[GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion

swicked wrote:@Randomblank
Yeah, that's not real.

notgonnapostthestorynotgonnapostthestorynotgonnapostthestory... dammit.

Okay, not the same mistake, but sort of comparable. I once listened to a 40-something engineer explain why evolution couldn't possibly work because of the second law of thermodynamics. It felt like she had to be joking, but no. Deadly serious. (I'm hoping that the argument and counter-argument are well-known enough that I don't have to explain them, because trying to explain the former without it sounding like a blatant strawman is really, really difficult)

@Quot
Read the first few sections, and bookmarked for later finishing. Is there only the one chapter? The prose was nice, and I liked how characterization was done so far. I wouldn't mind it continuing - also, you could probably start a thread for it here, I think that's a thing people do. Also also, out of curiosity, what do I look like in your head, if you have a head-image? (For my part, I can call up images of people in the thread when I want to, but mostly I just have an image of their avatar or a feeling of their presence)

Quotidian wrote:Hinds... is just a giant floating label with "British" written on it. Don't ask me, I don't control my imagination.

Amazing. Even through only text, my origin nationality is mistaken. (I am pretty frequently when meeting new people asked if I am British, or at least foreign.)

And now I really must be getting to bed, for I am already late in doing so and there is to be brushing after waking.

Well, surprising no one, there was no mention at all of PH's birthday on EqD. *sighs*
I suppose they were too busy being able to go to Bronycon... My picture didn't make it into the drawfriend either, also surprising no one.

Sindri wrote:Edit: the main EqD story page had a piece of fanart I don't think I've seen before: http://pantzar.deviantart.com/art/Lacunae-In-Lingerine-310667607

Ah, I'm friends with the person who drew that, he'd actually hoped similarly to get it put into a celebration post for PH's first birthday, but then they went at put it in the story post instead. Which isn't all that bad a result.

I'll go through and thank everyone by name tomorrow, but a quick thank you to everyone that liked my drawing for PH's birthday. I do appreciate the support.

Overlong Analysis Cobalt wrote:
notgonnapostthestorynotgonnapostthestorynotgonnapostthestory... dammit.

Okay, not the same mistake, but sort of comparable. I once listened to a 40-something engineer explain why evolution couldn't possibly work because of the second law of thermodynamics. It felt like she had to be joking, but no. Deadly serious. (I'm hoping that the argument and counter-argument are well-known enough that I don't have to explain them, because trying to explain the former without it sounding like a blatant strawman is really, really difficult)

I am seriously trying to understand this, and I am having a hell of a time understanding the effect thermodynamics has on evolution. Quantum physics are hard, damn it.

ketchup504 wrote:

Overlong Analysis Cobalt wrote:
notgonnapostthestorynotgonnapostthestorynotgonnapostthestory... dammit.

Okay, not the same mistake, but sort of comparable. I once listened to a 40-something engineer explain why evolution couldn't possibly work because of the second law of thermodynamics. It felt like she had to be joking, but no. Deadly serious. (I'm hoping that the argument and counter-argument are well-known enough that I don't have to explain them, because trying to explain the former without it sounding like a blatant strawman is really, really difficult)

I am seriously trying to understand this, and I am having a hell of a time understanding the effect thermodynamics has on evolution. Quantum physics are hard, damn it.

I believe that the claim is that a system cannot spontaneously become more ordered/complex without energy being added to it by an outside source. It's an argument frequently made by people who don't actually know what the word 'entropy' means but who think they've found proof of their delusions.

Supposedly, everything goes towards higher entropy, increase of chaos. Evolution goes against this idea, creating increasingly complex entities.

Thing is, thermodynamics applies to minimal scale, like gas, matter. It fails in total macroscale - a star, which is pretty much a uniform blend of hydrogen and helium, down at the bottom of an enormous gravity pit, seems to be the utter top on entropy scale, with only extinguishing left, temperature dropping. Yet at a certain point, instead of turning into dark cinder of inert matter, it explodes. It produces elements all across the spectrum, including all the heavy metals not possible to exist. It ejects its fragments beyond its gravity pit. Planets get formed from the ejected matter. And while, yes, the core of the star will eventually become an inert cinder, a momentary, local state directly contradicts the rules of thermodynamics. Lesson: increase of entropy is not always linear. There are events along the way that at cost of global increase of entropy can decrease it greatly locally.

