Tag: science

Technical Innovation 2030 – Part 2

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Alright, so I got the no-brainer out of the way.  I identified a critical technology that’s been allowed to languish for sixty years.  Now let me look at actual innovation.

Probably the most powerful new technology is the current ability we have to modify the living genome.  This is the CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology.  With this set of tools or techniques we can replace genes inside of living organisms and even produce gene lines that include or exclude traits that biology identifies for these changes.  This kind of control over the machinery of life is unprecedented.  Currently it is being used to create treatments for everything from genetic diseases to cancer.  In the future once the risks have been measured it may be used to edit the genes of human embryos to eliminate disease.  And obviously, as much as the idea is currently denounced by medical ethicists, in the future it will be used eugenically.  In some future time, in the same way as we currently inoculate our children against measles and chicken pox, we will modify our children’s genes against cancer and other diseases.  And after that we will alter their genetic code to make them more intelligent and longer lived.  And finally, after that we’ll use this technology for trivial purposes like making them taller and better looking.

And these things will happen because they can happen and because some of them will make human life better and happier.  Of course, sometime far in the future we may regret tampering with our DNA.  But the same can be said for all of the changes that man’s ascent out of the jungle have created.  These will be just the most premeditated.

And this CRISPR technology can also be used to modify all the other plants, animals and microbes that share the planet with us.  Imagine designing an insect whose only reason for existing is eating ticks so that they won’t have a chance to bite humans and spread disease.  Or how about a robber fly that is designed to eat specific mosquitoes that transmit malaria or even just live in my backyard in Dunwich?  Or how about a caterpillar whose favorite food is poison ivy?  And these are just parlor tricks.  The plant side is where the real benefits accrue.  Currently we have to plant grain every year.  This is expensive and fraught with problems.  What if corn and wheat and rice weren’t annuals but perennials.  What if we could chop the tops off of these plants and leave the root and the stem to grow again next year?  What if all plants could fix nitrogen from the air and thus reduce their need for fertilizers?  What if we could come up with microorganisms that attack the pathogens that cause tree blights like the ones that have decimated chestnut, elm and ash trees?  We can build living things that do a lot of the things we currently use chemistry to do.  And they’ll be a lot better at it.  Pesticides and herbicides can be biological.  We can even design creatures that excrete octane (well, maybe something a little less volatile).  Now that’s a trick I’d like to see come to fruition.

Anyway, you get the idea.  Biology is the next frontier.  But what will the third post in this series be about?

FedEx Boldly Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before

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When Scotty needs a shipment of anti-matter does he expect to see an Amazon truck or maybe FedEx?  Well, maybe not yet but who knows about tomorrow?

Antimatter has been transported for the first time ever — in the back of CERN’s truck

“On 24 March, a team at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, transported 92 antiprotons in a specially designed bottle that traps the particles using magnetic fields. The bottle travelled on the back of a truck, taking a 30-minute journey around the lab’s site.”

Alright, to be realistic, the Starship Enterprise couldn’t reach Warp Factor 8 on 92 antiprotons.  In fact, you probably couldn’t lift your pinky off the table with the energy produced by that amount of matter/anti-matter annihilation.

https://youtu.be/0xD9qEdHFIE?si=zCKTeF3RTXgm51yZ&t=52

But if we can send anti-matter by delivery truck today who knows what next week will bring?  Someday I may be able to order up a bushel basket of Higgs bosons or a peck of top quarks.  The sky’s the limit.

I read somewhere that the folks dreaming about interstellar travel were hypothesizing that anti-matter could be more easily stored if it was cooled down to just above absolute zero.  I remember thinking, “Does this sound like we’re making it easier or harder by requiring it to reach such a difficult state.  But maybe I’m wrong.  My whole experience with cryogenics had to do with trying to build a cooling jacket for a chemical reactor that used liquid nitrogen to run some organic synthesis steps at ridiculously low temperatures.  And to be totally honest, I wasn’t convinced that the chemists really had any specific reactions that needed these conditions.  They just wanted to make sure that the system they built couldn’t possibly be unable to produce the temperatures, pressures and chemical corrosion resistance parameters that they had promised to their boss.  But anyway, if you can imagine anti-matter travelling in a truck then you can further reckon with anti-matter at 0.01 K sitting in the hold of a star ship waiting to be combined with normal matter to produce impulse to accelerate the ship toward Proxima Centauri.  I just know I won’t be volunteering for that first trip, thank you very much.

