SETI mach II

Unfortunately this may mean nothing more than whoever is doing the computing does not actually know all the mechanisms, or how to properly quantify/formulate the mechanisms.In grad school I started into computational chemistry. I was modelling activity within small molecules. That was so fricking simple a system, yet the formulas necessary to model the full complexity of the system (and mind you I am talking about a single molecule) were not "simple" and not necessarily "perfect".While the experiment you suggest is possible, it will depend on our current knowledge regarding all possible chemicals, mechanisms between those chemicals, and the environment their interactions would take place in.I have yet to see any "information theorists" give any evidence that they fulfill the above. The closest has been saying that they used general laws regarding chance of interaction, which of course is meaningless inside chemistry where random chance interaction is skewed by environment and what is doing the interacting.I think science would be much better off continuing to investigate mechanisms between certain "basic" organic chemical systems which could lead to the complex ones which are necessary for life as we know it, and seeing what environments aid that process.Of course this assumes that there was not a chemical system we no longer see (or recognize) that acted as an intermediary between the basic chemical systems and the ones we see making up life today.------------------
holmes

Well I was also trying to suggest that we don't even have the knowledge required to simulate the complex world, much less a simpler version.The problem with simple models of the world is that they assume too much. While it may be possible that one guesses right, there are so many other ways to guess wrong. Heck you may even get a false positive (suggesting life molecule systems were easier to generate than they actually are).From my experience one really has to understand a system before modelling it properly. We simply do not have that kind of knowledge on the chemical level of life, or the precursors of life.This doesn't even include the multitudes of environments (static and dynamic) that would have to be worked into the model.------------------
holmes

Unfortunately I don't think this is true. Or at least it will be useless as an argument against those who use IC as a reason to believe ID.They will more than likely point out the obvious... any program that "discovered" the creation of complexity would itself have been designed, even if the outcome was not preprogrammed."See, so the laws of nature are designed to create the complexity. If it were up to pure random actions then IC would not come about."It just goes on and on...I think science's best bet is finding irrefutable evidence in real biological organisms that IC systems can develop naturally.------------------
holmes

Indeed I did.Not sure if I would be interested in doing that kind of stuff myself, a bit too science fictiony (even compared to SETI), but it could work I suppose.Anyway it would beat calculating odds in a field we know our knowledge of is far from complete.------------------
holmes