OT: How life came to Earth

Not really "life" as such, but the most important and fundamental building blocks of life. People think life is all about DNA or RNA, but the reality is they are pointless without proteins. Peptides are short proteins, or it is more common to consider proteins to be made of multiple peptides, hence the term polypeptide. Proteins are the functioning units of life. Virtually everything that happens in living organisms involves proteins in some way. It is conceivable that life started with proteins, without any nucleic acids. It is not conceivable that life started with nucleic acids without proteins. In fact, the purpose of nucleic acids is as a blueprint to allow proteins to make other proteins.

So they are suggesting that the basic units of life, may have come from space rather than for them to have been created on earth initially. They are at least, leaving the door open for these units to have been created in space.

The problem of life isn't coming up with small molecular building blocks, it's the astoundingly complex mechanism by which DNA works in a cell and reproduces itself. It's not so much a chemistry problem as a programming problem.

Our form of life was almost certainly designed and planted on earth. And yes, it's quantum mechanical.

On a sunny day (Fri, 11 Feb 2022 05:12:01 -0800) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

The article describes how the basic chemicals needed for RNA an DNA could form in space.

If you say 'was designed' you get into a loop, start: 'who or what designed it, and who or what designed that... goto start

It seems likely that in the trillions of reactions somehow some 'executable' part was formed that was strong enough to maintain itself. Polymerase chain reaction only needs some temperature cycling to make copies of say DNA, and temperature cycling happens due to for example the day night changes on planets.

I do not think we are very special at all.

That last bit is not accurate. While acting as a blueprint for proteins is a major purpose of DNA, it is not the only purpose. For humans, only about 1.5% of our DNA codes directly for proteins as "blueprints". Other purposes include epigenetic control and structural support, but there's a lot we simply do not yet understand. RNA also comes in many types, with many purposes. In particular, several key jobs done by proteins as enzymes and catalysts can be done by RNA molecules.

Thus there is the hypothesis called "RNA world" which supposes that RNA was central to the earliest lifeforms, and came before the biological use of proteins. It's a hypothesis - nothing is proven. But there's enough justification and support for it that it is a serious research topic. Certainly there is not enough supporting evidence to claim that it is inconceivable that life started with nucleic acids without proteins - abiogenesis researchers very actively conceive that idea. (Equally, of course, they also consider proteins first, or combinations of nucleic acids and proteins at a similar time, or other possibilities

- it's an open area of science.)

Whether such "basic units of life" (including amino acids, peptides, fatty acids, nucleic acids, organic molecules, complex carbohydrates, etc.) first arrived from space or first came together on earth, is unlikely ever to be fully established. However, the fact that we have found many of them in space makes it clear that they can be produced by relatively simple natural forces, breaking the chicken-and-egg cycle of requiring lifeforms to make the building blocks of life.

It can also help to answer some of the /why/ questions - such as why all known lifeforms use mostly the same chemical parts. Those are the parts that were found lying around when the lifeforms first formed.

Oh dear. Somebody needs to read up a bit on what a load of twaddle the "intelligent design" idea is. It's an irrational, inconsistent straw man argument made by religious fanatics who can't or won't understand science, and who think it makes their arguments more powerful if they pick a fight with reality and invent stuff - instead of just saying "I don't know".

Waving magic words like "quantum" will not convince anyone here, nor will carefully omitting any direct mention of your pet god. At least have the decency to be honest and say you think "God" made life on earth but you don't know how.

(There's nothing wrong with being religious /and/ scientific - freedom of religious beliefs is an important right. But there's something very wrong with denying reality in order to make it "fit" a particularly odd religious conviction.)

It could have been designed by some intelligence that had a less complex, more incremental evolutionary path. Something that evolved billions of years before earth formed.

If you believe in evolution, you will give that a fair consideration.

The big problem is DNA itself, which contains the recipes for the thousands of incredibly complex mechanisms required to make a cell and support and reproduce DNA. The problem isn't chemicals, it's programming.

If there is an evolutionary, incremental path from thin primordial soup to a living, reproducting cell, then someone should demonstrate it how it could happen. Without intelligence.

If a trillion robots or equivalent spread chemical life out throughout the universe, we're not.

The rabid neo-Darwinists are so afraid of being accused of being Bible-bangers that they won't allow themselves to think about anything but spontaneous generation in primordial soup. That fear has seriously slowed down evolutionary science.

We have no pets, since the cat died. It's reasonably probable that a robot custom-designed the first cells on earth. That's about as good an idea as any other right now.

You keep saying that ' "God" made life on earth ' so you can mock people. I never said that.

Is there anything wrong with instantly mocking ideas because they could (but don't) imply theology?

Mocking means not thinking. Think about that.

On a sunny day (Fri, 11 Feb 2022 07:39:34 -0800) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Suppose you had a collection of BASIC statements how long do you think it would take if you wrote a program that would randomly combine those before one combination said: Hello World" ? Not very long I think.

