Scientists get closer to solving chemical puzzle of the origin of life

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/02/29/life-earth-origin-chemistry/

by gardenfelder • 2 years ago

67 21 2 years ago

pfdietz3• 2 years ago

In OoL, there will be steps. Some could be easy, others potentially very hard.

By their very nature, the easier steps will be understood first. Understanding them therefore doesn't say much about how the hard the overall process is.

An analogy is those collect-all-the-letters games one sometimes sees from grocery stores or fast food restaurants. If you collect all the letters in some phrase, you win a big prize. When you start playing the game, the letters come quickly, and the phrase fills in promisingly. But there's one letter that never seems to show up. The contest ends and your phrase is still incomplete. What happened, of course, is that all the letters except that one were just distractions. That one letter was very rare and controlled how many times the prize would actually be awarded. The contest exploits the unconscious bias that the letters have to show up with the same probability. They're all just letters, right? There's a feeling that when you get a letter you're closer to winning, but unless it's that rare letter you're not significantly closer at all.

blackbear_2• 2 years ago

That's just how it is when you are studying the unknown. Good thing that there are people who do stuff without letting such thoughts stop them.

pfdietz3• 2 years ago

And bad thing that people overrepresent what's been found so far.

croes• 2 years ago

Just because a step is easy doesn't mean it's easy to understand and vice versa.

Just because you understand something doesn't you it's easy or hard.

Or to use your letter game: You got an E, without knowing the phrase you don't know if it's a rare letter or a common one, especially if even don't know the language of the phrase.

pfdietz3• 2 years ago

The question is how hard is it to get experimental evidence for the thing.

If it occurs under a wide variety of circumstances at a high rate, it's easy.

If it involves an extremely unlikely set of circumstances, it's not easy, and will be hard to replicate.

_xerces_• 2 years ago

I wonder if AI could help us with the problem of how life started. Either through simulation or some extension of existing programs like the ones used for drug discovery and protein folding. I know AI is not some kind of panacea for difficult problems, but it might be able to suggest things like the experiment detailed in the article and predict results.

RajT88• 2 years ago

"With the rapidly approaching inception

Of artificial intelligence Humanity may well set the stage

For its own demise Once the exponential rate of intelligence

Reaches critical mass There will be no turning back And all of mankind will be exterminated

The human race, who, for centuries

Have looked to the stars for answers

Have always questioned

Whether or not God exists

He does now"

gardenfelder• 2 years ago

Here is the paper linked in that piece:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk4432

1stub• 2 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240229165406/https://www.washi...

specialist• 2 years ago

Ever since Sagan showed the flask of chemicals getting zapped, creating a goo of amino acids and whatnot, I've wanted to know how life started.

Then I want to know the role of disruption in the emergence of us (intelligence). Randomizers cataclysmic events, plate tectonics, seasons, lunar tides, epochs, and so forth. Would evolution have stalled had there not always new niches being created? Should SETI be focused on planets (in the goldilocks zone) which have had pretty rough histories?

pictureofabear• 2 years ago

"On early Earth, the reaction could have taken place in small pools or lakes of water, the authors said. Large oceans, though, would have probably diluted the concentration of the chemicals."

This has interesting implications for possibility of life in places like Enceladus or Europa--places that may not have any isolated areas for these chemicals to interact over long periods of time.

animitronix• 2 years ago

I'm so glad this has finally been pointed out professionally!! Every time I hear about life on Enceladus or Europa the very first thing I think about is the dilution problem. Maybe in pockets underneath the volcanic vents, but the heat would seem to rule that out, no?

kadoban• 2 years ago

It's pretty hard not to have _some_ capacity to have puddles or pockets of some sort. If nothing else, you can have infiltrates and cavities in rocks or ice, or pools/puddles/lakes on top of frozen areas.

thriftwy• 2 years ago

What about ATP? We depend on it but it has to come from somewhere.

See https://shkrobius.livejournal.com/401292.html

philsnow• 2 years ago

not answering your question, but TIL that there are also GTP, UTP, and CTP, having somewhat similar functions, but each fulfilling one or more (much) smaller niches than ATP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleoside_triphosphate

taejavu• 2 years ago

By analogy, amino acids are to proteins what a pile of bricks are to a house. Have we made any progress on figuring out what could have possibly caused the amino acids to become arranged into proteins?

If you read between the lines, I know this sounds like an argument for creationism, but it's because I'm an atheist that I find the question so frustrating/compelling.

chimineycricket• 2 years ago

Even if you had the answer to that question, I think it should not soothe your atheism/creationism concerns. The bigger question would still remain on why anything exists at all.

david-gpu• 2 years ago

The bigger question would still remain on why anything exists at all.

Yet, if nothing existed, there would not be anyone asking the question. This doesn't actually answer the question, but it is funny to think about.

Many years ago I read a non-testable hypothesis that stuck with me. What is the simplest, most parsimonious explanation for why this universe exists? The most extreme end of simplicity would be that every self-consistent set of axioms forms the universe that can be derived from it.

For example, a universe may exist consisting only of the empty set. Another universe may consist of the natural numbers up to 42.

Our universe, with a significantly richer set of axioms, has led to an abundance of the hydrogen atom. And we all know that hydrogen is a colourless gas that, if left to its own devices in sufficient quantity and for long enough, progressively transforms and starts thinking about itself.

jryb• 2 years ago

Yes, there was this recent paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04676-3

They essentially propose that RNA molecules would be ligated to a small number of amino acids and would then use them for catalysis, and from there evolved the ability to create proteins that are not covalently bound to RNA. So this bridges the RNA world with the RNA-peptide world, and from there it's much easier to conceive of how we arrived at modern biology.

There's a good reason to think that this was the path, since in all organisms today, tRNAs are ligated to single amino acids during translation.

Scientists get closer to solving chemical puzzle of the origin of life

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