways, like transforming them in statues of salt.
It seems the Jews have been not good in following the rules for some time, since God has not spoken to any prophet since a long time and he/her/it did not destroy the enemies. Expecially, God did not send the "messiah" who should have lead the Jews to dominate the world. So while they are still waiting, the Jews got organized on their own.

You just go asking what "God" is to different religions and you get very interesting (sometimes entertaining) explainations.

Nevermind.

Just for curiosity, how old are you, where do you live and what is your religion exactly?

Why dont you just agree with him?

What created life??? Did it start by itself??? Oh!!!!!!! That's a big question which has never been answer correctly!!!
That's to say ,but " Everything happens for a reason". WEll, Generally speaking, there are two main ideologies about that: the first one is " God created the life" and the second one is the theory of evolution (Darwin).
Which one is correct??? Which one do you believe???
If the first ideology is correct, the problem is much more simple. Because God created the life and he just created on the Earth ,there won't be any life outside the Earth.GOD MAKE LIFE POSSIBLE.
But...Oh!!! I don't know .. I confused.

And if the second ideology is correct then light, temperature, oxygen, water, make life possible ....
WEll,,,,there maybe be more problems need to say...
After the explosion called the Bigbang, life on Earth started from a very small cell. And then, everything made his own evolution. For example, the evolution made homo erectus or gorrila or some other kinds of monkey become human... Well.... I don't believe that, either. If monkey (or something else like that) did make an evolution and become human then why don't the nowaday monkey continue making evolution to become human??? And why don't human continue making evolution to become something else????

You need to read some more books.

The cell is already a very complex living machine.
As told before, viruses don't have any of the functions of cells. That is the reason why you have drugs that can kill bacteria (that are cells) but there isn't any drug that can kill viruses.
Viruses are just a box with some piece of DNA inside.
Prions are even simpler, just moleculas.
Viruses don't do anything on their own, they inject the DNA samples in the cells to force them to build more copies of the same virus.
I don't know much of prions but I guess they make copies via some chemical reaction.
I guess the first "living" things were similar to virus and prions. Cells came much later.

Besides, cells just use chemicals as input and they work via some chemical reaction that produces energy, basic stuff to produce other cells and output, like oxigen. In some cases they also use the light or the temperature as part of the reaction. The whole oxigen we have got now in the air was build via chemical reactions by vegetable cells during the million years.

All the cells need is more or less the sea water and some light.
You just leave some water in your pool without clorine and see what happens.

In short, there isn't any mistery in the life of the cells, it is only chemistry and all the needed substances are already present in the common water.
What makes life special is the incredible complexity of whole "design" all together. If you take each single chemical process it is simple, but the cells can do MANY of those simple process together to achive their goal, that is to gather the energy and elements to produce more cells. And above this the cells have the "memory" to control all those processes in the exact order and quantity to achive the result.

Currently we can't reproduce ANY living creature, even the more simple. Life is sophisticated above our ability, our machines are incredibly unefficient and dumb compared to life forms.

Question: what the hell do they teach you in school?

@LorenzoCelsi: OK! What you've said is exactly what I've been taught in school. I knew that! each cell stores their genomic information in their Chormosomes (or DNA); then the cell grows up and the information is replicated...=> the cells is divided into two ones. In the same way...
the firs cell => 2 cells.
2 cells => 4 cells
4 cells => 8 cells.
....
They continue that forever and created life on Earth. I DO KNOW THAT!!!!!!. But... What produces the first cell??? Can't they be Carbon, Hidrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen and water???????? (They are some of the first elements on the Earth)
No!!! I don't think so. Because ... now, if we put those elements in a clean, hermetic jar inwhich there hasn't been any organism or organic substance; then put the jar in a place which has the same temperature and some other conditions as what the Earth had milions of years ago. Wait and wait.... then there won't be any organism created, I bet!!!!
............
WHAT DO YOU SAY???

No, I've said there is "life" that is simplier than cells. If you compare a cell to a car, there are life forms that are like bikes (viruses) and life forms that are like rollerskates (prions).
First life forms probably were very simple structures of proteins. Those simple structures then aggregated in more complex structures and then some sub-sets of the structure specialized for some bio-chemical functions only. The growing complexity of the aggregates finally built the rudimentarsy cells in a very long time and many trials.
Currently there are 3 "families" of life forms, those who produce copies of themselves taking energy from the enviroiment, those who get the already made components from other life forms and the parasites. Probably this division came very early.
The reason why they say life came from natural chemical reaction is we can reproduce the first stages of the aggregates, meaning very complex moleculas, using a water solution and pressure, temperature and solar rays conditions similar to those that probably were on earth in the very ancient past. What we can't do is to simulate the million years of experiments.

