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I understand your point, but in the lab scenarios we are theoretically using ideal(ish) conditions (or, at least what we think are ideal conditions). In the ra
by brk 6y ago
I understand your point, but in the lab scenarios we are theoretically using ideal(ish) conditions (or, at least what we think are ideal conditions).
In the random nature scenario, probably 99% of all the instances would be immediately discarded for potential because of 1 or more clearly suboptimal conditions.
- simonh 6y agoSure, but even if those ideal conditions only existed in a few cubic KM of ocean for a few million years, and life occurred there once, were never going to replicate that. If it really was likely to happen in a few litres of chemicals over a few years, once those conditions arose in the early oceans we'd expect it to have happened trillions of trillions of times, not just once or a few times. On the other hand if the conditions were so rare that they only occurred once in a few litres of ocean for a few days, those conditions must be so specific and unusual that we might never figure out how to create them.
- thechao 6y agoFermi estimate: there have been 10000 experiments of 10L each for a year. That gives 10000L-years. There are ~10^21 liters of water on the Earth. Let’s say life took a billion years to start. 21+9-4=>10^26x. Let’s say the labs are 99.999999 “efficient” compared to the oceans. That carved off 8 decades, meaning Earth’s experiment was still a million million million times bigger.
- dhimes 6y agoBut, as the article points out, the size of the oceans may actually work against that by diluting the possibility of getting the correct concentration of ingredients.
- simonh 6y agoOk so let’s say the conditions only occurred for one day each year, in a one litre puddle. Over just a one hundred million year period. I think that’s an extremely conservative estimate. Let’s say I have a huge lab and we have 1,000 one litre experiments running continuously. It would still take me 274 years going non stop to recreate the conditions.
- dhimes 6y agoWell I hope the researchers aren't pursuing this randomly.
- b450 6y agoYou include a good countervailing point in your comment, which is that our experiments are largely confined to what we think are ideal conditions. Evolution (or, whatever you want to call this abiotic Darwinian selective process) searches the space of possible designs randomly, which means it can happen on "improvements" that would be hard to predict a priori.
- matt-attack 6y agoBut we don’t really even know what’s “ideal”. If you read the article they go through the stages of achievements in laboratory synthesis of amino acids and proteins. Early work focused on heat and electricity. Later work realized that all you need was wet/dry cycles. You see we’re still figuring out what the conditions should be. Yes we’re good and recreating specific conditions, but we’re still figuring which ones we should strive for. Natural of course had the luxury of just trying them, in parallel, over vast amounts of time.
- frenchy 6y agoNature also had the luxury of not even having to try. If the creation of life on Earth had failed, we wouldn't have known about it.