Interesting. Is what Greg Cochran said here and below reasonable?

"A lot of ice moons seem to have interior oceans, warmed by tidal flexing and possibly radioactivity. But they’re lousy candidates for life, because you need free energy; and there’s very little in the interior oceans of such system."

All the upvotes! I am something of an astrobiologist myself, although my emphasis is on geobiology and planetary geology. My current day job is to map out Martian sedimentary rocks with an eye towards liquid water distribution and ancient habitability. My graduate thesis was closer to home, a study of Paleoarchean microbialites.

If you think your posts would benefit from a bit of collaboration, don't hesitate to ask. Otherwise, I'm eager to see what insights you have from a more astronomy-heavy and pure biology perspective.

Depending on how much 'for five year olds' is an actual goal rather than a rhetorical device, it may be worth looking over this and similar research. There are proto-Bayesian reasoning patterns in young children, and familiarizing yourself with those patterns may help you provide examples and better target your message, if you plan to iterate/improve this essay.

Just an amusing anecdote:

I do work in exoplanet and solar system habitability (mostly Mars) at a university in a lab group with four other professional researchers and a bunch of students. The five of us met for lunch today, and it came out that three of the five had independently read HPMoR to its conclusion. After commenting that Ibyqrzbeg'f Iblntre cyndhr gevpx was a pretty good idea, our PI mentioned that some of the students at Cal Tech used a variant of this on the Curiosity rover- they etched graffiti in to hidden corners of the machine ('under cover of calibrations'), so that now their names have an expected lifespan of at least a few million years against Martian erosion. It's a funny story, and also pretty neat to see just how far Eleizer's pernicious influence goes in some circles.

A Red Queen's Race is an evolutionary competition in which absolute position does not change.

You mean relative, not absolute.

I've also seen a more general interpretation: the Red Queen situation is where staying still (doing nothing) makes you worse off as time passes; you need to run forward just to stay in the same place.

I'll try to summarize:

1) I want to know enough about the low-level mechanics of gene transfer to be able to model it accurately enough (not necessarily for a scientific paper) with mathematics. This has to have been done before - links to how would be appreciated, or I could start from scratch.

2) I want to know enough about how it works on the macro level to simulate that too, perhaps with the lower level mechanics working behind the scenes.

3) I am very interested in how evolution started - Dawkins references a soup of chemicals, and then the creation of the first replicator mainly by chance over a very long period of time. Is that accurate?

How did evolution work in the beginning? Dawkins mentioned that there were other explanations than the one he gave - what are they? How do I find them?

My training is in engineering/programming, and my genetics knowledge doesn't much exceed anything taught at the high school level. I am, however, prepared to read college-level textbooks on the subject.

Thanks.

I believe this is called a "red queen race"

I've always been particularly frustrated with the dismissal of materialism as nihilism in the sense of 'the philosophical theory that life has no intrinsic meaning or value.'

What it really means is that life has no extrinsic value; we designate no supranatural agent to grant meaning to life or the universe. Instead, we rely on agents within the universe to assign meaning to it according to their own state; a state that is, in turn, a natural phenomenon. If anything, we're operating under the assumption that meaning in the universe is inherently intrinsic.

Could Malthusian tragedy be the Great Filter? Meaning, maybe most civilizations, before they develop AGI or space colonization, breed so much that everyone is too busy trying to survive and reproduce to work on AGI or spaceflight, until a supernova or meteor or plague kills them off.

Since humans don't seem to be headed into this trap, alien species who do fall into this trap would have to differ from humans. Some ways this might happen:

• They're r-selected like insects, i.e. their natural reproduction process involves creating lots of children and then allowing most to die. Once technology makes resources abundant, most of the children survive, leading to an extreme population boom. This seems unlikely, since intelligence is more valuable to species that have few children and invest lots of resources in each child.
• Their reproduction mechanism does not require a 9-month lead time like humans' do; maybe they take only one day to produce a small egg, which then grows externally to the body. This would mean one wealthy alien that wants a lot of children could very quickly create very many children, rapidly causing the population's mean desire-for-children to skyrocket.
• Their lifespans are shorter, so evolution more quickly "realizes" that there's an abundance of resources, and thus the aliens evolve to reproduce a lot. The shorter lifespan would also produce a low ceiling on technological progress, since children would have to be brought up to speed on current science before they can discover new science. This seems unlikely because intelligence benefits from long lifespans.
• Evolution programs them to desperately want to maximize the number of fit children they have, even before they develop civilization. Evolution didn't do this to humans - why not?

Human technological progress doesn't seem to be as fast as it can be, though, which suggests that there's a lot of "slack" time in which civilizations can develop technologically before evolving to be more Malthusian.

Do you believe that you can reliably distinguish 'problems that cannot be solved by humans' from 'problems that humans could solve in principle but haven't yet'?

"Solvable in principle by humans" and "solvable by humans with our current methods" are not the same thing. Most of the fruits that you can gather with the current tools of molecular biology seem to be picked. There are also a lot of man-hours thrown on them.

Progress in biology will come more from developing new methods than using the existing methods.