Imagine this. We go to a planet and find a working computer with a complex program running it. is the first thing scientists postulate is that these materials just self assembled and started working on its own?
” is the first thing scientists postulate is that these materials just self assembled and started working on its own?”
obviously.
And an experiment can be performed to prove it. We’ll go for something MUCH simpler than a single cell organism too, say a nano-sized CF-53 Panasonic i7 laptop with Windows 7 Professional x64 with integrated nano-solar cells for power.
First, we fill a billion (or so) beakers full of the necessary elemental powders, say a few ground up laptops and bootable Windows W7 x64 OS CDs, put some sea water in, and then bombarded the laptop soup in the beakers with lightening for a few hundred million years (or so).
What are the chance of getting our nano-laptop and OS. Pretty good, right? After all, that’s a WAY simpler setup than a self-replicating cell.
Do you think that we would eventually obtain a few simple diodes, later followed by an integrated circuit chip forming in the beaker? And then the chip should eventually RANDOMLY evolve all by itself into the laptop (with operating system) after being bombarded by cosmic rays for an even long time after that? After all, bombarding an integrated circuit with cosmic rays would be like bombarding an Intel i7 fabrication plant with 20mm depleted uranimum shells from an A-10 Warthog, and expecting to get an i9 processor coming out afterwards.
If organic life formed by accident in a similar scenario, then certainly there should be no problem with obtaining the laptop and operating system in a like fashion, because after all, the laptop and OS are a few thousand trillion times simpler than, say, the Homo Sapiens species. In fact, we should obtain the laptop and OS much faster because they are so much simpler.
I wonder how long we’ll have to shake our beakers?
I used to look down from my control tower, and say, isn’t it amazing how all those parts just threw themselves together, and formed that C-5 Galaxy down there? They would say it couldn’t have. I would say, of course, you are right, but then, why are you so comfortable, thinking that the universe, which is far more complex than a C-5 Galaxy, just suddenly came into existence all by itself. They couldn’t answer that, but just doubled down on it.