So, since we’re discussing anti-matter, I’m still waiting to hear where all the anti-matter in the universe is hiding.  After all, I seem to remember that according to all the theories out there, the universe should have exactly equal quantities of matter and anti-matter.  Well, where is it?

Somewhere out there shouldn’t there be an anti-photog, out there running an anti-OFC website and publishing his novel “The Anti-Sniper”?  Maybe all the missing antimatter is also, all the missing dark matter they’re always looking for.  But whatever the reality, if we’re starting to ship anti-protons around it’s only a matter of time before the commodities exchanges start listing anti-matter on the big board and before you know it, I’ll be able to trade puts and calls for anti-matter.  What would a butterfly spread on anti-neutrons cost on expiration Friday.  Hmmm.

The Earth’s Planned Maintenance Schedule – Part 2

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Let us speculate that humanity survives its intellectual infancy.  Let’s imagine that it’s now 10,000 A.D. (that’s right, the Year of the Lord) and our smartest Earth scientists have calculated that by 100,000 A.D. the Earth’s magnetic field is going to shut down for good.  I have no reason to believe this is an accurate number.  By all accounts we should have many millions of years on the warranty for the magnetic field but just let’s say for the sake of discussion it will.

Well, there we are ultra-modern humans with a world government, a genetically engineered genome that includes a third set of teeth and a three-hundred-year lifespan.  We hear that our distant descendants are going to lose their atmosphere, oceans and have to wear SPF 50,000 rated sunscreen for days at the {dry) beach.  So, what will they do?  Well, with a ninety-thousand-year window of opportunity, if they’re my descendants they’ll probably waste the first twenty thousand years dithering.  After that they’ll start engineering the crap out of their options.  But what will that be?  Let me try to guess.

So, the Earth’s liquid iron core produces a magnetic field because it is a moving electric field.  So, all we have to do is produce a moving electric field between Earth’s atmosphere and the sun (and to a lesser extent all of the universe around us.  Well then shouldn’t we install solar panels in orbit around the Earth and run a current through a really long piece of copper wire that is moving and thereby set up an electromagnet?  Now someone with any kind of electrical engineering knowledge or a physicist who specializes in E-M would slap me across the face and say, “What the hell are you rambling about?”  And he would be right.  But just for the sake of getting through this exercise let’s say that it is theoretically possible to have a framework around the Earth that converts solar energy into enough of a moving electric field to induce a magnetic field as strong as the current field we enjoy today.

Postulating that, is it technically feasible?  Or would the amount of mass needed to create this device be completely ridiculous from the point of view of the energy needed to boost it into space ?  Would the weight of the conductive material and the photoelectric cells be just so enormous that it would be beyond all of the resources of even a distant future civilization to put in orbit from Earth?

Now this is a cheat.  I don’t know the answer.  I haven’t tried to estimate the amount of material needed to produce such an enormous electrical field.  Something with a diameter of more than 24,000 miles and with the structural integrity that that requires seems absurd.  I, of course am aware of the science fiction convention of a ring or (Dyson) sphere around a star used to harness some significant portion of the energy output of the fusion reaction going on inside every star but I don’t know that anyone with enough of a technical background has tried to do a back of the envelope calculation to see if the numbers are just too scary to make any sense.

So, I’ll throw this one out to the readership.  What have you heard?

The Earth’s Planned Maintenance Schedule – Part 1

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Human beings of one sort or another have existed on this planet for a few million years.  But only in the last ten thousand years have we existed above the level of stone age hunter-gatherers.  And only for the last five hundred years have we begun to understand the rudiments of science at a level high enough to give us a glimpse of what surrounds us in the universe. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton began opening up the window to what the Earth is and how it interacts with the Sun and the Moon and how we are related to the other planets and just how far away the stars really are.

And because this knowledge is only a few hundred years old I guess I should forgive us for not having thought deeply enough about what our future looks like and what things should be on our list of stuff to think about.  For instance, only recently have planetary scientists started asking why are all the other planets completely unfit to sustain life?  And this may seem like a silly question but look at it by asking the inverse question, “How did Earth win the jackpot and have basically everything we need to make this place a paradise stuck in the middle of a series of hells.  We’ve got the right distance from the Sun.  We’ve got a molten iron core to produce a strong magnetic field to protect us from solar and cosmic radiation.  We’ve got a deep atmosphere.  We’ve got liquid water in abundance.  We’ve got all of the chemical elements available due to vulcanism.  And most importantly we’ve got life in absolute abundance.

