Лем Станислав - Сумма технологий 2с - текст песни, слова, перевод, видео

CHAPTER TWO

TWO EVOLUTIONS

(c) DIFFERENCES

1. The first difference between the two evolutions we are considering is genetic and concerns the question of the forces causing them. Nature is the “culprit” of biological evolution, and man is the “culprit” of technological evolution. The description of the “start” of bioevolution still causes the greatest difficulties. The problem of the origin of life occupies a prominent place in our reasoning, for its solution would mean something more than simply establishing the cause of some historical fact from the distant past of the Earth. We are not interested in this fact itself, but in its consequences - consequences that could not be more important for the further development of technology. This development led to the fact that the further path became impossible without accurate knowledge about extremely complex phenomena - as complex as the phenomena of life. And again, the point is not to learn to “imitate” a living cell. We don't imitate the mechanics of bird flight and yet we fly. We do not strive to imitate, but to emulate. But it is precisely the attempt at a “designer” understanding of biogenesis that encounters enormous difficulties.

Traditional biology calls on thermodynamics as a competent judge here. She says that typical development goes from phenomena of greater complexity to phenomena of lesser complexity. But the emergence of life was the opposite process. Even if we accept as a general law the hypothesis of the existence of a “threshold of minimal complexity”, overcoming which a material system is capable of not only preserving the existing organization, but also transmitting it unchanged to descendant organisms, then this will not explain biogenesis. After all, once upon a time some organism had to first cross this threshold. And the extremely important question is how this happened: by the will of the so-called chance or due to causality. In other words: what was the “start” of life - an exceptional phenomenon (like the main win in the lottery) or a typical phenomenon (like a loss in the lottery)?

Biologists, having taken the floor on the question of the origin of life, say that such origin must have been a gradual process; it consisted of a number of stages, and the implementation of each individual stage on the path to the appearance of a procell had a certain probability. The emergence of amino acids in the primordial ocean under the influence of electrical discharges was, for example, quite probable; the formation of peptides from them is a little less, but also quite feasible; but on the other hand, the spontaneous synthesis of enzymes, these catalysts of life, the feeder of its biochemical reactions, constitutes - from this point of view - a super-unusual phenomenon (albeit necessary for the emergence of life). Where probability rules, we are dealing with statistical laws. Thermodynamics demonstrates precisely this type of laws. From this point of view, water in a pan placed on fire will boil, but not with absolute certainty. It is possible that the water on the fire will freeze, although this possibility is astronomically small. However, the argument that phenomena that are thermodynamically most improbable will eventually happen if one has enough patience, and the development of life had enough "patience" because it lasted billions of years, such an argument sounds convincing only until we Let's put it on the mathematician's desk. In fact, thermodynamics can still “swallow” the random appearance of proteins in a solution of amino acids, but it will no longer tolerate the spontaneous generation of enzymes. If the entire Earth were an ocean of protein soup, if it had a radius five times larger than it actually is, then even then the mass of the soup would still not be enough for the random emergence of such highly specialized enzymes as are necessary to “start” life. The number of possible enzymes is greater than the number of stars in the entire Universe. If the proteins in the primordial ocean had to wait for enzymes to spontaneously arise, it might well take an eternity. Thus, to explain the implementation of a certain stage of biogenesis, it is necessary