{"id":45,"date":"2007-08-17T11:16:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-17T19:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=45"},"modified":"2007-08-17T11:16:00","modified_gmt":"2007-08-17T19:16:00","slug":"we-dont-need-no-steenkin-carbon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=45","title":{"rendered":"We Don’t Need No Steenkin’ Carbon"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Okay, now here’s<\/i> a paper<\/a> to kick your paradigms a little off-kilter: self-replicating, mutating complex structures built from inorganic dust, kick-started into a form of rudimentary “metabolism” by charged plasmas. <\/p>\n

For want of a better word, Life. Inorganic life. Spawned from starting conditions reasonably common in deep space, if I’m to believe the commentary<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Of course, the results are just out, and so is the jury. We don’t want to get too carried away; lots of nonliving structures superficially resemble life in a variety of ways (ball lightning<\/a>, Fox’s microspheres<\/a> from the fifties — I even wrote a children’s story once premised on the thought that fire<\/i> might be considered a life form under the right circumstances, although the logic of that argument was about as feeble as the story itself). And for every thought-provoking Hoyleian thought-experiment into sentient clouds<\/a>, there are ten third-rate episodes of Star Trek<\/i> and Space: 1999<\/i> that trotted out the ol’ energy-being trope for no better reason than that a blob of blue light was even cheaper to render than a guy in a rubber mask. There’s a certain hokey taint to the whole concept. <\/p>\n

Still. Those of you who read Maelstrom <\/i>may remember the definition “Self-replicating information shaped by natural selection”, based on (and slightly mutated from) a line I stole out of Dawkins’s Blind Watchmaker<\/a><\/i>. Tsytovich et al<\/i>‘s “inorganic living matter” seems to meet that standard, at least. And since I’m presently gearing up to build a deep-space lifeform or two of my own, I for one welcome the arrival of our new dustbunny overlords…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay, now here’s a paper to kick your paradigms a little off-kilter: self-replicating, mutating complex structures built from inorganic dust, kick-started into a form of rudimentary “metabolism” by charged plasmas. For want of a better word, Life. Inorganic life. Spawned from starting conditions reasonably common in deep space, if I’m to believe the commentary. Of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-extraterrestrial-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}