Now look at the rest of the planets.  Mercury is ridiculously close to a titanic fusion reactor.  Venus and Mars are close to the habitable zone in terms of solar orbit.  But Venus is a greenhouse oven and Mars is a frozen lifeless ball with no atmosphere to speak of and no water.  As for the outer planets they’re not even close to being places where life could even start.  Jupiter is more like a failed star and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are frozen hells where liquid nitrogen takes the place of water.  A case could be made that some of the moons of Jupiter and the other gas giants may have subsurface oceans of liquid water underneath thick layers of ice.  And due to magnetic interaction with their primary world, they could be at temperatures and pressures where life is theoretically possible to exist.  Sure.  Why not?

But once we get a little smarter and a little more organized it’s going to be time to start thinking about what challenges will planet Earth be faced with in the distant future.  Now, I’m not specifically talking about the distant future, billions of years from now when the Sun runs out of hydrogen and starts becoming a red giant.  That’s too far in the future for even me to worry about.  But as a for instance, what happens if the magnetic poles switch off and then reverse direction?  That sounds kind of crazy but it does happen fairly regularly.  And sometimes the field just weakens significantly like the last one about 42,000 years ago.  If the field disappears soon, it would probably wreak havoc with all of our satellites that currently benefit from the Earth’s field protecting them from charged particles to a greater or lesser extent.

Now things like this have been postulated in science fiction stories but when we get around to growing up, we will have to spend a good amount of time figuring out how much time we have before the Earth starts reaching its middle age and stuff starts working less optimally.  I’ll think about some “for instances” in the next installment.

Sort of a Personal Butterfly Effect

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When I was about ten, I got my hands on a box full of books that came from the library of a New Jersey Catholic High School in the Philadelphia area.  It had a lot of stuff I wasn’t interested in but it did have a few items that I was.  There were copies of two books by C.S. Lewis; “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and “The Screwtape Letters.”  The first book whetted my appetite for fantasy and the latter was an oddity that combined a comedic take on the devil with theology that didn’t currently interest me.

But a third book that was in that box was a book on astronomy.  It was called “Neighbors of the Earth.”  It was a collection of articles from the astronomy magazine “Sky and Telescope” that concerned the planets and other bodies that travelled around our star and made up the solar system.  For a young boy many of these articles were somewhat opaque because spectrographs were beyond my level of scientific accomplishment.  But there was plenty of things I could understand that changed a lot of the “facts” I had about the planets that I had begun to accumulate from science fiction stories.  The statement that, “the atmosphere of Venus consists largely of carbon dioxide” seemed to put the kibosh on my idea of a planet colonized by humans working on farms raising tobacco and coffee.  Later on, the surface temperature being 600 degrees Fahrenheit sealed any hopes of Venusians of any kind.  Then, the article, “Is There Vegetation on Mars?” provided the death blow to my thoughts about Martians.

But the book had many thought-provoking and for me enjoyable articles.  An article called, “Internal Structure of Jupiter and Saturn” introduced me to the concept of “metallic solid hydrogen.”  The idea that a gas could be turned into a solid metal was so exotic to my juvenile understanding of science that it probably sparked my first wishes to understand the mysteries of chemistry.

But looking at the book recently, I noticed that I never was very interested in the mysteries that surrounded the relatively recently discovered planet Pluto.  Even back then, the fact that Pluto seemed much too small to account for the perturbations in the orbit of Neptune was very disturbing to the astronomical community.  So, theories to explain this included either trying to convince themselves that Pluto’s diameter was much larger than observed or that its density was enormously higher than any other body in the solar system.  There was an “experiment” with metal balls of different materials and coated with materials of differing reflectivity to show how “specular reflection” could make a larger object look much smaller.  I’ll have to say it wasn’t very convincing.  And this made me think of all the current theories using dark matter and dark energy that are being used to explain measurements that defy the current models of how the universe works.  And this reminds me that our knowledge is always incremental and that we will never have all the answers.

But it’s interesting to see how that one box of unwanted books seems to have informed many of my intellectual leanings.  Sort of a personal butterfly effect.

