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Life is all around us. There's hardly a crevice too small, too hot, too cold, too dark, or too bright where we don't find it. But we have absolutely no idea ho
by apo 10y ago
Life is all around us. There's hardly a crevice too small, too hot, too cold, too dark, or too bright where we don't find it.
But we have absolutely no idea how life got here. Pick any starting point in the earth's history and try to spin a hypothesis for how cells came to be from organic molecules and other stuff lying around.
You can't do it at a high enough level of detail to even attempt the most rudimentary experiment.
- macspoofing 10y ago>But we have absolutely no idea how life got here. At a high-level, we have a very good idea how life developed and we have reasonably good ideas how life got started. The details will most likely always elude us because tracing the exact evolution of a chaotic system consisting of immense number of particles over a huge span of time will always be beyond our grasp.
- Koshkin 10y agoTrue, a single cell is an astonishingly complex system. On the other hand, science does, in fact, offer hypotheses as to the origin of life on Earth. Also, the fact that life in all its forms that exist today was able to evolve from those primitive single-cell organisms seems to me just as amazing.
- Steuard 10y agoThis is very true, and it's absolutely something that we don't understand. But Carroll's point in this blog post is simply that we have no reason to think that the ultimate answer to these questions will require some fundamental principle of physics that is not ultimately a consequence of quantum field theory (and specifically, the standard model) and general relativity as we understand them today.
- imaginenore 10y agoWe actually have pretty good ideas on how life could have started http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis