Life

Life is so cool. I don't know why I am fascinated by it; probably because I'm amazed by anything. I was out running yesterday and we--me and some friends--ran by this tree. All the leaves are changing here, but this tree was amazing. It was absolutely neon yellow. It was so bright we all had to touch it to see if it was real. It was. Anyway, I was just thinking; what is life? What makes us different from the rocks and the dirt and the dogs and worms and Mercury and Venus? We have DNA, you might say. But how does having a complex carbon-based atom that makes up most of our body make us different? And, why does DNA classify us as alive? 'Dead' people still have DNA. They still are made up of cells. What's different? Perhaps the way we can adapt to our environment, you might suggest. So, like water. Pour water into a cup and it will adapt to its environment to fit the shape of the cup. To reproduce is a common argument. Fire? Clouds? To be able to move of our own accord? Trees can't. We classify them as alive. This probably seems pointless; to try and convince you that nothing is alive. But I am actually leading up to something way more cool.
We were watching Star Wars in my English class today--I know, coolest teacher ever!!--and seeing all of those fake-looking aliens makes you wonder. Did George Lucas have a specific thought in mind? Did he classify these things as alive? Did they have DNA? Were they made of cells? No? Well are they alive? I think people can be so narrow-minded when it comes to life. You all know, science class--
"The 7 characteristics of life: DNA, cells, able to adapt to its environment..." you know the drill. It just seems like we're relying so heavily on our view of 'life' that if we met life from another planet that we wouldn't classify it as alive because it wasn't carbon-based and didn't drink liquid water. Though of course I'm still not convinced that life is a real thing. It seems like something that we decided to call ourselves. "We move. Rocks don't. We're alive." It just seems like a strange way to think.
So now, where did life (I'll just refer to it as that because you all know what I'm talking about even though it's not quite real.) come from? Could it really have just been a couple molecules that floated together and started swimming around? That seems, though reasonable, a little far-fetched. One thing that I like to consider is our sister planet; Venus.
Venus, God of Love, ironically, is really a fascinating planet. Once really similar to us, now she is hotter than Mercury. Some people worry that we will end up like her, but I have never worried about it, because why would we take so much longer? Anyway, similar size, similar composition, we are definitely related, right? Now just a tad of history; in the beginning of the solar system it was chaos. Meteors flying around, comets going every which way, it was insane. So what if we were switching meteors with Venus? Seems likely, right? There were pieces flying everywhere. So, if life originated on Venus, then it seems totally possible that it could've just floated over here and gotten started here as well.
Here's a random thought: we don't know why Venus is the way it is. What if life flourished there even more than it did here. Animals could have started building fires, and gotten more and more advanced until they were to where we are. Hmm? And then they found a big thing of coal. And they started burning it until they built up enough greenhouse gases to overheat the planet, evaporating the oceans and ultimately snowballing until Venus is--what it is now.
But back to the life thing, what if it didn't originate in Venus? Because even if it did start there, we would still have the same problem, correct? It had to start from something. Maybe, and I know I'm getting a little far-out here, but maybe it originated somewhere else. Like, Titan? Titan is awesome. I know I keep getting sidetracked, but this isn't a report for school, so as long as you're not bored I'm good. But in any case, Titan is the only moon--natural satellite--that that has a dense atmosphere like Earth. And it's just like us!! It rains there, they have lakes, oceans, rivers, a nice atmosphere, wind, pressure, it's perfect!! Except for one thing; there's not much water or oxygen. What? I thought you just said it has rivers, lakes, and oceans. Well, it does. They're just made of methane. And the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen.
Wow.
So what's to say that life couldn't be there, too, just Sodium-based. Okay. So the reason that Carbon is such a good thing for life to be based on is because it has so many empty electron shells; 4 in fact. That means it can connect to 4 different atoms to make huge chains. You know how DNA can be 3 meters long when it's all stretched out? That's one big molecule. And Sodium has 7 empty electron shells, which means that Sodium could make really long chains too. DNA is then possible, and so then life is too. So maybe there is/was/will be life on Titan. Who knows?
And now we're back to our age-old problem; where?! How?! What?! All right, what if it came from other solar systems? It seems reasonable to suggest that we are not the one anomaly in the 14.5 Billion years that the universe has been around (Or 'alive' some people would call it). People who think there are no such thing as aliens are just crazy. (Look at the probability!! How unlikely that in billions and billions and billions of planets there are no other bacteria anywhere?) It could have floated in and landed on our little planet and just kind of adapted to fit here.
I know, I know, I'm avoiding the question, but I'm ready to give you my answer now. You can tell that I'm a Lincon-Douglas debater by the fact that I give all these crazy theories with very little evidence to support them. Promise you won't think I'm crazy.
I was talking with another L-D Debater--you'll be able to tell--and we were talking about this same thing. And then he said something that just kind of made me think about everything ever.
"Well what if we're just a computer generation?" Like, we're just something a computer is showing. Now of course everyone else said "Had an extra dose of crazy in your pancakes this morning?" But he stopped us and backed it up with other theories. We can generate cells dividing, right? We can generate galaxies forming, though we've never seen it, correct? We can generate supernovas exploding though we can't get close enough without dying, yes? So, suppose someone got a big computer and set it rolling on cells, trying to get it to form the exact conditions that formed them and their set of DNA and such. And they left it rolling. Now suppose that their computer generated life forms invented similar computers and did the same thing; started a computer generated solar system. Now what if this goes on for a long time and then it ends up with a person sitting at a computer theorizing about life? Maybe every single thing that we know about is all 1s and 0s.
Now, you probably think I'm insane. But before you say 'well you're crazy' just try and prove that it's impossible. That'll twist your brain, won't it? Maybe there's little green men looking into a computer screen and seeing you walking home from school. Maybe our time is going extra fast for them, so for them it's been a blink of an eye since Hitler came and tried to take over the world. Consider them looking in at you from the 4th dimension when you're doing homework.
Though you can't prove it's true, you can prove that it is more likely than life actually developing from nothing. Here:
So, let's start out big. First of all, there is a very fine line in our universe between too much gravity and too little. When the Big Bang happened, we can only assume that the laws of physics couldn't have existed before them. (Long story if you don't understand. Comment and I can talk about it.) So, suppose there was a little bit more gravity. There would be black holes everywhere. Everything would pretty much be sucked into black holes and we would end up with almost exactly what we had before the Big Bang: No life. What about a little less gravity? With a little less gravity nothing would stick together. One of the astronauts that went up into a space station found out that when you put sugar in a sealed little bag in no gravity, they float together. Though that's only at this particular level of gravity. Much less, and everything would fly apart. Even meteorites and comets wouldn't work. We couldn't really have stars either because they kind of run off energy. So it's like one in a million that we would actually get this perfect little 'gravity goldilocks zone.' So if we were a computer generation we would be perfectly suited for life.
Speaking of the Goldilocks Zone, it's really surprising that there is a) a planet in the Goldilocks Zone and b) a rocky planet in the Goldilocks Zone! We search for them constantly and we have come up with a surprisingly small number of planets in the zone. And that includes gas planets too, with which it would be much harder to have life on. I'm not saying impossible, it would just have to be really light, and they certainly couldn't make big computers like this because they would have all gas. Back to the point; we have this perfect little planet that is very, as far as we can tell from our galaxy, out of the ordinary.
Have you heard of the Electromagnetic Field? Well, it's awesome. There would be no life without it. See, the sun is spitting out rays that would kill you really fast if you were in them. I am so general because there's different kinds. But it is here because we have a molten inner core. Coincidence? I think not. It protects us from these rays in ways that we couldn't protect ourselves. It's pretty amazing.
And then we come back to the theory of how life started. How could it have started? Of course it could've started the old-fashioned way, I'm definitely not ruling that out, I'm just saying it seems really improbable. But of course for this theory to work it would have had to happen at least once, or at least something happened. And I feel like this is kind of a one-theory-suits-all kind of thing, because I am religious, and I believe in God, and such, and I think if God wanted to send us here, it would have been really easy to insert our souls into a bunch of 1s and 0s instead of creating a whole universe.
And now I just have one more thing to add before I get off and leave you to your lives. If my crazy debate team and I are right, then that would mean that it would take one person tripping in one world somewhere to unplug us and literally obliterate us.
Thank you! And I hope you don't think I'm absolutely insane!

