I'm of the same notion, just because the basic combinatorics of various features of even the simplest self-replicating life forms are so exceedingly unlikely th

I'm of the same notion, just because the basic combinatorics of various features of even the simplest self-replicating life forms are so exceedingly unlikely that to me the idea that they were developed stochastically in relatively rapid succession in the first billion years on earth just doesn't add up. It will become clear that I'm no expert, but this has fascinated me a bit and I've seen a few articles about simplest self-replicators. In a lab they've constructed enzymes [1] that are able to do some replication with as few as 160-190 bases of RNA, but they aren't self-replicating, they spew out some subset of themselves. RNA is just half of DNA with each base in a particular sequence being one of four possible nucleotides (A, C, G and U). In the smallest case above, you have 160 nucleotides giving the entire string of RNA a molar mass of ~ ~50kDa [2] (approximately 50kg per mole of that RNA string). There are ~4^160 combinations of just this extremely short and as far as we know insufficient string of RNA to build even the simplest self-replicator. 4^160 is approximately 2e96 combinations. If you wanted to try every one of those combinations, you would be assembling (2e96 / 6e23) approximately 3e72 moles of RNA. To do it in one shot you would need more mass than in the observable universe (closer to a billion universes). To do it with just the mass of the earth (forget surface/hydrocarbons/biomass) in four billion years you'd have to recycle at relativistic speeds. Obviously it happened, and the above 'needle in a haystack' assessment has many problems as well. But the numbers are so big that no matter how you slice it I can see a scenario where it plausibly only happened once in the history of the universe. Either that or the stochastic parts of the explanation of abiogenesis are incomplete. 1 - https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1200752 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1200752 2 - https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/files/Nucleic%20Acids_Sizes_and_Molecular_Weights_2pgs.pdf https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/files/Nucleic%20Acids_Siz...