That’s the Whole Fun of the Thing

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Have you ever looked at a science article that had a title like, “How Old is the Universe?” or, “How Big is the Universe?” or, “What are the Elemental Particles of Matter?”  I remember reading an article that said the universe was 13.8 billion years old.  And another one that said the universe is 93 billion light-years in diameter.  Now I understand that these numbers come with caveats built in.  They’re estimates based on some model.  The age is based on some calculation involving the background microwave radiation and modelling how long it would take based on some estimate of the energy present at the moment of the “big bang” to degrade to what we see now.  And then the size of the universe is based on this age and how far light could travel in that time or some such logic.

But even with these asterisks attached, even reputable scientists talk about figuring out the size and shape of the universe.  And this always make me laugh.  What do they think this finite universe rests on?  A giant turtle’s back?  Even the limited glimpse that modern science has given us of the immensity of time and space should have convinced anyone with a rational mind that we’re dealing with infinity.  And that’s the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small and the infinitely old.

Our perch even in this island universe the Milky Way galaxy is absurdly isolated.  We can reach the Moon relatively easily.  We can send robotic missions to the planets.  And that’s about it.  Even reaching the nearest star with a robotic probe is ridiculously beyond our capability as a species.  We could get a space craft to Alpha Centauri in something like ten thousand years with our current rocket technology.  But that is longer than our race’s complete written history.  Even if the probe reached the Centauri planets and there were intelligent being there to send a message back what are the chances we would still be waiting for the message?  And I’m not even saying we would no longer exist as a civilized species.  I’m wondering if anyone would remember or care that the mission had occurred and be waiting if a message came back.

And none of this is to belittle the achievements of scientists and engineers over the course of the last five hundred years.  We’ve gone from horse carts and wood burning stoves to space ships and nuclear power plants in that time.  The difference between a long sword and a hydrogen bomb is a remarkable change in the amount of power we can wield in that short stretch of time.

What is annoying to me is that anyone thinks time and space are finite.  If anyone told me that the universe was some absurdly large number of trillions of light years in diameter, I’d just ask him, “So if I were standing that absurdly large number of trillion light years from here and I was facing away from where we are now, what would I see?  A brick wall with a sign that said ‘End of Universe, do not fall off!’?  I mean, come on!  If I were versed in multidimensional geometric topology maybe I’d know if there is a shape that has no external surface but a finite volume.  But I’m pretty sure I still wouldn’t believe in it.

And as far as the very small, we’ve gone from atoms, to protons, electrons and neutrons, to quarks, gluons, bosons and heaven knows what else but none of this convinces me we’ve reached the bottom.  I don’t think we ever will.

But at the same time, I don’t see the problem.  There are no ends to infinity.  But so what?  That’s the whole fun of the thing.

Fake Science Exposed

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Sabine Hossenfelder has a PhD in particle physics.  She gave up academic physics when she discovered that it made raising her children impossible.  For the last number of years, she has become a YouTube popularizer of science.  Many of her videos are interesting and entertaining.  I don’t find myself agreeing with every conclusion she draws but her talks are thought-provoking and often compelling.

In the above linked video, Sabine reads a letter from a colleague in answer to a journal paper she wrote seven years ago casting doubt on the validity and value of much of modern scientific research in general but specifically in what she calls research into the foundations of physics (particle physics).  In this letter she received from a colleague it is admitted that much of “research” done by academic physicists is worthless.  But that it supports thousands of physicists who otherwise would be unable to support themselves and their families through their educational background in physics.

In other words, because they are “scientists” they deserve to be supported by the government regardless of whether their work has any value to anyone.  Sabine spends most of the video attacking this mindset and declaring this academic fraud a severe danger to the whole enterprise of modern science.

In my opinion she’s absolutely correct.  And she is far from the only one admitting that academia (and to a large extent corporate research) have been getting less and less result from steadily more and more scientists.  And why is this?  Probably the top reason is falling standards at the universities.  Colleges have become mills stamping out more and more degree holders in scientific fields.  But the caliber of these graduates is decreasing.  A good place to look for the reason for this is affirmative action.  Universities now award more degrees to woman than to men.  If you allow for the discrepancy between male and female skills in math and science, you can infer that standards have been reduced to accommodate more women in these fields.

And all of this is happening just as DOGE is examining government programs to uncover waste and corruption.  Well, if Musk’s people were smart, they would look for whistle-blowers in all of the various NSF and other science funding entities and determine just how much of the research that is funded by the government is poorly done or even worthless.  I think they’ll find that the ratio of bad to good is close to 10:1.

