yeah, i agree its fun to question these things really.
also, i suppose we could say, there’s ALOT more we can observe which is unexplained about this, than there is eg. an invisible friend following you (as far as I’m aware hehe).
but yes, i agree there’s currently no clear evidence any of it exists.
basically i got passingly interested in this topic a while back (‘life’, not woo products lol), as far as i got was essentially we don’t know. so when people say eg. “x doesn’t exist”. but in fact we just don’t know.
here’s about as far as i got on the topic before moving onto other things. some random “interesting” bits in no specific order:
- 1970 Experiments by Carl Sagan et al, thermal shock production of amino acids from a gas mixture roughly simulating earth’s primordial atmosphere [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.168.3930.470]
This had also been found from work done 18 years earlier in the Miller-Urey experiment which if I recall used arc discharge rather than a stricly thermal regime [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller–Urey_experiment]. But essentially you have this gas mixture which simulates prebiotic earth atmosphere, and subject it to various conditions for example simulating lightening, and it can produce amino acids. And we can see the absorption lines of those gases all around the universe. Pretty crazy and interesting.
- Seeds are actually already living, and living in dormant “suspended animation”. Apparently they very very slowly use up a store of energy and possibly interact with other systems while dormant, and may actually live many thousands of years. The oldest reported successful germination i’m aware of was a 2,000 year old date seed [Sallon et al, 2005]. There was some they thought might be 10,000 years old but the sample turned out to be contaminated. [http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=4405].
is there completely zero evidence?
something happens which turns a bunch of molecules and amino acids into ‘life’. we still don’t know what that thing is.
there is evidence of that process occurring in nearly every mm^2 on the planet, yet noone has been able to reproduce it.
is it simple random chemical chance? perhaps, but there’s not exactly clear evidence of that either.
[not defending snakeoil sales people btw, they are scum]
there is some/broad consensus that we can do better than iptables these days
oh yeah i have no doubt about that. just wondering what a healthy timeline looks like for the transition.
i don’t follow it especially closely, but had the impression bpf is still in the maturing phase regarding vulnerabilities. hopefully that is at least in part a sign it is being actively inspected and hardened with this purpose in mind - and i’m sure iptables still has many lurking vulns.
in summary, agree some form of transition is likely inevitable. wondering what the timeline will look like.
Definitely some good points raised further in the article.
Agreed we need new paradigms coming through.
From this article at least, they didn’t yet convince me the new paradigms are incompatible with future POSIX implementations however.