The chemical composition of life in other worlds

Is it a coincidence that life on Earth is based on carbon? Is this the only element capable of becoming the basis for life? Could there exist, somewhere in the Universe, a type of life different from ours, whose chemical composition is not based on carbon? On what atom or group of atoms could a chemistry of comparable complexity to organic chemistry be built, in theory?

There are 91 different chemical elements on Earth. Others have been generated artificially in the laboratory, and it is suspected that they can be produced in small quantities inside a giant star that becomes a supernova, but their life is short, because they are very radioactive and disintegrate quickly, transforming into more stable elements. Therefore, the search can be reduced to the 91 natural elements. We will select from these those that meet the following two conditions, essential to be able to be the chemical basis of life:

1. They must be capable of establishing more than two covalent bonds with other atoms.
2. They must be stable. That is, they must have at least one non-radioactive isotope.

Rational and scientific inklings about God’s existence

In the previous post I mentioned that science does not provide proof of the existence of God, but it does give inklings. In a book I wrote, which was published in Spanish in 2013 with the title ¿Es compatible Dios con la ciencia? Evolución y Cosmología (Is God Compatible with Science? Evolution and Cosmology) I described a list of those inklings. Here I will summarize a few of them. The first three are scientific, the others are not.

1.      The universe is a physical object. During the 19th century, atheist philosophers denied that the universe is a concept applicable to a concrete object that exists outside our mind. The universe is usually defined as the set of everything that exists. According to those philosophers, such a set does not exist, since the concept of the universe is an invention of the human mind, which does not correspond to any physical object. Therefore, it would not be necessary to look for its origin (its cause) outside our mind. This argument was disproved in the 20th century: Einstein’s theory of general relativity leads to a cosmological equation that applies to the universe, which implies that the cosmos has real existence, that it is a physical object.

Scientific proofs of God’s existence?

Two French engineers, Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, have published a best-seller entitled Dieu - la science - les preuves: L'aube d'une revolution (God - Science - The Proofs: The Dawn of a Revolution), where they claim that science has proven the existence of God. The book is interesting, because it contains many anecdotes and quotes from scientists, and some little-known facts. However, I do not agree with their approach, which is apparent in the title of the book.

Can science prove the existence of God? As I have said in this blog more than once, the answer to this question must be negative. The object of science is the study of the material world. But God is not in the material world, He is not part of it. Therefore, he cannot be an object of study by science. This means that science will never succeed in proving the existence of God, nor will it succeed in proving his nonexistence.

As I explained in another post, perhaps Pope Pius XII was tempted to think that science had proved creation, although it is suspected that Georges Lemaître, discoverer of the Hubble-Lemaître law and the Big Bang theory, dissuaded him, for the Pope, in a speech shortly after their interview, said this: science, while progressing by leaps and bounds, will never be able to answer the ultimate questions, such as the origin of everything.

Changes in the Scientific Paradigm

Thomas Kuhn

As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, from time to time there are shifts in the scientific paradigm that cause sharp deviations in the direction of research. These shifts can occur in any of the sciences. Here are some important historical examples:

Puerperal fever was for centuries the leading cause of death in women giving birth. In 1795, the Scottish obstetrician Alexander Gordon claimed that the disease was transmitted by doctors and midwives. In 1842, the English physician Thomas Watson, known for his description of the aortic pulse, recommended that doctors wash their hands with diluted lye before attending a birth. And in 1847, the Austrian physician Ignaz Semmelweis advised the same, based on data showing that the incidence of puerperal fever was higher in hospitals than in births taking place at home, and higher among women in labor attended by doctors than by midwives. Semmelweis' proposals were violently rejected by contemporary physicians, who were outraged by the idea of ​​being blamed for infections caused by themselves, to the point that Semmelweis was committed to an asylum where he only survived two weeks. His death is believed to have been the result of a beating by the asylum guards when Semmelweis, who was 47 years old, tried to escape. His proposals were confirmed by the discovery of the germ theory of infectious diseases by Louis Pasteur, according to which diseases are caused by microorganisms, and not by miasmas transmitted by air, as previously believed. This caused an abrupt change in the scientific paradigm applied to medicine.

Is homo economicus rational?

Nicolás Bernoulli

In 1713, Nicolás Bernoulli formulated the St. Petersburg paradox, which can be summarized as follows:

Let us consider the following game: a coin is tossed. If it comes up heads, you receive $2. If it comes up tails, it is tossed again. If it comes up heads, you receive $4. If it comes up tails, it is tossed again. And so on. With each toss, the prize is multiplied by 2. How much would you be willing to pay to participate in the game?

The probability of winning $2 is 0.5; the probability of winning $4 is 0.25; the probability of winning $2^k is 2^-k. The expected value is obtained by multiplying each value by its probability and adding them all together. So the expected value of the profit that could be obtained by playing that game is:

The Chinese and artificial intelligence

Wolfgang von Goethe

The media has been reporting on a recent breakthrough in LLMs (large language models), the hottest applications in the field of artificial intelligence, which in the last two years have given rise to great hype, suspicions of stagnation and accusations of excessive energy and water costs.

This latest breakthrough has been achieved by a Chinese company, DeepSeek, which has jumped to the front line because it successfully competes with the big companies in the field, OpenAI (which built ChatGPT and GPT4) and Google (with GEMINI), but at a lower cost.

There are now many tools of this type, but the two mentioned in the previous paragraph (GEMINI and GPT4) provided the best performance, although they were the most expensive. Their code is secret, owned by the two companies (Google and OpenAI) and users cannot modify it. Alongside them, now there are others with open source, which can be adapted to each user, but with lesser performance.

Anything can be assigned a probability?

In the previous post I mentioned the book Radical Uncertainty: Decision Making Beyond the Numbers by Mervyn King and John Kay. The book, written by two prestigious British economists, attacks the bad use of statistics and probability calculus in fields where they are not always applicable, such as history, economics and the law. Let’s look at a few examples:

• What do we mean when we say that Liverpool F.C. has a 90% chance of winning the next match? One possible interpretation is that if the match were to be played a hundred times, with the same players and the same weather conditions and the same referee, Liverpool would win 90 times, and draw or lose the other ten. But the match will be played just once. Does it make sense to talk about probabilities? No, because there are no supporting data on frequency. What is meant is that the person speaking believes that Liverpool will win. Nothing more. It is a subjective probability. Milton Friedman wrote: We can treat people as if they assigned numerical probabilities to every conceivable event. (Price Theory, 1962).