Extraterrestrial life Intelligent Design

Researchers: The space aliens are indeed Out There! But they’re “lyfe,” not life

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Yes, that’s got to be the explanation:

Bartlett, working with astrobiologist Michael Wong of the University of Washington in Seattle, argues that we need to escape the straitjacket of Earth-based thinking about life. They propose introducing a broader category called “lyfe” (pronounced, in an oddly West Country fashion, as “loif”), of which life as we know it is just one variation. “Our proposal attempts to break free of some of the potential prejudices due to us being part of this one instantiation of lyfe,” says Bartlett.

Philip Ball, “Are aliens hiding in plain sight?” at The Guardian

The researchers offer four criteria for “lyfe” and add:

The two researchers say there are “sublyfe” systems that only meet some of these criteria, and also perhaps “superlyfe” that meets additional ones: lyfe forms that have capabilities beyond ours and that might look on us as we do on complex but non-living processes such as crystal growth.

Philip Ball, “Are aliens hiding in plain sight?” at The Guardian

Don’t like that explanation? We have others:

Seven reasons (so far) why the aliens never show up: Some experts think they became AI, some that they were killed by their AI, and others say they never existed. Who’s most likely right? Science fiction writer Matt Williams delves into seven hypotheses into which scientists and science fiction writers have put a lot of thought.

Always remember, as long as there’s an Out There out there, They’ll be Out There. Two key certainties guarantee it: wishful thinking and the human imagination.

8 Replies to “Researchers: The space aliens are indeed Out There! But they’re “lyfe,” not life”

  1. 1
    AaronS1978 says:
    September 7, 2020 at 8:56 pm

    I just Face palmed when I read this

  2. 2
    Belfast says:
    September 7, 2020 at 10:03 pm

    Don’t read the comments in the Guardian article, Aaron, or you will do yourself a hurt with repeated face-palms.

  3. 3
    polistra says:
    September 8, 2020 at 12:29 am

    After reading the whole article…. It’s too bad they played stupid word-games. Their list of criteria actually makes sense, and they also state firmly that life doesn’t have to follow Darwinian evolution. They’re closer to the ID side of the fence.

  4. 4
    bornagain77 says:
    September 8, 2020 at 4:58 am

    As to:

    Nasa’s unofficial working definition is “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”. ,,,,

    “Nasa needs a definition of life so it knows how to build detectors and what kinds of instruments to use on its missions,” says zoologist Arik Kershenbaum of the University of Cambridge. But not everyone thinks it is using the right one.,,,

    They suggest four criteria for lyfe:
    1. It draws on energy sources in its environment that keep it from becoming uniform and unchanging.
    2. It grows exponentially (for example by replication).
    3. It can regulate itself to stay stable in a changing environment.
    4. It learns and remembers information about that environment. Darwinian evolution is an example of such learning over very long timescales: genes preserve useful adaptations to particular circumstances.,,,

    “Our hope is that this definition frees our imaginations enough to not miss lyfe that might be hiding in plain sight,”,,

    Kershenbaum says it’s hard to imagine any other process that could produce complex chemical systems worthy of being considered alive (or alyve). Evolution by natural selection, he says, follows “well-defined principles that we know will apply not just on Earth but elsewhere in the universe” – and he is “very confident that it will be driving the diversity of life on alien planets”. If that’s so, he argues, we can make reasonable assumptions about other attributes it will have: for example that life will have a process like photosynthesis to harvest energy from the parent star.

    It seems quite disingenuous for me that Darwinists would try to squeeze their false Darwinian narrative into any basic definition of life that they try to put forth in their article (so as to ‘free their imaginations’).
    When discussing the sheer impossibility of any naturalistic Origin of Life (OOL), I don’t know how many times I have been told, by Darwinists themselves, that that impossibility against a naturalistic OOL does not count against Darwinian evolution itself being feasible since Darwinian evolution, i.e. Natural Selection, supposedly does not kick in until after you have life.

    Thus, according to the Darwinists themselves, any basic definition of life that we may put forth is apparently not dependent on Darwinian evolution in order for life to be defined properly.

