I wrote out the mechanism that I'm proposing down lower, and I'm going to paste it again up here so that people see it. My idea of how Metabolism First would w

I wrote out the mechanism that I'm proposing down lower, and I'm going to paste it again up here so that people see it. My idea of how Metabolism First would work is something like this: 1. You get a lot of weird chemistry happening, say, in pools of water. This chemistry starts creating large organic molecules that are like sludge building up in the pools. These molecules are dead, but they are rich in energy and perhaps interesting building blocks. Maybe they are made of amino acids. 2. Now you have this unbelievably rich energy source, and at some point there start appearing chemical chain reactions that start "eating" the sludge. 3. Life originates from these chemical chain reactions. I suppose it kind of flips the prevailing hypothesis around. Rather than have lightning and such build our proto-organism directly, instead it builds up a sludge that the proto-organism eats. With the planet being sterile, this organic sludge could build up forever until something figures out how to eat it.