Ribonucleotides are very very very reactive / unstable - definitely in today's atmosphere / world, and likely even in a neutral / reducing abiotic world. (almos

Ribonucleotides are very very very reactive / unstable - definitely in today's atmosphere / world, and likely even in a neutral / reducing abiotic world. (almost every surface we touch today will be left with very robust RNAses, for instance, which makes working with RNA a particularly fun experience in lab.., but I digress). I am struggling to imagine a clear path from ribonucleotide synthesis during an atmospheric impact to polymerization (which again requires protected / specific conditions), to the point where the randomly assembled RNA polymerase has catalytic activity, and specifically, ability to self replicate. I recognize that the article is not claiming the nucleotides can polymerize, etc. Still, I fail to see how enough nucleotides could be created through such processes and remain stable through their descent to the surface to form polymers / ribozymes. I understand that these are probabilistic events, so a low probability event is still possible. However, my contention is that atmospheric synthesis of ribonucleotides, followed by polymerization into a catalytically active RNA polymer (which is equally unstable) which then has to have a readily accessible pool of mono-nucleotides or peptides / amino acids to act on, all during high atmospheric impact / subsequent descent to the surface, seems, well, challenging to envision. So, to summarise, I think this is a cool result, but I don't think it moves us forward much in terms of understanding how life got started. And I speak as an advocate of the RNA world hypothesis.