    They mentioned Sara Walker in passing in their article,,

    Astrobiologist and physicist Sara Walker of Arizona State University agrees. “There might be some systems that have many attributes of life but never cross the threshold to Darwinian life,”

    I have a sneaking suspicion that Sara Walker may be more than a little perturbed that the article gave her such a short say on the subject. Sara Walker and Paul Davies wrote a very informative article that equated the problem of properly defining life to the ‘Hard Problem of Consciousness’. In fact, they called it the ‘Hard Problem of Life’.

    The “Hard Problem” of Life – Sara Imari Walker, Paul C.W. Davies
    (Submitted on 23 Jun 2016)
    Chalmer’s famously identified pinpointing an explanation for our subjective experience as the “hard problem of consciousness”. He argued that subjective experience constitutes a “hard problem” in the sense that its explanation will ultimately require new physical laws or principles. Here, we propose a corresponding “hard problem of life” as the problem of how `information’ can affect the world. In this essay we motivate both why the problem of information as a causal agent is central to explaining life, and why it is hard – that is, why we suspect that a full resolution of the hard problem of life will, similar to as has been proposed for the hard problem of consciousness, ultimately not be reducible to known physical principles.
    http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07184v1
    pdf
    http://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07184v1.pdf

    And as Robert Shedinger, via Paul Davies, noted, “Since living organisms consistently resist the ravages of entropy that all forms of inanimate matter are subject to, there must be some non-physical principle allowing living matter to consistently defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And for (Paul) Davies there is; the demon in the machine turns out to be information.”

    “With a nod toward James Clerk Maxwell’s entropy-defying demon, Davies argues that the gulf between physics and biology is completely unbridgeable without some fundamentally new concept. Since living organisms consistently resist the ravages of entropy that all forms of inanimate matter are subject to, there must be some non-physical principle allowing living matter to consistently defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And for (Paul) Davies there is; the demon in the machine turns out to be information.”
    – Robert Shedinger, “Hey, Paul Davies — Your ID Is Showing” – Match 17, 2020
    https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/darwin-skeptic-robert-shedinger-calls-out-paul-davies/

    Finding immaterial information, (not natural selection), to be integral to any definition of life that we may put forth, (so as to enable life to resist the ‘ravages of entropy’), is simply devastating to any possible materialistic definition for life that Darwinists may try to put forth.

    Here are a few comments along that line of thought:
    https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/a-fourth-law-of-thermodynamics-as-natures-steepest-entropy-ascent/#comment-705065

    One final note, although the author(s) tried to disingenuously include Darwinian evolution, i.e. natural selection, into every definition of life that they put forth in their article, the fact of the matter is that Natural Selection is now found to be grossly inadequate as the supposed ‘designer substitute’ as Darwinists falsely imagine it to be.

    Waiting Longer for Two Mutations – Michael J. Behe
    Excerpt: Citing malaria literature sources (White 2004) I had noted that the de novo appearance of chloroquine resistance in Plasmodium falciparum was an event of probability of 1 in 10^20. I then wrote that ‘for humans to achieve a mutation like this by chance, we would have to wait 100 million times 10 million years’ (1 quadrillion years)(Behe 2007) (because that is the extrapolated time that it would take to produce 10^20 humans). Durrett and Schmidt (2008, p. 1507) retort that my number ‘is 5 million times larger than the calculation we have just given’ using their model (which nonetheless “using their model” gives a prohibitively long waiting time of 216 million years). Their criticism compares apples to oranges. My figure of 10^20 is an empirical statistic from the literature; it is not, as their calculation is, a theoretical estimate from a population genetics model. Generally, when the results of a simple model disagree with observational data, it is an indication that the model is inadequate.,,,
    The difficulty with models such as Durrett and Schmidt’s is that their biological relevance is often uncertain, and unknown factors that are quite important to cellular evolution may be unintentionally left out of the model. That is why experimental or observational data on the evolution of microbes such as P. falciparum are invaluable,,,
    http://www.discovery.org/a/9461