...or, for a simpler experiment... take a box of identical ball bearings. They are a random mix, but if you shake it, they will distribute in regular layers of hexagonal grid. This is their lowest energy form - ordered, regular. Lesson from this: Increase of entropy doesn't enforce increase of chaos. The two are different entities. Sometimes, quite opposite, lower energy allows patterns to emerge.

And last example, you have a waterfall. Water splashes down onto randomly scattered rocks. Entropy increases, as water's potential energy is transformed into heat and dissipated, total energy of the water below the waterfall is lower than above it, and there is no way that it could get back up without external help. Yet as you stand above the waterfall, you get splashed by droplets that travel all the way from the bottom. The potential energy of these droplets is higher than when they were flowing with the water before reaching the waterfall. Lesson: if massive random process occurs, there will be isles where entropy is lower than it was in the first place, before the process started.

What I can't understand personally, is why something like all this matters.
Yes, this is me admitting I'm a fucking dumbass - it most likely does have some very practical use that I'm unaware of.

From what I personally know however (or specifically: don't know), there is no real need to learn all of this for any other reason then simply knowing all this.
Does it help with some engineering method? Or understanding things on a molecular level so we can replicate it for our own benefit?

Or is it simply so we can understand?
To me, things like the LHC are just a silly waste of money to try understand something that actually doesn't have a practical use.
We should be instead focusing money and effort onto how to improve the world around us for all peoples, rather then trying to understand some science which has no application.

So, Thermodynamics apply to the smallest level, and represent a curve in loss of potential usable energy, but fail in large scale due to variability in systems?
Evolution apparently "fails" because it suggests that energy isn't added to the evolving structure which is forming less chaotic and more orderly designs without losing energy?
Am I getting any of this? Thanks for the explanation, anyway.

And Kipper, some of us are just curious, I think.
The argument is valid that we could spend more money for more immediate gain of betterment now than using it in scientific progress. How much of a gain has the US' Space Program been? Not much, but we know a lot we didn't before.

@Random & Sindri
Yup, nail on the head. It's like she thinks the earth, or even just primordial ooze, is somehow a closed system, shut off from the rest of the universe. Or, more likely, she didn't think beyond, "Hey, evolution is a natural increase in complexity! That's not possible! HA, take that, Darwin!"

@Ketchup
Here's a metaphor that may or may not actually help/be accurate. You take a glass that's half-filled with water. Over time, it slowly fills up with water. One person says, "Oy, that's just not cricket! Where's the extra water coming from? Clearly, the glass is not actually filling up at all, 'cos that's impossible!" And then you point to a leak in the ceiling, whence dripped the extra water. Alternatively, a website!

@Kippershy
Personally I'm a bit with you on the money front, though there's definite practical application to some of this stuff (somewhere down the line). Quantum computing, maybe fusion or something (always just 20 years away, so I hear!), stuff like that. Weird materials with weird effects. Another problem is that the people with the skills to do this stuff really can't use them to help here and now: we pretty much have the tech to fix a whole lot of big problems already, we just don't implement fixes, because of a variety of extremely interesting socioecoculturaliticalous factors (I made up that word, just now. Not "factors," but the other one). You need people to tangle with that crap, and particle physicists aren't trained to do so. And understanding how the universe works is not a bad thing; I personally don't know how it'll be useful immediately, but odds are it'll come in handy eventually. For building wormholes or something. Or at least better capacitors, which would definitely be extraordinarily useful for everyone worldwide.

But yeah, I expect a lot of the value is more philosophical than practical at this point. That itself can actually be valuable to the socioecoculturaliticalous junk, I suppose (I think I'll add it to Chrome's dictionary, surely it will come in handy). Anyway, it's 7:30 AM and I should maybe sleep a little, and let one of the proper scientists explain the value of extreme physics beyond providing a foolproof way of winning arguments (you just shout "BECAUSE QUANTUM!" and run away. Works. Every. Time.).

Kippershy wrote:What I can't understand personally, is why something like all this matters.
Yes, this is me admitting I'm a fucking dumbass - it most likely does have some very practical use that I'm unaware of.

From what I personally know however (or specifically: don't know), there is no real need to learn all of this for any other reason then simply knowing all this.
Does it help with some engineering method? Or understanding things on a molecular level so we can replicate it for our own benefit?

