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Scientists Just Recreated The Chemical Reaction That May Have Led to Life on Earth
(www.sciencealert.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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dooooooooubt
prof Dave got me through most of my college education
It's really an error of article choice for the title, it should be "Scientists Just Recreated a Chemical Reaction..."
Doubt that you read the article. It's short, but quite interesting.
Eh, I gave it a skim as I am quite familiar with the topic. Kudos to them. I personally subscribe to the what the Miller-Urey experiment shows, which is that amino acids were formed first and that basic molecules came later through enzymes.
It’s hard to believe how much of an energy differential was overcome and self replicating molecules just formed somewhere vs just having high entropy molecules to start with through lightning and primordial soup.
We would have new life popping up all the time don’t you think?
Depends. You'd have to have the right soup, and the right environmental conditions to make the the relevant reactions probable.
If those conditions exist currently, those proto-life fragments would probably need to be in niches devoid of life, as they wouldn't be able to compete/survive with DNA based lifeforms around.
it's possible microbial life is common but complex life is rare
No doubt about that. This is basically different flavors of atheism lol.
The argument is did amino acids come first, or did the molecules that make up amino acids find an incredibly rare way to line up and form all the various different amino acids?
A theory about lightning hitting the pools of water and ammonia forming amino acids directly is what I believe to be the true cause of life.
The other theory (outlined in the article) is based on a much older chemical reaction that heavily relies on autocatalysis in which near perfect conditions are required.
But in whole, I don’t know, nobody knows. We will fade in to dust and never be sure why we really even existed to begin with.
Also this type of research is a real chicken and egg scenario. No one wins because no one knows.
The egg came first.
... an egg laid by something that was almost, but not quite, a chicken.
I was going for the analogy but yeah sure
I know what you were going for, I was pointing out that it was a bad analogy.