29 Constants to sustain life

[raecoffey]

I have attached parts of an article that talk about the 29 constants that must be fine tuned for life to be possible in nature.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I'm in. Let's gooooooooo!

[pinback]

I'm good for a half dozen, sure. I'll pitch in.

[raecoffey]

I didn't post the whole article bc it was long, but the writer put this so much more eloquently than I could have. How fragile life truly is

[pinback]

That's one way to look at it. The other way is it's all life, and so it's not fragile at all, nothing else is possible.

One of my kid's earliest school activities was picking things that were alive, and things that were not alive. Is the bird alive? Yes. Is the rock alive? No.

This seemed insane to me. It seems more insane to me than ever. I know what they meant, but it's a ridiculous conceit.

It's all a movement of the whole. There is only life.

[raecoffey]

So a rock is alive by your standards? It's not conscious. It doesn't feel anything. It doesn't have a nervous system.

[pinback]

It is not separate. There are many waves, but there is just the ocean. There is only the movement of the whole.

[raecoffey]

Yes, but there is a difference between someone and something, between alive and not, between conscious and unawake, between sedentary and self-aware...

[AArdvark]

Rocks are alive, but not in a way that humans can understand. As a whole we tend to judge things by our standards, which is quite narrow minded

[pinback]

Yes, but there is a difference between someone and something, between alive and not, between conscious and unawake, between sedentary and self-aware...

There are a lot of false assumptions in your assertion, but I'm not gonna get into it cuz Tdarcos will eventually come in and destroy the thread.

[raecoffey]

Please tell me your argument for including rocks in the category of breathing things...

[pinback]

It is only the human mind that separates the world into things and objects like rocks and humans. In reality no such separation exists.

[Flack]

In a normal world someone would say "here's an interesting article" and then post a link to the article and yet somehow I ended up in an alternate universe where people are arguing whether or not rocks are alive. Jesus, take me!

[pinback]

It's the full Jolt Country experience.

[Flack]

If someone could take a rock, living or dead, and bash my head in I'd sure appreciate it.

[raecoffey]

Fair enough, sorry I lost the damned link in my surfings but I see where you are going. Yes, we are all matter, we are all connected, that is true, and without each other, we wouldn't exist, but do you really think that a rock can think, or enjoy an experience? This is all really a big ball of semantics. Your just picking apart what I said. I said 29 constants for living, breathing, conscious beings to be able to coexist within their environment.

[raecoffey]

I mean I guess that by design those same 39 constants, like the speed of light, or planks constant, being in the right range for matter to form, would also allow for not-concious mattervto form too... But the premise was about "life," not "rocks" ...

[AArdvark]

Well, I didn't want to derail this thread because I get the knife edge that human life depends upon.

The thing is that we all judge life by human standards. That may not be the case in stuff we think of as not alive, like rocks

[pinback]

There are not "things that are conscious" and "things that are not conscious". Rocks are not conscious, nor are humans. There is only consciousness.

Likewise, there are not "things that are alive" and "things that are not alive", there is only life.

You will all say I'm talking crap, but you will never be able to show me anything else.

[AArdvark]

Exactly, which is why I didn't want to do this. Well, I did, a little. But we were discussing the minute circumstances in which human life is possible here on Earth, not rocks and other sidebars. I read someplace that if the hydrogen atom was .00000010 somthing larger than it is there would be no chance for bonding with oxygen and thus no water and thus a planet of very thirsty organisms