Or is it simply so we can understand?
To me, things like the LHC are just a silly waste of money to try understand something that actually doesn't have a practical use.
We should be instead focusing money and effort onto how to improve the world around us for all peoples, rather then trying to understand some science which has no application.

The LHC is classic exploratory science, doing Science for Sciences sake, we don't know what will come out of it, but please keep in mind that building the LHC required all sorts of engineering and technical know how and the network they had to build to support the literal terabytes of data per second formed the building blocks for the next generation of the Internet.

As well understand molecules is vital to material sciences because if we can better understand why Gold does what it does and why it's so useful but studying particles and atom smashers may one day to the holy grail of material sciences and that's making our own stable atoms with the exact properties we want like the Strength of titanium with the head conductive ability of Silver. The energy storage potential of Lithium with the ease of use and weight of copper.

At the end of the day the reason why the LHC make sense is simple.... The LHC is Raw science, the kind of science you do that you don't expect to have concrete implications because the only way you learn anything and find new areas to research to make concrete improvements is by walking into that great gulf that is the unknown seeing what you can find.

Anytime we increase our understand of the universe around us we have always had new areas of science and new improvements have resulted from that.

Kippershy wrote:Or is it simply so we can understand?
To me, things like the LHC are just a silly waste of money to try understand something that actually doesn't have a practical use.
We should be instead focusing money and effort onto how to improve the world around us for all peoples, rather then trying to understand some science which has no application.

Yes, you don't understand.
To us LHC is as useless, as Marie Curie's research on radioactivity 100 years ago. Yet you can't deny nuclear fusion is important in our lives.
It's like Ciolkovsky's calculations of orbital flight and rockets, long before rocket engine capable of suborbital flight was developed. Utterly useless to his contemporaries, but when your GPS tells you "Turn left in 1 mile" it's thanks to him and his equations that the GPS satellites could have been brought to the orbit.
When Lukasiewicz distilled petroleum, it was big for his time - a revolution in lighting. Petroleum lamps were a blast! Yet we don't use petroleum lamps, they are at best fine antiques. But his work is the basis of gasoline, diesel oil, tar, propane gas, and by extension - about all plastics we use every day. Back then - yay, bright lamps.
When Edison put an extra electrode inside a vacuum bulb, the results were deemed an interesting, but pointless quirk. That was the electron lamp, later replaced by transistor, foundation of all electronics.
Open your computer and look at the graphics card paths. How many "pointless" curls they make on their way. The reason? That pesky Einstein, who set a limit on light speed. In one clock cycle of modern CPU electricity travels roughly 20 inches, at speed of light. And since the cycle has sub-division, suddenly 3 inches from one chip to another becomes a distance where relativistic effects become a very serious issue. Who of Einstein's contemporaries thought their kids' appliance would be influenced by the General Theory of Relativity? And again, mr. Heisenberg messed up too. The paths inside the CPU run so close, that the uncertainty principle becomes a serious obstacle, as the probability cloud of an electron in one path reaches to another, and the electron can just tunnel across, cease to exist in path A and start existing in path B. And considering on the minimum level the impulse of electricity needed to switch a transistor may be less than 100 electrons, whoops, a few such tunnelling phenomena and we get a faulty result... Thus, limit on minimum size of CPU, and we're really leaning against it. Back then, such theories? Pointless.

Neutrinos should shave about 50% off the minimum ping between opposite sides of the world (around 30ms, due to light speed limit), as the signal will be able to go through earth core and not around.
Tachyons, if they exist at all, will make global ping times non-issue.
Quantum computing will probably break all pre-existing cryptography, while quantum entanglement will create new, unbreakable one. This may not be very useful but you can imagine the arms race between organizations that want to keep their secrets and know secrets of others...
Aerogel, result of research into extreme pressures, should revolutionize insulation industry, once bulk production becomes sustainable.

But these are things almost at hand's reach. We know their applications.
Mathematics is about 50 years ahead of physics, physicists discovering new regularities in the nature described by theory of mathematics long ago.
Physics is about 50 years ahead of engineering and manufacture of actual consumer goods.
Yes, you will not see useful effects of LHC in your lifetime. But your children will. And they will curse the ones of nowadays that choose to oppose this kind of "pointless spending".

