[extropy-chat] HISTORY: Solved & Unsolved Riddles

[The Avantguardian]

Natasha wrote:
"What are some riddles that some bear light, or a shadow, on our extropic
transhumanity?"


Here are some of riddles and unsolved mysteries from science that are very curious indeed:

1. How do homing pigeons and other migratory birds unerringly find their way home? Do they have some special sensory organs to detect the earth's magnetic field? If so why haven't we found it and characterized it yet? If we do find out the mechanism, can we transhumans augment ourselves to have it to, thereby eliminating the need to "litter" earth's orbit with GPS satellites?

2. What is the so called "Hotspot" detected in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy experiments? Could future transhumans use it to navigate deep space the way early navigators used Polaris the North Star to navigate the world?

3. Why is all life on earth asymmetric at a molecular level. The amino acids that make up proteins on earth all have a "left-handed" (levorotary) chirality and the sugars that make up carbohydrates are "right-handed" (dextrorotary). This is quite literally an extropic riddle because in any standard synthesis reaction occuring in nature (enzymatic reactions don't count because enzymes themselves are composed of these asymmetrically "left-handed" amino acids and you get the chicken or the egg problem) the resulting molecules are a racemic mixture i.e. composed of equal amounts of "left-handed" and "right-handed" molecules. The entropy that the biosphere as a thermodynamic system would have had to shed to the universe to be entirely composed of these asymmetric molecules is astronomically huge. This also ties into Erwin Shroedinger's riddle as follows. There have been attempts to duplicate the so-called "primordial soup" like the famed Miller and Urey experiments in 1956, where they
 recreated the early atmosphere of earth in a laboratory flask and shot electric sparks through it for a week producing amino acids that clung to the inside of the glassware. They succeeded in producing amino acids but they were in, you guessed it, a racemic mixture.

4. How can sperm whales hold their breath for half an hour at a time, descend into the abyss, and have fights to the death with giant squid and then surface without getting the bends or nitrogen narcosis? We can't do that even with all our fancy diving gear unless we mix helium with our air supply and spend hours depressurizing... or can we?

5. How can some really bright people claim to understand the universe so completely that there is nothing eerie, anomolous, or mysterious about it yet still manage to misplace their car keys. ;)

 

 



The Avantguardian 


"He stands like some sort of pagan god or deposed tyrant. Staring out over the city he's sworn to . . .to stare out over and it's evident just by looking at him that he's got some pretty heavy things on his mind."

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