Life may not need a planet. It may only need matter, persistent gradients of energy, memory, and enough time for (ie self-) organisation to become aware of itself.
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the oldest questions
Tag: chemistry
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Marbled: Atmospheric Modulation
Sitting alone, observing cloud define, design, drift and diffuse themselves across the sky. Tidal flows of moisture, heat and thermal rhythm: a moment of quiet reflection. It takes a universe to make a cloud. I wonder if it might also, and in some counter-intuitively enigmatic sense, take a cloud to make a universe. Can the […]
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Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) was a pioneering British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose meticulous work provided critical insights into the structure of DNA. Her photograph 51, capturing the helical diffraction pattern of DNA fibres, was instrumental in revealing the molecule’s double-helix form, though her contributions were long overshadowed by others who built upon her data. Working […]
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Entropic Deferral: Lossy Signals
To understand ourselves as primarily here to produce waste is to face the unsettling fact that our bodies and systems are throughput machines. What we consume is less important than the transformation that occurs in the middle, where emergent rules of metabolism, language, and culture operate. Output is not accidental but constitutive: waste is not […]
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Life in Space?
Context: First evidence of cell membrane molecules in space I wonder if we might stretch the boundaries of biological diversity far beyond the limited subset of observed (terrestrial) organic self-replication to encompass the possibility of space-based life, sentience and intelligence. Given the sheer vastness of all possible configurations of matter and energy as dynamically-reflexive environmental […]
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Chemical Computation
Context: How chemical reactions compute The endemic computation of information dynamics in (and as) chemical reactions suggests that matter, energy and material relationships or interdependencies are already an implicit form of computation as complex logical information-processing. The interesting thing, from a philosophical perspective, is just what it is that damps or limits and abstracts a […]
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Chemical Intelligence
Context: Neural network based on autocatalytic reaction performs image classification It really is not much of a hop, skip and jump from all these emerging discoveries of proxy mechanisms for invoking rudimentary machine intelligence to suggest that we have quite profoundly placed the ontological cart before the horse here. Information-processing systems (of which all matter […]
Context: The most common organism in the oceans harbors a virus in its DNA Meta-replicatory strategies (as explained in the article linked above) being those of diversifying and exploiting multiple channels of optimal and simultaneous self-replication. The referenced order of magnitude more viruses than bacteria in the ocean already suggests that the grey-zone between “living” […]
Daedelus Kite 