How did life begin? How did chemical reactions on the early Earth create complex, self-replicating structures that developed into living things as we know them? According to one school of thought, before the current era of DNA-based life, there was a...
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.