Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.
July 29
Chance of being born?
So, at one stage you consisted of spermatozoa in your dads testicles. I read that a mans testicles make 1000 sperm a second. So that's 60,000 sperm a minute. I'll let you do the math, but on a particular day your parents decided to have sex and fertilised your mommas egg.
Have I got the premise wrong or what, but did you I and everyone else have an astronomically minute chance of even existing in the first place. I mean, if another sperm got inside the egg or you didn't survive the ride through your dads epidermis and into your moms vagina you wouldn't have existed? Would the baby born be a difference person altogether. Or are are all sperm the same.
Woody Allen in 1972 made a hilarious film about this fascinating question. Akseli9 (talk) 11:34, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
There must be theories that approve, and others that disapprove, that the principle of natural selection, applies also among spermatozoa. Akseli9 (talk) 11:37, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Akseli9: I think you mean prove and disprove. Theories are not a kind of thing that can approve or disapprove things. --ColinFine (talk) 11:54, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. that's what I meant. Thanks. Akseli9 (talk) 12:58, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
No, they're all genetically different. See Meiosis. --ColinFine (talk) 11:54, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Depending on what your Mom was getting up to, our article Sperm competition may be relevant. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 212.95.237.92 (talk) 12:55, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
You can ignore biology and instead read up on
twin studies and heritability. But I think this is really a question about philosophy of probability and identity :) SemanticMantis (talk) 13:36, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply
]
The probability of "you" being precisely, genetically "you" if anything whatever were different at the time of your conception is indeed astronomically small. However, not all of what makes you be "you" is in your genes. A lot of it is how your parents treated you, what foods you ate, what diseases you got - that kind of thing. If a different sperm had made it into your egg, a lot of that "nurture" stuff would be very similar. So, it would be as if you were your own twin (but not identical-twin). Twins that are non-identical are very often quite similar.
But in terms if being identically you - everything depends on how identical you're talking about.
If the same sperm met the same egg - but three days into pregnancy, if your mother had eaten something different than she actually did - then that would undoubtedly change some microscopic detail in that tiny ball of cells - and an entirely different "you" would emerge from that process. Genetically identical to the you that we know - but still more different than one of a pair of identical twins. (My step-daughters are identical twins - and I can tell you that they are far from identical in many significant ways).
Conclusion: The "you" that would emerge if there were a difference in some small detail surrounding your conception, pregnancy, birth and early childhood would range from roughly what a fraternal twin would be like - to roughly what an identical twin would be like - depending on whether the change happened before or after sperm-met-egg.
I'd point out that a mere difference in a meal is unlikely to have an effect on a fetus unless it contains a
teratogenic toxin. The fetus will thrive so long as threshold levels of the necessary nutrients are available, and certain toxins are avoided or minimized. The sort of change that could effect a baby during development is a somatic mutation
. Such a mutation at a very early stage in one of two twins might have noticeable effects. Otherwise twins are sometimes differentiated by position in the womb, especially the relative size and bloodflow from the respective or shared placentas.
The overall concept here is historical contingency. There are certain focal points such as which numbers you choose and which numbers are drawn in a lottery. The path you take to get to the store to buy the ticket might not matter at all, if you have already made up your mind on the numbers you want beforehand. In his book Wonderful Life, S J Gould examines contingency in depth. He gives the case of a single dog that is believed to have killed a significant portion of the wild Kiwis of New Zealand. Had it not been stopped, it might have driven the species extinct.
