Comments
PrimeInsanity t1_iyhwsmo wrote
Wood is a far more rare material than any stone type materials on the scale of our solar system, let alone a grander scale. Assuming of course that life is not incredibly common and tree like species dont evolve at rate that puts carcinization to shame.
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[deleted] t1_iyhy31v wrote
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pcaYxwLMwXkgPeXq4hvd t1_iyi58ie wrote
Good point! Or some kind of a human made material, like plastic maybe?
Uncynical_Diogenes t1_iyi8o8l wrote
Plenty of polymers can form spontaneously.
Cellulose is special because of the specificity of its linkages, and wood is special because of the complex entropy-fighting necessary to order it that way.
BloodshotPizzaBox t1_iyi8te9 wrote
I know this isn't what you meant by the question, but since the vast majority of the universe (not counting dark matter, whatever that is) is made of stars that are mostly hydrogen and helium, basically everything on Earth is very rare compared to the universe in general. So, that's pretty cool.
Uncynical_Diogenes t1_iyi8wwg wrote
Unrelated to substances, but I wanted to piggyback because one of my favorite facts is that Earth is also the location of the coldest known places in the universe.
Labs on Earth have created systems closer to absolute zero than anything we have yet observed off-Earth.
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FellowConspirator t1_iyiie8r wrote
We don't have any meaningful way to answer the question on a universe scale.
It's reasonable to believe that many biological materials on Earth are probably exceptionally rare in the universe. They represent a minuscule portion of the mass of our own solar system, and, as far we can tell, Earth is the only place in our solars system where a majority of biomolecules can be found.
KnoWanUKnow2 t1_iyioee9 wrote
The universe is mostly not matter. It's about 63% dark energy. What little matter there is is mostly dark matter. Only about 20% of all matter is not dark matter.
Of that 20% of matter that's not dark matter, it's mostly Hydrogen. Hydrogen makes up about 80% of all non-dark matter in the universe. The remaining 20% is mostly Helium, which makes up about 19.8% of that 20%.
So that means that everything else, all carbon, all iron, all oxygen, and nitrogen, everything that we are made of and everything that out planet is made of (excepting the hydrogen in things like water) is made of a vanishingly small and rare subset of what's available in the universe.
95% of the universe is dark matter and dark energy. Of the 5% that's left 4% is hydrogen, and Helium takes up most of the remaining 1%. We and our entire planet (excepting the Hydrogen bound up in water and other minerals) are made of less than 0.001% of the universe.
The Calcium in your bones, the Iron in your blood, the Carbon in your food, the Oxygen that you breath, even the ground that you walk upon, all of it is so rare as to be almost impossible.
IthotItoldja t1_iyip11s wrote
There appears to be more heavy elements (gold, etc) in our sun and solar system than is typical. It is speculated that a neutron star merger seeded earth & our system with heavy elements.
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common_sensei t1_iyitwo6 wrote
Molecular oxygen is 21% of the atmosphere on Earth thanks to the presence of life. There are many geological processes that remove molecular oxygen, so without life replenishing it it would go away over a relatively short geological timeframe.
There are some ways to maintain molecular oxygen in an atmosphere without life getting involved, but as far as we know that much molecular oxygen in an atmosphere is rare in the universe.
RATH3SUNG0D2017 t1_iyiuogj wrote
Plutonium is a decay product of U-238, so natural deposits of uranium do have some amount of it, i.e. it's not man-made, but we bring enough uranium together to probably have an above-average amount compared to other unadulterated planets/space rocks.
danceswithtree t1_iyiy541 wrote
DNA. This is straying a little bit from your question but there is a picture of earth from far away. This wasn't the original but the same sentiment applies.
On that speck of blue a billion miles away, every person ever born has lived and died, be he a king or a pauper. The almost 8 billion alive today and the billions who have gone before. Life probably exists elsewhere in the vastness of the universe but they will certainly look nothing like us. Us people of the planet Earth.
Nieshtze t1_iyj09y1 wrote
Wouldn't most of these exotic trans-uranium elements be formed in some quantity during events like supernovae? There's enough radiation and particles flying around in that event that I'm sure every isotope is formed (if only for a few short microseconds) due to the massive scale and energetics of the reaction.
Nieshtze t1_iyj0t9q wrote
Yeah... extremely specific biomolecules (such as u/FellowConspirator's DNA) are likely to be present only on Earth and nowhere else.
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cjheaford t1_iyj4ysx wrote
Plutonium is P-239. How can 238 decay into a HEAVIER atom?
