Assignment 3

Questions

Article 1

What is the so called bottom-up and top-down approaches?(I did not quite get it)

Bottom-up Approach:

Attempting to recreate the conditions and processes that led to the origin of life from simpler non-living molecules. It involves studying and simulating the prebiotic chemistry that might have led to the emergence of life. Researchers start with basic chemical building blocks and try to piece together how these could have self-organized into more complex biological systems.

Example: Scientists might simulate conditions in early Earth environments to see how organic molecules, like amino acids or RNA, could have formed and eventually led to life.

Top-down Approach:

The top-down approach works in the opposite direction. It begins with existing life forms and traces their characteristics back in time to understand their origins. This includes studying the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) and other forms of early life by using genetic, metabolic, or structural data and extrapolating backward to infer what the first life forms might have been like.

Example: Researchers analyze modern DNA and proteins to understand what early molecular systems might have looked like before life as we know it developed.

Article 2

Chemical matter, whether organic or in-organic, is active and dynamic, then why are we still defining them as organic or in-organic? Because what life like is active and dynamic?

At first I was confused about whether organic things have life and in-organic things do not have life, so I came up with this question. However, life could emerge from both, so it doesn’t matter which has life or not. Also if we inspect in a theological way, all matters have life.

 

Writing

In 3021, we found a planet consists of magnet. What seemed weird was, the ‘creatures’ on the planet are actually controlled by the undercurrent of liquid magnet.

The undercurrent is like . So the current might collide into each other and have interaction with each other. At the same time, there might be some randomness within the current, so small ‘creatures’ will be born.

We named the ‘creature’ mag-worm. The mag-worms have their own life form which appears like the snakes in the sand, but what seemed also weird is they are just condensed solid magnet molecule and gas in molecule state and have the ability of attacking and annexing others. Forgot to mention, this planet was found in a cyber world and we already had the ability of going into the cyber world by putting on a special suit. 

Just imagine, a small planet, probably hunderds or thousands of them, gather together like a galaxy, has millions of magnetic ‘creatures’ on them. This is like a inner alien world, where, to some extent, artificial but not that artificial.

It’s quite interesting that they have the behaviour like human—-compete and merge. When a mag-worm is much stronger, bigger and more condensed, it will be more likely to absorb the weaker ones into its own body. The digest process is surprising as well, due to the difference of density between the original body and merged one, there might form gas swirls, which would calm down when the worm moved certain distance, so that the current of the swirls will approach the current in the mainstream. Every second, small worms will be born, and every second, hunderds of worms will be eaten. It is also weird that the worms at same size are repulsive to others, so on the surface of the planet it established block-like districts, quite close to small societies. There are slight chances that the biggest worm will form on the planet, because when the worm reaches certain weight or density, it will die out. If there exsists only the biggest worm on the planet, the planet will fade away within seconds.

 

Reference

Dune