5 ms·
Sure there are many plausible series of events that lead from a dead planet to one shimmering with life. My main question isn't if it's possible...we have dire
by jcims 6y ago
Sure there are many plausible series of events that lead from a dead planet to one shimmering with life. My main question isn't if it's possible...we have direct evidence that it is. My question is more related to the probability and how much of a 'happy path' that our little spot in the universe had to have in order to lead us to where we are today. Going back to the origin of my question, it's easy to say 'all we need is the right key and we can decrypt this file' and wave away the fact that all of the atoms in the universe could be recruited for the cause and not have a chance in hell to guess the correct key in all known time.
- ncmncm 6y agohttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3943892/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3943892/ describes an RNA enzyme (I count 63 base pairs) that replicates itself, in the absence of other things to replicate, so you don't even need two of them, to start with. The point is that we don't need to assume spontaneous conjunction of all the particles that make a complete system. We should instead guess that before there was what we would recognize as life, many of the constituent parts, at a scale much larger than atoms or amino acids, had arisen, many a result of pre-life analogs of living processes such as replication, driven to high populations by pre-life statistical analogs of natural selection. Then life becomes not a miraculous coincidence, but an inevitability.