    The waiting time problem in a model hominin population – 2015 Sep 17
    John Sanford, Wesley Brewer, Franzine Smith, and John Baumgardner
    Excerpt: The program Mendel’s Accountant realistically simulates the mutation/selection process,,,
    Given optimal settings, what is the longest nucleotide string that can arise within a reasonable waiting time within a hominin population of 10,000? Arguably, the waiting time for the fixation of a “string-of-one” is by itself problematic (Table 2). Waiting a minimum of 1.5 million years (realistically, much longer), for a single point mutation is not timely adaptation in the face of any type of pressing evolutionary challenge. This is especially problematic when we consider that it is estimated that it only took six million years for the chimp and human genomes to diverge by over 5 % [1]. This represents at least 75 million nucleotide changes in the human lineage, many of which must encode new information.
    While fixing one point mutation is problematic, our simulations show that the fixation of two co-dependent mutations is extremely problematic – requiring at least 84 million years (Table 2). This is ten-fold longer than the estimated time required for ape-to-man evolution. In this light, we suggest that a string of two specific mutations is a reasonable upper limit, in terms of the longest string length that is likely to evolve within a hominin population (at least in a way that is either timely or meaningful). Certainly the creation and fixation of a string of three (requiring at least 380 million years) would be extremely untimely (and trivial in effect), in terms of the evolution of modern man.
    It is widely thought that a larger population size can eliminate the waiting time problem. If that were true, then the waiting time problem would only be meaningful within small populations. While our simulations show that larger populations do help reduce waiting time, we see that the benefit of larger population size produces rapidly diminishing returns (Table 4 and Fig. 4). When we increase the hominin population from 10,000 to 1 million (our current upper limit for these types of experiments), the waiting time for creating a string of five is only reduced from two billion to 482 million years.
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....MC4573302/

    “Darwinism provided an explanation for the appearance of design, and argued that there is no Designer — or, if you will, the designer is natural selection. If that’s out of the way — if that (natural selection) just does not explain the evidence — then the flip side of that is, well, things appear designed because they are designed.”
    Richard Sternberg – Living Waters documentary
    Whale Evolution vs. Population Genetics – Richard Sternberg and Paul Nelson – (excerpt from Living Waters video)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0csd3M4bc0Q

    Is Evolution True? Laying Out the Logic – December 4, 2014
    In contrast, our argument is as follows:
    1. Is evolution true? Test case: do enzymes evolve by a process of natural selection and random mutation?
    2. Modern enzymes are the only thing we can test.
    3. No one knows if ancient enzymes were different. They are lost in the deep past, so claims with regard to their promiscuity or ability to evolve are hypothetical and unfalsifiable.
    4. Modern enzymes can’t evolve new functions, based on our own experiments.
    5. We haven’t tested the universe of modern enzymes, so our result is qualified, but the nine most similar enzymes did not change function.
    6. Our estimate for the likely waiting time for an enzyme to evolve a new function is at least 10^15 years.
    7. Therefore evolution of enzymes is likely to be impossible.
    8. Given the sophistication of enzymes and the way they work together, intelligent design is the best explanation for the origin and current diversity of modern enzymes.
    http://www.biologicinstitute.o.....-the-logic

    In short and in conclusion, Darwinists, whether they like it or not, are forced to look ‘higher’ than reductive materialism and/or natural selection for any proper definition of life they may try to put forth.

    I have a suggestion for them as to where they can look for that proper definition of life:

    John 1:1-4
    In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

  5. 5
    AaronS1978 says:
    September 8, 2020 at 9:36 am

    @belfast
    To late, but I guess not to worry because I knocked myself out after the 3rd facepalm

  6. 6
  7. 7
    Truthfreedom says:
    September 8, 2020 at 10:07 am

    lyfe forms that have capabilities beyond ours and that might look on us as we do on complex but non-living processes such as crystal growth.

    This has to be a joke. We can not agree that a human pregnancy results in a human being (thanks “materialism!”) but we can agree about this “lyfe” thing??

  8. 8
    AaronS1978 says:
    September 8, 2020 at 11:54 am

    @ ba77
    Yup yup yup! Exactly me
    I laughed my butt off

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