Teleportation

I am a complete science nerd.I am just going to start with that. Now to the good stuff:
I like quantum mechanics a lot. I like talking about possibilities, and lately the thing that's been on my mind a lot is teleportation.
I was talking with a friend, and we were discussing the likeliness of it happening randomly to a person. Technically, it's possible. Quantum particles, which is pretty much anything smaller than an electron, have the ability to randomly jump around. Sometimes, they can go from somewhere right here to somewhere right there without crossing it physically.
In English we call it teleportation.
It's pretty cool, right? But the thing is, that only quantum particles are small enough to do it. So now we're getting into quarks and such and it's getting really really tiny. (Quarks are the things that make up protons, by the way. There's 7 different kinds, Up, Down, Strange, Charm, Top, and Bottom. Yeah. It's pretty cool.) Anyway, I want you to imagine the probability of one of the billions of billions of billions of billions of electrons in the whole universe teleporting, is in you. The probability is tiny! And that's of one electron in your body moving a little ways away.
Now; it would be super awesome if one of your electrons, or quarks, or whatever make up quarks left, but it wouldn't make a big difference. That's not what causes cancer, or makes the sun burn, or anything else amazing or detrimental. So now let's think about an entire atom just up and going. All the electrons. All the quarks. And everything that makes up quarks (because some of them aren't quantum particles and thus not capable of teleportation, but they're made up of quantum particles, probably.) Imagine a billion over a billion over a billion over a hundred. That's probably pretty close to the probability of that happening.
BUT!! That's just the thing. The fact that there is a tiny tiny tiny possibility of that happening is two times amazing!! A whole atom traveling somewhere faster than light! Just because we're talking about atoms I have to mention--atoms are really small. This means nothing. This isn't like half of a golf ball or something, this is really really really really small. I remember it with this cool analogy:
An atom is to a base ball what a golf ball is to the earth.
That's really small. So now that we have our one atom that's teleported, it still doesn't mean much. Especially because this atom didn't even make it there without almost blowing apart. There are electrons everywhere, the protons aren't stuck together, it's a mess. Teleportation isn't all perfectly aligned like I'd love it to be.  But, let's remember, there's always the microscopic chance that they are still perfectly formed.
Now we must return to moving up the scale in size of teleportation. Now one of your atoms is gone--you wouldn't even notice the difference. Your pool isn't half empty, the computer you're reading an amazing essay on is still working, but probability, probability!!! What's the biggest number you can possibly imagine? Bigger than a google-google-google? Times it by three, put it over one hundred, and then you probably have the probability that anything is going to teleport anywhere. Then times it by nine and there's your chances that it will still be in perfect form and not just a smear in the cosmos.
WHAT?!
Go back to your number over a hundred. That's a possibility. It will almost certainly not happen, but we can't rule out the possibility.
Well, you kind of can.
So, if you like other nerdy science things like this, then comment a question you have and I'll post something about it!