@OAC
So DNA naturally increases in complexity because of outside interference? Because it's an open system?
And as the resource you linked to says, randomness comes to order in nature elsewhere as well. Besides, you can't have disorder without having order.

ketchup504 wrote:@OAC
So DNA naturally increases in complexity because of outside interference? Because it's an open system?
And as the resource you linked to says, randomness comes to order in nature elsewhere as well. Besides, you can't have disorder without having order.

It's not quite that. Thing is, the system, while mostly closed (with pretty fixed influx like solar light, or insignificant like meteorites), is internally very strongly random. Like I said, within a system of rapid enough and random enough, large scale, violent change, isles of decreased entropy emerge.
Emergence of a self-replicating pattern with over-abundance of building blocks (aminoacids) is not impossible if you consider every tiny drop of water conducts billions of experiments at creating it randomly every second, and each tiny drop is a part of a many miles deep ocean encompassing the whole Earth. And the "every second" is a part of about a billion years long era.

It's not like "bam, there was no DNA, and suddenly there is self-replicating organism". There was a whole Earth covered with ocean full of protein soup and random mess of non-self-replicating DNA, and it existed for a billion years, every drop of it randomly mixing the components, before one that could replicate itself was created. Then the copies were affected by random changes. Ones that would not increase in complexity died away when the "soup" cooled down. Ones that got the ability to mutate and adapt (note, there was a whole ocean of them by that time) began evolving.

ketchup504 wrote:@OAC
So DNA naturally increases in complexity because of outside interference? Because it's an open system?
And as the resource you linked to says, randomness comes to order in nature elsewhere as well. Besides, you can't have disorder without having order.

No, no... I mean... ugh.

First, Entropy is a universal phenomenon.

People approaching thermodynamics for the first time often don't understand that we're talking huge scale here. Earth is not a closed system; we are CONSTANTLY bombarded by energy from outside (the sun) as well as other influences. Since Earth is a system that's being fed energy every second of every day, it's not appropriate to try to apply rules that apply to closed systems to it. You can apply the concept generally in an imperfect and hand-wavy kind of way ("things tend to break down over time", "extremes tend to become more medium over time")... but you can't apply the rules in a strict way when you don't have a sealed system to work with.

Or to put it another way, you can have a local increase in complexity, so long as it is balanced by an even greater universal increase in chaos. Since the sun burning hydrogen into helium is a MASSIVE increase in chaos (throwing away energy, essentially), we on Earth are free to benefit from that without worrying about entropic consequences.

And really that's what life itself IS -- it's a local anti-entropic force. It's not the only one. There are chemical reactions that have a similar increase in complexity and order. But life is the most common one -- it takes disordered elements in its environment and forces it into an ordered structure. That process requires a huge amount of energy, which ultimately comes from the sun. The classic example is a plant using green leaves to absorb the energy needed to turn water, carbon, and nitrogen from the atmosphere and soil into the sugars and starches that support the whole food chain.


second, entropy doesn't mean chaos. It does in the sort of "human" meaning of the word, but if you start trying to apply that equivalency broadly, it doesn't work.

The ultimate result of entropy is not a universe of utter chaos (like something Discord would be in charge of); rather it's "heat death" where the whole universe has a completely even distribution of energy and matter. The ultimate "chaos", then, is a perfectly predictable universe where every cubic meter is exactly identical to every other cubic meter. What the second rule of thermodynamics really means is "energy flows from more energetic areas to less energetic areas". Which ought to be obvious; hot things cool down and cold things warm up. Ultimately that means structure (having hot in one spot and cold in another) breaks down and you're left with "average". This fact does not imply that life is impossible or that local order can't increase.

@Random
So more random makes more, but less, order. Evolution is a very slow process indeed.

ketchup504 wrote:@Random
So more random makes more, but less, order. Evolution is a very slow process indeed.

Now you got me confused.
But I think you meant what I meant:
a lot of randomness over a long time will occasionally create small pieces of order.
Yes, since chaos is everything, order is a part of chaos too.

@Feather
Not quite sure how to respond to that...
@Random
Yes, that's what I meant. Chaos chaotically makes order.
Thanks for going through this likely fruitless effort to teach me about this.

Evolution isn't exactly this slow, but it certainly takes many tries to kick-start it. The simplest self-replicating system, the most primitive cell, is quite complex by itself, and it took many, many random tries until it was made right, considering no wrong solution had a chance to get developed any further, lacking its own copies. Evolution is: take a billion organisms, poke them at random damaging them in completely random manner, and the ones that benefit from the "damage" will produce more, stronger, better offspring than these that got bad changes. This changes incrementally, over a long time, but not nearly THAT long time, and over millions of organisms, not over quintillions or more...