Another example is my neighbor, who did not work at the World Trade Center, but who was at a conference there on the Windows of the World restaurant, and was killed on 9/11. Certain events are
I thought this nonsense had been zapped. Be that as it may, the OP's premise is wrong. You don't start out as a sperm, you start out as a fertilized egg. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 22:21, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The definition of "you" is kinda fuzzy. All of the information needed to describe "you" (genetically speaking) is present before sperm meets egg - so who is to say when "you" are "you"? One of the severe problems with the abortion debate is in answering this very question - contraception for the catholic church revolves around similar issues. Personally, I liked Monty Python's "Every Sperm is Useful" song - which encapsulates a yet further extreme point of view. Coming up with a specific point of origin is horribly misleading. I'm a very different person than I was (say) 10 years ago - was I "me" then? I just don't think you can pick a single point and call that "The Moment". SteveBaker (talk) 23:29, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Even the most staunch opponents of abortion define a human being's starting point as conception. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 23:57, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think you meant staunch supporters, BBB. I would protest that I started from a pair of
isogametes. I oppose assigning gender roles such as sperm and egg. μηδείς (talk) 00:02, 30 July 2015 (UTC)[reply
The definition, Steve, isn't really fuzzy. Instead, you are you is axiomatic. By definition you have to be you, because if you weren't you, then the you you really were would be you, and I'd be writing in response to someone else. It's like the anthropic principle. It's not really a physical explanation of anything, but it is necessarily true epistemologically as a precursor of debate. μηδείς (talk) 00:00, 30 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, technically it is a tautology, not an assumption necessary in a deductive system. μηδείς (talk) 20:04, 31 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Today's Feature Picture
Today's feature picture of NGC 1097 shows it rotating clockwise, the picture in the posted link to NGC 1097 shows it rotating counter clockwise. Which is correct?70.30.7.110 (talk) 14:38, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
For convenience, NGC 1097. I think OP is comparing the top image galaxy appears to be rotating clockwise to the bottom image. galaxy appears to be rotating counterclockwise
I think it's safe to say that the images were not take from different sides of the galaxy :) I cannot tell which one is a mirror image. I don't think it can be the case that they are showing different structures in the same galaxy from the same perspective without reflection - but I don't know much about spiral galaxies. Both images are sourced - top one is a composite image here [1]Spitzer Space Telescope, bottom one (seems to be a single image?) here [2], from the Very Large Telescope. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:44, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I downloaded them both, and rotated and flipped one of them so that their orientation is similar. The patterns of various points of light seem to match. So one of the images was flipped, either purposely or by the type of telescope they were using. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 17:22, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
This sort of flipping of images is quite common in old-style print media dealing with physical plates that can be reversed accidentally during layout or printing. Unless there's written words in the image it is often impossible to know which is right. This seems less likely in digital media, however. μηδείς (talk) 17:33, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If you do a Google Images search on "NGC 1097" - you get a surprising mixture of clockwise and anticlockwise images. I'd say that the preponderance of them is per the top image - but it's definitely not a slam-dunk one way or the other. Most JPEG files have orientation data stored in an "EXIF" record - which should (in theory) tell you when they are rotated or flipped and in which direction. However, when people use a program to crop, recolor or adjust contrast on the image, that data is easily destroyed...so it's still not conclusive evidence. SteveBaker (talk) 19:34, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The EXIF orientation value indicates the raster order of the encoded pixels, not the orientation of the image relative to some canonical source image. Almost all software writes JPEG images in the standard raster order (English reading order) with a matching (or omitted) orientation tag, because that's the most compatible format. This doesn't destroy any (relevant) information because the raster order is a low level encoding detail, like the Huffman tables. As far as I know, no software ever writes the reflected raster orders (2, 4, 5, 7). -- BenRG (talk) 23:27, 29 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed. But many software packages don't pay attention to the EXIF data, resulting in these kinds of issues. I know of at least a couple of cellphone camera apps that use the reflection flag when using the 'front camera' in order that the user gets a mirror-imaged photo when taking a 'selfie' (which is what they seem to expect will happen). It's plausible that astronomy packages might use it to flip pictures from telescopes that naturally produce inverted images. That would be a fairly plausible explanation as to how this came about...but it's just speculation at this point since there are no unusual EXIF flags in either of those two JPEG files and there are many software packages that might have been used to crop the images that both ignore and destroy the EXIF information. (The EXIF flags aren't a part of the core JPEG specification anyway - so there is some justification for doing that.) SteveBaker (talk) 14:53, 30 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure this out with no luck.. I am really curious and hope that someone comes along with the right answer. I did learn that some galaxies have a spin different than what you would think and based on this alone I'd put my money on the bottom image and that the top one was flipped because of the type of telescope or imaging instruments, but that's just an unsubstantiated guess. Maybe someone could repost this to the science section?? Void burn (talk) 05:43, 30 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If OP or anyone else wants to cut to the chase, they could ask NASA here [3], though it may take them a few weeks to get back to you. Could probably even point them to this thread for context. SemanticMantis (talk) 20:07, 30 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I submitted a request with the link semantic mantis posted. Whenever they reply to me I'll be sure to post it on the WP science reference desk. Hopefully this link still works for 10 to 15 days. Void burn (talk) 22:20, 30 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
This shows the rotation relative to the rest of the night sky. 209.149.113.45 (talk) 19:23, 31 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
That still doesn't help us IP.. That picture you posted could be backwards. We need a reference that explicitly states which way the tails spin for this specific galaxy. Void burn (talk) 00:32, 1 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It's not ironclad proof, but it's helpful evidence in support of the top image above. Unlike other images I've seen, wikisky at least claims to be showing us the orientation that we would see from earth. I'll look forward to hearing if NASA gets back to Void Burn. SemanticMantis (talk) 22:20, 5 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