During the Cold War an emphasis on scientific and engineering research was needed to “win” the arms race and the space race and every other technical challenge that we made up in our minds about beating the russkies.  Well, we won and we can stop worrying about the race and start worrying about our tax dollars being thrown away on worthless research.  Being a particle physicist should be the occupation for a very few highly gifted mathematical geniuses that can add to the store of human knowledge about an incredibly esoteric scientific field.  It isn’t the place for thousands of mediocre minds who’ve burrowed into a university payroll by checking a DEI box or two.  Likewise, the United States government shouldn’t be paying for research in pure and applied science if the results don’t provide value to some worthwhile project.  Injecting mice or rats with cocaine to see what aberrant behavior they will demonstrate is not something the United States government should pay for or even allow.

Not everyone is Einstein, Watson or Crick.  But at the very least the people who are paid US tax dollars to do science must be intelligent and competent enough to earn that money.  Currently, the great majority of academic (and corporate) researchers are neither of those things.  I hope that DOGE makes it one of their priorities to whittle down government research grants by a factor of ten.  That will be a good start.  It will save us billions of dollars and change the way the universities do business.

Where’s My Slide Rule?

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Thank you, Donald Trump.  Watching your show on Monday and Tuesday was like a canteen of cold clean water to a man dying of thirst in the desert.  I feel I’ve been paid back for any trouble I’ve taken on your behalf in the last four years.  Hallelujah and amen.

Okay now it’s up to Trump and his merry band of madmen to fix Washington and fix the country and do that list of a million impossible things that he said he’s going to do.  Have at it, boys.  Give ‘em hell.

So, what’s for me to talk about tonight?  Well, I’ve got to talk about what’s chasing around my head tonight.  First off, I’m grumbling about how damn cold it is today.  The heating system at the Compound is undersized.  Or maybe the insulation should be the focus.  When the outside temperature dips below zero Fahrenheit, it won’t hold a set point above seventy.  And that’s too bad because I hate being cold inside my own home.  Camera Girl holds me directly responsible because I never put the weatherstripping around two of the external doors.  I explained to her that these small insulation problems are only a minor part of the problem and that I’m addressing the problem holistically by spending considerable time thinking deeply about all the ways that a solution can be reached.  I’ve considered the thermodynamic aspects of the problem.  The psychological ramifications of the fear of cold.  The physiological mechanisms by which the human body adapts to hypothermia.  The cultural involvement of cold in the human industries that are called clothing and shelter.  The quantum meaning of absolute zero.  And finally, the latest bill from the heating oil company.  All these things I showed her and admonished her to have patience and faith in my stewardship of the Compound’s Overall Heat Transfer Coefficient (U).  None of this registered with her at all.  She made certain primitive Sicilian gestures with her face and hand that I won’t dignify with detail.  Suffice it to say they were not helpful in the least.  I’m going out tomorrow for other reasons.  But I may also pick up some weatherstripping.  Maybe.

I was recently in a discussion about General Relativity with a friend.  The question of the curvature of space came up.  I told him I’ve never been convinced of the idea that mass curves space-time.  I stated that what is the difference if gravity bends the path of light and matter when it comes close to an object like the sun but space is unaffected?  How would we know the difference?  After all, how the hell can you bend something that isn’t even there?  It’s empty space.  Now sure, particles are always popping into existence because of quantum effects.  But by definition those things aren’t empty space they’re matter.  So how the hell can something that’s nothing bend?  Anyway, after the argument got us nowhere, I got hold of a book on general relativity and started reading it.  But my mathematical skills have degraded so I’ve had to break out a book on vector analysis to try and remember what tensor notation means.  Oh, my aching head.  I had an old advanced calculus test from my undergraduate days that would be very helpful on some points but then I remembered I threw it out (stupidly) about thirteen years ago when I moved.  I was going to buy it used and was amazed how expensive text books have gotten.  Yikes!

So anyway, I’m ensconced with the Kronecker delta, the curl and the Laplacian.  And I think I’ve made a big mistake.  I predict by the end I’ll have nothing but a murky idea of the meaning of the proofs of relativity but no explanation as to why we would think of space as being curved.  I think the idea that space is curved is just a figure of speech.  The reality is “space’ goes on endlessly in every direction.  I don’t think it loops back around behind us or anything like that.  It just keeps going.  It’s the same as physicists saying that the beginning of the universe was the Big Bang.  Well, what about five seconds before that?

