I've made the "yes, we know this is speculative" rant in another post. Here I assume you're still interested in moving forward with the speculation. If not, ple

I've made the "yes, we know this is speculative" rant in another post. Here I assume you're still interested in moving forward with the speculation. If not, please don't belabor the point. There is a substantial body of abiogenesis experimentation focused on reproducing DNA/RNA proto-life. They haven't managed to make anything that self-replicates, but they have managed to make nucleic acid polymers with catalytic activity, e.g. you zap the primordial soup with lightning, you get a bunch of short sequences, some of those sequences fold into RNA-zymes that catalytically produce long "AAAAAAAAA" sequences or long repeating "AUAUAUAU" sequences. The critical next step is to demonstrate the ability to do this from a template. In any case, are you aware of research that aims to do this with alternative polymer chemistries? Such results could inform our speculation about the likelihood of a fundamental 1000x difference.