Small pieces of chemicals would combine into some RNA or DNA Small pieces of that RNA or DNA in a big soup (oceans?) would be similar. The one that maintained itself would persist and use other pieces, like we use bacteria in out guts as 'slave' to digest food..

And yes, we are already busy contaminating mars and moon with what sticks to our spacecraft and survives the trip.

And there are religious powers denying life is on Mars for example, while the Viking lander test was positive for life. I remember that announcement "Life detected on Mars' to be followed half an hour or so later by a denial. When I worked in broadcasting head control room we had a red phone, somebody from the government could call; and you followed orders. Looked to me like a red phone call from some scared religious powers, else no way a change in media in half an hour. NASA worked years on that experiment. And now they send landers to where life is most unlikely to be found, better look here:

The late Dr Levin was the one from the Mars experiment that tested positive for life: He deserves credit!!!

OK. <0.1s interval>

Jan has already addressed that, you've ignored it or not understood it, viz: 'who or what designed it, and who or what designed that...'

Where did that program come from?

How long would it take, combining random statements, until you had a Basic compiler? And the design of a computer to run it on?

That's the theory. People who have done the math tend to run out of zeroes for how long that might take.

Got a link for that?

Skepticism is reasonable there.

If you believe in spontaneous generation and evolution, you might consider that life should have evolved in billions of places in the universe, billions of years ago.

Give that another 100 milliseconds of thought before you dismiss it.

On a sunny day (Fri, 11 Feb 2022 08:58:08 -0800) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

The small chemical 'strands' are in this example the BASIC statements. The 'machine' is the energy that mixes things. In the mixed environmet some things stick together, laws of chemistry, laws of physics if you will. It really will _not_ take very long before combinations of those strands can do things.

You do not want to admit the simplicity of it all :-)

But why start at life? Have you wondered why them electrons find those atomic cores and start buzzing around those? So many times over, everywhere you look, and all those we call 'elementary particles' have turned out to be not so 'elementary' at all but rather complex, and all are interacting together, All is connected, is an atom alive? Sure!

We talk about consciousness as something mysterious Even a sunshade moved by a light sensitive sensor is 'conscious' of light. It takes one beeper added to let you know it is going to close or open. ;-)

I do see well you can guess it ;-)

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” ― Arthur C. Clarke

My personal belief is that intelligent life has evolved many times, but we haven't yet communicated with other examples.

Many people have indeed given that serious consideration, famously Enrico Fermi's name and fellow physicists Edward Teller, Herbert York and Emil Konopinski - back in 1950. FFI, see the inconclusive musings about "The Fermi Paradox".

I think intelligent life is unstable. By the time it has become sufficiently powerful to communicate or travel over cosmic distances, it also has become powerful enough to blow itself into oblivion, and will, after a short while (on cosmic timescales).

Jeroen Belleman

False; no reason to find archaea in the depths of the earth if there had been any modern form of life planted here. Archaea is clearly well-suited to be ancestral, and hard to explain otherwise. Our familiar life forms are all part of an ecology with dizzying complexity, and evolution is the best explanation of that.

Well, sure; all chemistry is quantum mechanical. Quantum mechanics, as a requirement for understanding, is nearly as ubiquitous as mathematics.

It's astoundingly complex now, yes, but it can't have been in the beginning.

Non sequitur.

Jeroen Belleman

That opinion shows a limited imagination. The chemistry of DNA reproduction does not have to start all at once. Just as the watchmaker would not have been starting with a fully functional Swiss watch on day one. In this case there are theories of proteins reproducing with no nucleic acid blueprint to form basic encapsulated organisms with very few of the features of life as we know it.

But someone who can't envision the process of evolution is not likely to appreciate the many, many tiny steps that would be taken before a single eukaryotic cell was produced or even the first DNA molecule. Someone who can only see a creator, perhaps modeled after himself.

I think you have gone off the deep end here. None of this is relevant to the origins of life. You are describing interactions that have happened long after life began. I like that you even describe "a lot we simply do not yet understand" as something that is outside the basic processing of DNA being the blueprint for proteins.

Once you start talking about things needing to happen coincidentally, you get into an increasingly improbable region. But we don't know. However, since proteins can function in a life-like process without nucleic acid blueprints, there is no reason to think they must have been involved in the beginning.

Or that these are the "parts" that are possible given the raw materials available due to the basics of physics and chemistry.

Yes, consider that if you examine the idea of preexisting life of a different form creating the life we know today, why is there no sign of such preexisting life? Why would there not be a signature deep inside a glacier in ancient Norway?

So did Windows start as the massively complex organism that runs on our PCs today? No, it started in the simplest of machines, in a print statement, "Hello, world" or even blinking lights on a front panel somewhere. The programming initially only needed to reproduce itself using a process that could be much simpler that what happens today.

That is what people are working on. It's hard to find evidence of chemical reactions from billions of years ago.