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Douglas_Knight comments on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: NancyLebovitz 09 December 2013 04:35PM

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Comment author: Douglas_Knight 10 December 2013 04:52:37AM 1 point [-]

There's barely any life in the Sahara. It looks a lot like spores to me. I want a measure of life that includes speed. Some kind of energy use or maybe cell divisions. I expect the probability of life developing in a place to be proportional to amount of life there after it arrives. Maybe that's silly; there certainly are exponential effects of molecules arriving the same place at the same time that aren't relevant to the continuation of life. But if you can rule out this claim, I think your model of the origin of life is too detailed.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 10 December 2013 05:02:24AM 0 points [-]

There's barely any life in the Sahara. It looks a lot like spores to me.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

I want a measure of life that includes speed.

Do you mean something like the idea that if an environment is too harsh even if life can survive the chance that it will evolve into anything beyond a simple organism is low?