But there is no such phase between inert matter and the simplest life, that indeed takes a long, long time and really mind-boggling amount of "tries".

Kippershy wrote:To me, things like the LHC are just a silly waste of money to try understand something that actually doesn't have a practical use. We should be instead focusing money and effort onto how to improve the world around us for all peoples, rather then trying to understand some science which has no application.

This is a simple mistake: There is no choice between one and the other. We can do both, and we should be doing both. If you want to save the world, there is no one thing that will, by itself, cause world peace or end hunger or remove inequality etc. The answer to the question of whether to go to the moon or send aid to impoverished states is to do both. There are many really good things (tm) in the world, but there are so many more things we should be doing but aren't. (tm) If you made a list of all the scientific, technologic, social, economic, political, etc. things that Humanity can theoretically do to make a better future, the truth is that we as a species have the resources and capability of doing all of those things simultaneously. We're just too busy with things like war and for-profit business and for-profit politics and w/e to get our act together.

Quotidian wrote:Second: Anyone else make up faces in their heads for the people that post in this thread?

Eh, for me I always associate the avatar picture with the 'person,' but I usually don't picture the avatar itself as being the one talking. But yes, Hinds is definitely from the British dimension.

Anyways, I have to ask this question now: Does anyone here have the impression that I'm smart? I ask because in RL, I have a psychic field that gives everyone I talk to for more than five minutes the impression that I'm smart. It's not a bad thing for people's first impression of me to be that I'm 'smart,' but when I speak to complete strangers about completely ordinary stuff and then for some reason they're telling me how obviously intelligent I am, it stretches my belief in reality being a thing that exists. Just because I can say intelligent things doesn't make me smart. I say and do stupid things all the time! I've named myself moron-brain! I just don't know what's going on. So if anyone's had any inexplicable impression that I'm 'smart' back a zillion years ago before you any of you knew me at all, please say so.

Derpmind wrote:
Anyways, I have to ask this question now: Does anyone here have the impression that I'm smart? I ask because in RL, I have a psychic field that gives everyone I talk to for more than five minutes the impression that I'm smart. It's not a bad thing for people's first impression of me to be that I'm 'smart,' but when I speak to complete strangers about completely ordinary stuff and then for some reason they're telling me how obviously intelligent I am, it stretches my belief in reality being a thing that exists. Just because I can say intelligent things doesn't make me smart. I say and do stupid things all the time! I've named myself moron-brain! I just don't know what's going on. So if anyone's had any inexplicable impression that I'm 'smart' back a zillion years ago before you any of you knew me at all, please say so.

I find you insightful, and logical, like a lot of people around here, but saying somebody is "smart" isn't all encompassing. Everyone is "smart" in their own way.
I too seem to radiate the effect of being "smart" on my peers, which helps in that everyone leaves me alone unless they need help.

ketchup504 wrote:So, Thermodynamics apply to the smallest level, and represent a curve in loss of potential usable energy, but fail in large scale due to variability in systems?
Evolution apparently "fails" because it suggests that energy isn't added to the evolving structure which is forming less chaotic and more orderly designs without losing energy?
Am I getting any of this? Thanks for the explanation, anyway.

Something like that. The whole argument is absurd because life itself is a decrease in disorder, whether it's evolving or not. Evolution is just replication, mutation, and natural selection taking their course. It requires a constant input of energy (sunlight), and the sun is gradually settling into a lower-energy state through nuclear fusion. The increase of entropy inside the sun far outweighs any creation of order here on Earth.

Derpmind wrote:So if anyone's had any inexplicable impression that I'm 'smart' back a zillion years ago before you any of you knew me at all, please say so.

No, I can't say I have.

I have the completely explicable impression that you're smart, because you explain things clearly and succinctly, and you seem to have a generally good grasp of what's going on. There's been more than one occasion where I read your post and then specifically wondered if your forum name was intended to be ironic...

@Sindri
When I said finally, I meant after an hour or two of searching it wasn't that hard. But yeah the Signposts at ID where rather buried, I actually created an ID account to start posting there thinking that was the forum.
@SCIENCE
I would just say that it is difficult to find truly useless science, but everyone else already said that much more eloquently than I

SilentCarto wrote:

ketchup504 wrote:So, Thermodynamics apply to the smallest level, and represent a curve in loss of potential usable energy, but fail in large scale due to variability in systems?