Ok, we can't reproduce life, it's obviuos. It is too complicated for our abilities to build machines. We can't reproduce even a black hole or a star. Science is about to find an explaination for the phenomenon that resist to the critics better than all the other explainations. It is different from faith because in science there isn't any "forever truth". So the day you come out with a better explaination for a phisycal phenomenon your explaination becomes "official" till the next better explaination.

Yes, you can also say "it's God" for everything. You find fossils of ancient sea creatures on a mountain. You can say they come from the diluge or you can say one day the mountain was an ancient sea bed.

Electricity is present everywhere in nature. Even our bodies produce electricity via some chemical reactions. Electricity is used, with chemicals, by some cells to communicate basic messages to other cells, for example your body muscles are controlled via electrical pulses.
Most human inventions are inspired by nature. The men watch the birds fly and think how to build a machine that flies. They observe the static electrical charge in some conditions and try to reproduce it.

The main thing you need to understand is man's machines come out from man's imagination. Our mind is limited tool then, we can't handle with our thought the inner complexity of nature. As a result, our machines are much simplier than the natural objects that inspire them. The most advanced jet plane is much more simple than the most simple flying living thing. The most powerful computer is much more stupid than the simpler brain. And so on.

On a side note:
In english, like italian, you have "man" for the male and "woman" for the female and usually you say "man" as human kind.
In latin instead there was "vir" for male, "mulier" for female and "homo" for the neutral case, both male and female.
This explain why we say "human".

No I say you are completely wrong.

Of course it is not my opinion, it is the latest 3000 years of history that you ignore. In all this time the strongest minds of human kind thought about the above issues and they finally came out with what we have today.

God as explaination for everything was already discharged by the ancient greek philosophers (who were also scientists at that time) about 2500 years ago.

You go and read the ancient philosophy history and find why.

I just studied these things at school 30 years ago and I am not that smart either so you can't ask me to summarize 3000 years right now and here. Go and search on your own. Or you can say "God" and do nothing. You can chose. But saying "God" you can maybe be a farmer, surely you won't work for the NASA.

Yes, if you belive in 2012 there will be the end of the world you can also sit and wait. The end of the world was predicted countless times in history but so far it never happened.

Well.... Our Doom Day will come in 2012, won't it????? I DIDN'T KNOW THAT. But what causes it???
By the way,hey guys! Why do we have to argue about things that we are not completely sure about??? Why don't we let the time answer it??????

P.S: LorenzoCelsi! Why do you think that a farmer is not a scientist ??? Oh!!! Come on!!!!! I hate to disagree with you, but if you work for NASA that doesn't mean you are a talent scientist and If you work as a farmer that doesn't mean you're NOT a talent scientist,either!!!! AND if you think people who believe in God will never be excellent scientists, YOU'RE COMPLETELY WRONG!!! Do you know Louis Pasteur, Albert Einstein??? They did believe in God and THEY DO BE FAMOUS SCIENTISTS ALL THE TIME. Besides, do you know Gregor Johann Mendel, Father of Modern Genetics? He was a priest who surely believed in GOD. And so what???? That he's a famous biologist is clear!!!!! NOBODY CAN DENY THAT!

In conclusion, believing in God or not is just your religion. Religion and science are not always antagonistic. If you are a good scientist you should know how to put them harmony. That's all.

Religion and science are not antagonistic because religion is metaphysics. Do you know what it means?. Litteraly it is "beyond the physics". In short, while like I said above the "truths" in science are only temporary and you can always propose a better explaination, you can't say anything about religion "truths" because they don't allow to demonstrate them true of false. They are just assertions that you either accept as they are or you refuse.

Anyway, I am bored now to try to aducate you and other people here. I am not payed as your teacher and honestly I still wonder what you do at school.

Belive what you want and be happy.

Ok!!! Thanks anyways.
Discussion is just discussion!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But, I admit that you have lots of knowledge about science and biology! I need to study more!!!!!
Ah! "What I do at school" is to learn all the theories and explanations from the famous scientists and not to accept them easily as well as never forget to wonder about them.

Accept what you can't change and CHANGE WHAT YOU CAN'T ACCEPT

Anonymous writes:

what makes life possible?

pepa writes:

in with paragraph put what makes life possible

You know, I believe time has something to do with this.

God! It's been ....errr... one year since I last got here!

Noah, Ive been wanting to know how to say this for a long time and you said it perfectly. It is so obvious that there is a creator!

There is a God. And you know what? He is way closer than just out there in another realm of existence.