Re: OT: Life from a drop of rain, New research suggests rainwater helped form the first protocell walls

It's easy to form a blob with some goo inside. Like mayonaise.

The hard part is the DNA and all its tousands of supporting structures.

One conjecture is that it takes a planet with a decent sized moon so that tide range is variable to have rock pools that concentrate the chemistry to a point where it works. We will know better once Mars or Europa has been properly explored. Finding life independently evolved somewhere else would go a long way to answering these questions.

That is why self replicating autocatalytic peptides and RNA probably came first. They are much less stable and mutate faster. But RNA is good enough that plenty of viruses and viroids (plant pathogens) still use it today. They are the last remnants of earlier pre-DNA life on Earth.

DNA with its double helix preserves information much more reliably in complex organisms, but that came much later when cells started to have a nucleus and organelles inside. Primitive life had neither just a single chromosome (and bacteria today are descendents of those archaea).

The general impression is that the first life was RNA-based, rather than DNA-based, and that it wasn't all that complicated. DNA and the "thousands of supporting structures" came later. We've got some 20,000 genes that code for specific proteins, and they get tweaked to produce about 100,000 different proteins. First life was presumably quite a lot simpler.

Or they are parasites that evolved after DNA life.

Proponents of RNA World should design an RNA based reproducing, evolving life form.

From what?

They don't have to. Covid-19 is a perfectly adequate example. It does depend on us for reproduction, but you failed to exclude that mode of reproduction.

You probably want a free-living RNA-based life-form that can get its energy and its and its constituents from a non-living environment, which is a much bigger ask, in part because we don't know all that much about the environment prevailing before life had got its first toe-hold.