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FowlOnTheHill t1_iyjafh0 wrote
No it’s harvested on Pluto by Plutonians which caused the planet to get smaller and thus be re-classified as a dwarf planet. It’s a big deal on Pluto and most of the population isn’t aware of their diminishing status in the solar system.
Get your facts straight!
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OlympusMons94 t1_iyjajjv wrote
U-238 can undergo spontaneous fission, which results in the emission of neutrons. If a U-238 nucleus absorbs a neutron, it becomes U-239, which quickly decays to Np-239, and then Pu-239.
But there are other isotopes of Plutonium besides Pu-239. This includes Pu-238, which can also occur naturally in small amounts as a result of double beta decay of U-238.
Yet another naturally occurring isotope of Plutonium is Pu-244, which has a relatively long half-life of 80.6 million years. This is produced by the r-process, and some trace amounts of this have been found in the ocean floor.
cjheaford t1_iyjbmin wrote
Very interesting. Thanks for taking the time to explain!
RATH3SUNG0D2017 t1_iyjcj4f wrote
Beta decay! A neutron emits an electron and antineutrino and becomes a proton.
Edit: If you'll entertain wikipedia as a source, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_decay
Acrobatic-Secret374 t1_iyji4zp wrote
To expand on this... Virtually everything heavier than iron must be formed by stellar explosions.
Either the star explodes, or two stars collide and explode (like neutron dwarf star collisions (NS-NS) )
Iron uses more energy to fuse than it makes in fusion. So, once a star starts to make iron, it is already dying. Supernova only make a small fraction of stuff heavier than iron (5%) the rest is NS-NS collisions.
Octavus t1_iyjj33a wrote
Beyond the R process there has been atleast one natural nuclear fission reactor which can produce some additional plutonium.
Abdiel_Kavash t1_iyk8ppt wrote
That is not how it works. You can have an infinite number of events, out of which each event repeats only finitely many times.
Example: There are infinitely many natural numbers. Only one of them is equal to 2.
coaxialgamer t1_iyk9gtd wrote
Phosphorus. It's critical to life, and yet so incredibly rare. We actually have quite a lot of it given the size of our planet.
It's so rare that low availability of phosphorus galaxy-wide is seen as one possible explanation for the Fermi paradox.
Defence_of_the_Anus t1_iyl2vs8 wrote
Overlord aliens trying to build buildings but the alien peasants be like: wood needed
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jqbr t1_iyl5dsr wrote
No, that does not follow. Consider that rational fractions like 1/7 have infinite decimal expansions but only a very small number of patterns occur. Even for irrational numbers with non-repeating expansions like pi or sqrt (2) we can't be certain that every pattern occurs.
urzu_seven t1_iyleipz wrote
Plastics, concrete, steel, basically anything that is man-made.
Wood, skin, blood, etc. anything biological would seem to be exclusive to earth as well for now.
Every element after plutonium on the periodic table, they haven't been found in nature.
Limos42 t1_iylg7ek wrote
Fascinating. I've never thought of it this way. Thanks for sharing.
Earthling7228320321 t1_iyq4b28 wrote
It's a huge conversation, I've had pieces of it several times. It boils down to one frustrating stopping point tho. We simply don't know because we have only our own planet to study and all life here is related.
That makes almost everything we csn talk about here speculation built atop a house of cards if assumptions. The only reasonable things we can assume hinge on the life having followed a very similar path to our own, and the odds of that may or may not be likely to have happened twice in the same meaningful span of distance.
Worst case scenario, the odds of intelligent, technological civilizations being within 20 billion light years of each other is low. But it could be even worse. It could be an average of a trillion light years and we might be alone in the entire observable universe.
If we could figure out how life formed and master recreating it in a lab, we'd be able to speculate a lot better about the odds of it happening. But until then we're really grasping at straws when we say anything about life outside earth.
Nieshtze t1_iys24p7 wrote
That doesn't answer his question. Beta decay does not increase mass of the parent nucleus, only increases the atomic number.
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Putnam3145 t1_iyz4ja8 wrote
> and tree like species dont evolve at rate that puts carcinization to shame.
I mean, they definitely do. Every crab you see is in the same order, decapoda, while trees are all over the dang place; they've convergently evolved far, far more often than crabs could ever hope to.
PrimeInsanity t1_iz0fl9x wrote
Honestly, that is a fair point. It's easy to forget how diverse trees actually are.
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