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Originally Posted by Aokigahara
Sounds to me like your dad is the one with the problem, not you. I'm actually getting pretty mad at the guy from reading this. I'll try to keep that under control. Instead, I'd rather talk about the point in which chemistry becomes biology. what do you think it takes to turn raw matter into living organisms? i mean, the material is pretty basic. carbon, mainly... but what is life, then? will life be created simply by arranging the right matter in the right pattern (i.e. internal organs, ect..). hmm, maybe not. Still, consider when the smallest living organisms first appeared on Earth. Do you think life just flashed into existence from the matter it was made of? How else could it have happened? Even if it arrived on Earth on meteor, it still would have had to undergo the same process and make the transition from non-living to living matter. I know its still something which can't be recreated in a lab. Also, what have you learned about dark energy? Have you studied quantum theory and the multiverse at all? That stuff is infinitely fascinating to me. Damn, I'm not trying to bomb you with questions. Sorry. What about nanotech or the colonization of space? Any interest in those?
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Life has been attempted to be created in the lab, and the farthest they could get was to cell like structures, according to a book I read by Isaac Asimov. Other books say we have only come to create amino acids and couldn't go further. I think life can be created from non-living matter, because not understanding how doesn't mean it cannot happen. Maybe we had to wait more time for unicellular life to form, some million years? Thats a long time for an experiement.
What I know of dark energy is limited to what I have read on popular science books, but I know something: It also goes by the name of vacuum energy, or the cosmological constant. Vacuum energy consists of virtual pairs of particles that come into existence and annihilate each other since they are particle anti-particle pairs. The process happens really fast, and we cannot see it directly, but we know it's there because of the acceleration and expansion of the universe, and an effect known as the cassimir effect. That effect was discovered by placing 2 metallic plates separated and parallel to each other on a vacuum. They measured that a force is still present.
The issue with dark/vacuum energy is that as far as we know, it's useless for everyday life. It is so rarefied throughout the universe because it has high entropy (meaning high amount of disorder in a system). When something has high entropy, or is in thermal equilibrium, which is another way of calling high entropy, it is useless to turn something on or use it in any practical way. Everything in the universe goes towards higher entropy, and if something reverses the entropy, it was either a statistical fluctuation, or that system isnt a closed one and is consuming energy from another source, (one of the discoverers of the second law of thermodynamics, that the entropy always stays constant or increases in a closed system, Ludwig Boltzmann, hanged himself. I think that thinking about entropy most of the time is depressing!).
So going back to dark energy, its quantity throughout space is pretty much the same, all homogeneous, so is its density. There are no regions with more vacuum energy than others, all have the same.
Dark matter is another beast altogether, and there are concentrations of it, meaning that some places don't have it. Dark matter is 75%, if i remember correctly, of the matter in the universe, as far as we can tell, and it is 24% of the energy content in the universe, with normal matter being the 7% and dark energy the rest. There are many candidates for dark matter, meanin materials it is made out of, and the ones i remember the most are WIMPS (weakly interactive massive particles) and/or brown dwarfs and matter that is too dim to be seen. Either possibility is fascinating. Ive read before that it may even be that there is a huge number of rogue planets and they are just too dim to be seen.
In the end, for me the universe is a place that you need to learn how to love it a it is. It is like an acquired taste: at first it is repulsive, but you learn to love its paradoxical combination of complexity and simplicity. It is also a place both destrucive and constructive, depressing and fascinating. It is indeed a paradox.