So here I am with my cave man cosmogeny and cosmology trying to relearn Einstein’s equations (at my age!).  Well, why not?  Trump’s fixing the country.  The least I can do is straighten out the theoretical physicists.  Camera Girl! Where’s my slide rule?

Cold Fusion, Again

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https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.07245v2

Cold nuclear fusion is real!  But it’s also extremely lame.  Apparently when deuterium gas is put in contact with solid palladium metal the gas can find its way into the crystalline metal structure and fill voids in the lattice of palladium atoms and the structure of the metal lattice can somehow shield the deuterium nucleii from each other’s positive charges in order to fuse into a helium atom (²H + ²H → ⁴He).

Unfortunately, the rate of fusion is so low that it’s barely detectable.  And if energetic means such as lasers are used to enhance the rate then the energy balance is extremely poor with much more energy put in to speed up the reaction than is produced by the fusion reaction.  As a practical energy source this would be described by the technical term “lousy.”

But all is not yet lost.  The authors of the paper speculate if three separate accelerating processes are employed simultaneously there is the potential to produce the forty orders of magnitude improvement needed to make cold fusion a useful energy source.

Forty orders of magnitude.   Hmm.  That’s a lot of orders of magnitude you know.  That’s 1040.  That’s a really, really big number.  If I had 1040 pennies I’m pretty sure it would form a black hole of pennies.  It’s a lot.

So somehow they think they can increase the fusion rate that much?  Hmm.

So I really like the idea of cold fusion.  The fact that you can take palladium and heavy hydrogen at ambient temperatures and somehow get a nuclear reaction that produces really clean energy is extremely appealing to me.  It sounds like what E. E. “Doc” Smith used as his source of energy for interstellar flight in the “Skylark” series of space operas.  It’s amazingly exciting.  But  1040 anything is a lot.  So I’ve decided not to hold my breath or invest heavily in the technology or rip the oil burner out of my basement just yet.

The good thing about cold fusion research is that you don’t need billions or even hundreds of millions of dollars to work on it.  You don’t need magnetic containment to avoid your nuclear plasma from eating through the metal walls of your reactor.  And you don’t need giga-watt lasers to blast a pellet of boron hydride or anything else that would break the budget of any second world nation.  It can all be done in a lab with all the stuff found in MIT or even Brooklyn College for that matter.  So I’m all for research into this avenue of science.  After all twenty years ago cold fusion was declared a hoax and that turned out to be wrong.  Who knows what else they’ll find.  Maybe if you use alloys of several of the platinum group elements the geometry of the spaces in the lattice will make the process run at some phenomenally faster rate.  Maybe not 1040 times faster but something reasonable and that would be enough to throw the whole thing into the range of practical applications.  But to reiterate I won’t be holding my breath.

But it is something cool to think about.  Or even write into an sf story!  But instead of palladium I’m going to make it tantalum.  It’s just cooler.

How Many Macromolecules Can Dance on the Head of a Pin

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Here’s a very interesting discussion of Levinthal’s paradox.  In a nutshell, the paradox is related to the almost infinite possibilities in the ways that a macromolecular protein can fold into its primary, secondary and tertiary shape versus the effortless way that proteins function in living thing.  The author says the degrees of freedom inherent in a large protein molecule have been modelled and there are supposed to be 10300 different shapes that the protein could assume.  Now the point is that this number is so absurdly large that the chance of any particular protein molecule assuming the shape it needs in order to perform its biochemical function in a living cell within a short enough time to sustain the metabolic requirements of life seems impossible.

Well I must admit that is a ridiculously large number.  Someone did a guess at how many separate atoms there are in the observable universe and he came up with 1082.  So that gives you a feel for the absurdity of 10300 .

Basically this argument is supposed to demonstrate the unlikeliness of the genesis of life occurring again elsewhere in the universe.

I guess I’m not sure what I think of this.  While the large size of macromolecules render their physical properties subtle and hard to predict, nevertheless, they do possess these properties and these are exactly the properties needed to sustain life in the world we live in.

If they occur on Earth then they could occur elsewhere.  Now the point really is how could life occur in the first place if the exact sequence of amino acids and nucleic acids needed to make up the macromolecules of life are so absurdly complicated and the random forces involved in creating these exact molecules would be so blind?

It seems what the paradox is hinting at is God.  Well, I won’t argue with that.