Something like that. The whole argument is absurd because life itself is a decrease in disorder, whether it's evolving or not. Evolution is just replication, mutation, and natural selection taking their course. It requires a constant input of energy (sunlight), and the sun is gradually settling into a lower-energy state through nuclear fusion. The increase of entropy inside the sun far outweighs any creation of order here on Earth.

...Thermodynamics is based on law of big numbers, turning statistics of huge number of samples into actual usable equations. It turns billions upon billions of gas particles knocking into each other into gas pressure, their speed into temperature, things that are simply not measurable into values easy to perceive and understand.

This works in scale of billions similar entities, that behave in roughly stable manner. It will work for a box of air (particles), and for a galaxy of stars. But humans behave unpredictably, so it won't work for our population.

Take a big bag of mix of acetylene and oxygen. Thermodynamics will describe how the gasses will mix, how they change pressure with temperature and volume, but it will not foresee spontaneous combustion: that mix composition is specifically interesting in that it places the likehood of "singularity" within our perceivable timespan - not millennia, not nanoseconds, but depending on air temperature, pressure and bag size between seconds and days. Despite the whole bag being well below acetylene combustion point, within one random point of its inside particles will knock just right, and a particle of acetylene will be broken up, instantly binding with oxygen, releasing energy - just enough to break up some more particles... And the whole bag spontaneously goes boom, without any outside influence. Laws of thermodynamics do not foresee this event. The mix was unstable. Random, rare occurrence on scale of single atoms changes the state of the entire volume of gas. And even if they did, they are completely powerless in foreseeing the exact moment of explosion.

Just like you can't apply Newton's mechanics to very fast movement, you can't apply laws of thermodynamics to materials with non-deterministic particles. Like live cells.

Sooo.... yeah
Project Horizons
Also
This thread can no be contained! (Re:Mods have given up on the 990 limit and/or are asleep)

Cptadder wrote:
This thread can no be contained! (Re:Mods have given up on the 990 limit and/or are asleep)

It's all automatic. So, unless this feature was turned off, thread split will come shortly.

Yeah, it's usually about 3 or 4 pages after 990 posts.

Kattlarv wrote:@Robo: (Flesh) Just since I'm bored: I may not be innocent, but I got some "flesh" you could "feast on". *cue cheesy music* "Haven't you heard most people should... "eat out" more often?
Okay, yeah, I'm done now. That was my random fit for the week xP

...You, m'lady, are indeed far from innocent...



@Subject of PH Birthday: I still feel like I should do something...maybe I'll shop something up later...

Cptadder wrote:Sooo.... yeah
Project Horizons
Also
This thread can no be contained! (Re:Mods have given up on the 990 limit and/or are asleep)

Y'know, now that I look at it - counting all the threads in Cloudsville so far, plus the stuff left before we made the jump, we'd have needed another comment thread in the Blogger system almost a week ago. About par for the course, I think.

OFFTOPIC, for Nightfire:
I keep reading your sig, and I just remembered something my friend sent me from her workplace. (read the divider lines)
Part1
Part2

Cptadder wrote:Sooo.... yeah
Project Horizons
Also
This thread can no be contained! (Re:Mods have given up on the 990 limit and/or are asleep)

Actually, it's automatic, so I have no reason to do it myself, I can if you want me to though It usually waits until about pg 39 or 40 to split you guys into a new thread by itself.

One little bit I like to add. Evolution isn't random. Evolution is adapting to suit environments and maximize efficiency. If your environment is an oxygenless waste in iron green oceans and in muddy puddles, the organisms that develop traits to maximize their efficiency thrive while those that do no die off. Very rarely an nitch will open up in the environment that is not being exploited. Like, say, skies clearing enough that powerful sunlight reaches the surface. "Woah! Energy! Ahah! I can take this magnesium that that protein and... WOOT! Sugar! SO much easier that breaking down sulfur. Eh, I got this oxygen stuff left over, but we don't need that." And then a half billion years later. "Wow, we got all this oxygen stuff now. It's really toxic but you know, if I use this protein I can combine it with sugars and... Wow! This is great." And so life undergoes explosive change. It isn't random. There's an environmental nitch to be exploited and whomever can exploit it most efficiently wins.