OOL: origin of life

Science is a wonderful thing.

Except when it's nonsense. Life is a lot more than chemistry.

On a sunny day (Fri, 29 Jul 2022 07:13:16 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Fred Bloggs snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Yes it is interesting how cyanide, a very toxic substane to our life, plays a role. Or maybe it is because it so essential at the basics Bil Sloman knows more about chemistery?

In a reducing atmosphere cyanide would be fairly long lived.

It is highly toxic to us because we belong in an oxygen rich atmosphere and it is very reactive. These are however exactly the properties that make it able to form amino acids under the right conditions.

A remarkable number of compounds have been observed in dense molecular clouds including Buckminster fullerenes before they were found on Earth.

Life is *entirely* chemistry. It is just *very* complicated chemistry.

Science is a much better approach than consigning everything that is presently unexplained to "Goddidit" as a "just so" explanation.

I'd be a bit more cautious with "entirely" as we don't understand everything but OK, as far as we know it looks so.

However this - like any other - argument does not contradict the "God did it" one; we cannot prove God did not design the universe with its physical laws such that there would be complex chemistry to turn into life....

Nor can we prove the opposite of course.

On a sunny day (Fri, 29 Jul 2022 19:53:15 +0100) it happened Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote in <tc1aau$1nbu$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org>:

Very nice they can detect that in the IR, amazing!

The spectrum of interstellar dust (long believed to be mostly some sort of carbon soot or basalt like mixture) was known long before fullerenes were discovered. No terrestrial organic spectrum quite matched it.

Carbon stars are impressively red (but mostly dim as well) so you need a small telescope to see even the brightest ones. List here:

On a sunny day (Sat, 30 Jul 2022 16:20:45 +0100) it happened Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote in <tc3i8f$1nrb$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org>:

Thanks especially the second link gives / leads to a lot of info! Did not now about that site.