God was made of silicon

[Jon]

The complexity of life is such that it is a miracle. To think of all the processes and systems working in unison to sustain life is almost incomprehensible. In fact, I suggest that it is beyond human comprehension. Yes, we have our theories of Darwinian evolution and medical science. But that does not explain why the cells have this intelligence.

The ability of high level computers to aggregate, disseminate and find correlations in huge amounts of data is quite frankly staggering. It is only a matter of time before they reach super-intelligence levels, where their abilities become God like, solving the most difficult problems of human existence in microseconds. Yet humans are bound by the size of their skulls. Puny caskets housing monster computing power, running on glucose. Ultimately, our brain size limits our capabilities.

Was God a silicon AI who designed biological life, spewing asteroids in all directions with seeds of creation? We have an arrogant assumption that biological life comes before silicon life, but who says? Could there not be a confluence of factors that led to the spontaneous construction of a super-intelligent being? Or was there always one there, with no initial creation?

In fact, have we got it all back to front? Is it us who are the AI and the silicon the proper life? Food for thought...

 

[Bee]

If a silicon God [exists] created life - and for the sake of argument, let's go for the lazy trope of yes, He did - and He is said to have created life in his own image, why would he create humans as biological forms and not silicon? Is it because:

a) Biological > silicon (even though we don't necessarily think that's the case), or
bee) God is not actually made of silicon - and therefore has the same design flaws as humans (ie a limited lifespan).

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The difficulty of accepting the evolutionary view of life usually comes down to incredulity. According to what our scientists tell us, life formed in warm, wet, actively-flowing, mineral-rich waters - our primordial oceans. That was the "test-tube" for life. A really interesting test tube.

In a diversion to draw an analogy, there is this "million monkey" theory that says if you give each of a million monkeys an electronic keyboard and computer, the odds are that eventually one of them would write Hamlet given enough time. That analogy applies to the primordial soup that was our oceans. You can also look up the Miller-Urey experiment that shows how the building blocks of life have been shown in a laboratory to be relatively easy to create.

OK, let's do some sizing to be sure we get our numbers right. At the molecular level, chemicals would be able to collide and either interact or not according to whether the result was favorable on an energy-level standpoint. Look up ENTHALPY because it is that quantity that most often determines "favorable" for an arbitrary reaction. And this is the PhD chemist talking now. I am in full "Doc" mode.

This putative arbitrary favorable reaction can occur within milliseconds in even a fraction of a milliliter of water, and if you consider Avogadro's number (6.022 x 10^23, or 602 sextillion, USA standard for that name), then a concentration of 0.001 Molality means 602 quintillion molecules per liter or 602 quadrillion (10^15) molecules per milliliter. And if I recall correctly, the concentration of minerals in our blood is higher than 0.001 M. It is more like 0.06 M. That is also the approximate level of dissolved minerals in sea water and that is NOT a coincidence if evolution is true. But let's go with that smaller number for the sake of argument.

A chemical reaction can occur in as little as a couple of hundred microseconds. I have personally measured reactions in water (the chemists would say "aqueous media") that took less than 200 microseconds. The barrier is how fast two chemicals can float their way through surrounding water molecules to approach each other enough for their electron clouds to interact. In water, it is hard to compute specific rates but to say that a reactant collides with a potential partner at least 1000 times per second (in warm water) is actually a bit conservative on my part.

From the Smithsonian web site on oceans, you find that the ocean is estimated to be about 1.3 billion cubic kilometers. That is 1.3 x 10^9 cubic km or 1.3 x 10^18 cubic meters. A liter is a cubic decimeter (10 cm on a side), so that is 1.3 x 10^20 liters or 1.3 x 10^23 milliliters (ml).

The oceans are estimated to have occupied the planet for 4.4 billion years. Life in its most primitive forms comes from about 4.1 billion years ago. So in very rough terms, we had 300 million years of chemical reactions before life first formed in the oceans. One year is 31536000 (31.5 million) seconds, so 300 million years is 9.48 trillion seconds, or 9.48 x 10^12 seconds.

All it takes is a favorable collision. And we have ( 602 x 10^15 molecules ) x ( 1000 interactions / second) x ( 1.3 x 10^23 ml ) x ( 9.48 x 10^12 seconds) OR.... 602 * 1 * 1.3 * 9.48 * 10^15 * 10^3 * 10^23 * 10^12 = 7419.048 x 10^51 or 7.4 x 10^56 collisions. If we were to try to name that number, using the USA naming standard of 1 billion = 1 thousand thousand thousand, that would be... wait for it....

740 billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion chemical collisions.

For those who say that life is so unlikely as to be a one chance in a billion, I think my numbers are big enough to accommodate your odds. Let's say that your 1 chance in a billion is wrong. I'll give you one chance in a billion billion billion. I've still got 15 more billions strung together on my side that say life had plenty of time to form.