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Scientists discover chemistry that may help explain the origins of cellular life

phys.org

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Re: Scientists discover chemistry that may help explain the origins of cellular life

#31

Post by photojosh »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #11
fergalish wrote: post #8

Since reading it somewhere in the distant past, I have become convinced that the moon played a vital part in the origin of life, by creating the tides. Picture a coastline in early Earth. Tide washes up a bunch of chemicals that get baked in a warm sun, while simultaneously getting exposed to a harsh atmosphere with plenty of energy surges (volcanic/atmospheric). Tide washes in a bunch of fresh chemicals to reiterate…

One thing arguing against this is that there was little free atmospheric oxygen, and thus little ozone. According to Nick Lane in his book, "Oxygen", UV light at the surface of the earth was 30 times greater then than now. Life has had a lot of time to build up mechanisms to protect against UV light [1], including sophisticated dna repair mechanisms and creating sophisticated antioxidants and regulation mechanisms. B…

Thanks for the book recommendations— right up my alley as I very much enjoyed Lane's "Vital Question" too.

Re: Scientists discover chemistry that may help explain the origins of cellular life

#32

Post by photojosh »

ibraa wrote: post #14
yehosef wrote: post #5

The problem is that once you start to appreciate the immense complexity in a single, most basic cell, you realize how far away we are from understanding how life got started. This article would be comparable to some future generation trying to figure out how our computers were made and then stumbling upon factory that could make the cases. The case is important, but relatively trivial part of the machinery. Similarly…

I find it funny that people would rather believe in the matrix/simulation rather than God

They're equivalent postulates, but one of those more appealing to the modern secular mind.

Re: Scientists discover chemistry that may help explain the origins of cellular life

#33

Post by icanhackit »

As an aside, when reading this I considered a fun alternative theory (I'm not actually proposing it as any kind of truth) that if it's ultimately discovered that the processes behind the creation of life are just too complex to be duplicated in our universe...

...Rather than invoking a god which comes with its own problems (i.e. who/what created the creator) one could infer that life came from a universe where the physics/conditions for creating life are possible, and life somehow crossed branes moving from one universe to the next.

Consider a reverse/inverted universe where instead of space being a void, space is solid containing voids/cavities/pathways between voids, allowing complex chemical processes to occur naturally and at great scale.

Re: Scientists discover chemistry that may help explain the origins of cellular life

#34

Post by fergalish »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #11
fergalish wrote: post #8

Since reading it somewhere in the distant past, I have become convinced that the moon played a vital part in the origin of life, by creating the tides. Picture a coastline in early Earth. Tide washes up a bunch of chemicals that get baked in a warm sun, while simultaneously getting exposed to a harsh atmosphere with plenty of energy surges (volcanic/atmospheric). Tide washes in a bunch of fresh chemicals to reiterate…

One thing arguing against this is that there was little free atmospheric oxygen, and thus little ozone. According to Nick Lane in his book, "Oxygen", UV light at the surface of the earth was 30 times greater then than now. Life has had a lot of time to build up mechanisms to protect against UV light [1], including sophisticated dna repair mechanisms and creating sophisticated antioxidants and regulation mechanisms. B…

Thanks for the reference, will try to look it up. I guess here I'm referring to the passage in the linked article that says:

"...simple [chemicals] spontaneously polymerize and self-assemble into [bigger chemicals] when dried at moderate temperatures followed by rehydration."

Re: Scientists discover chemistry that may help explain the origins of cellular life

#35

Post by agumonkey »

ggggtez wrote: post #16
apo wrote: post #3

A fascinating study that tries to solve the most difficult problem in the origin of life: bootstrapping. Nobody has been able to explain how the multitude of complex organic molecules needed to support life got there in the first place. It's a little like we're trying to reconstruct modern industrial civilization by assuming Dow Chemical exists whenever necessary. Dow and the entire chemical industry arose from a boo…

I really like the idea of this as a scaffold for collecting lipids for the first cell membranes. It seems likely to me that there would need to be some relatively simple compound responsible. The fact this is present in meteorites gives me some confidence that it must be a compound that forms fairly easily. Once again, the "improbability of life" just got a little more probable.

What ecosystem would provide lipids in those times btw ?

Re: Scientists discover chemistry that may help explain the origins of cellular life

#36

Post by agumonkey »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #13
fergalish wrote: post #8

Since reading it somewhere in the distant past, I have become convinced that the moon played a vital part in the origin of life, by creating the tides. Picture a coastline in early Earth. Tide washes up a bunch of chemicals that get baked in a warm sun, while simultaneously getting exposed to a harsh atmosphere with plenty of energy surges (volcanic/atmospheric). Tide washes in a bunch of fresh chemicals to reiterate…

The moon is the analogous cpu clock cycle for many biological processes.

pictures dynamic throttling of the moon..

Re: Scientists discover chemistry that may help explain the origins of cellular life

#37

Post by fergalish »

varjag wrote: post #10
fergalish wrote: post #8

Since reading it somewhere in the distant past, I have become convinced that the moon played a vital part in the origin of life, by creating the tides. Picture a coastline in early Earth. Tide washes up a bunch of chemicals that get baked in a warm sun, while simultaneously getting exposed to a harsh atmosphere with plenty of energy surges (volcanic/atmospheric). Tide washes in a bunch of fresh chemicals to reiterate…

To be fair, at this point we have no idea how rare is the life in the Universe.

Well, it would seem to have occurred only once in all the universe we've looked at. That's as rare as it can be, given the anthropic nature of the observation. :)

Statistically speaking... as in mean civilisations per galaxy, yep I agree, no idea where that might land!

Re: Scientists discover chemistry that may help explain the origins of cellular life

#38

Post by varjag »

fergalish wrote: post #37
varjag wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, at this point we have no idea how rare is the life in the Universe.

Well, it would seem to have occurred only once in all the universe we've looked at. That's as rare as it can be, given the anthropic nature of the observation. :) Statistically speaking... as in mean civilisations per galaxy, yep I agree, no idea where that might land!

Outside solar system, we can hardly observe anything but supercivilizations as we conjecture they should be. In our solar system, non-sentient life is still not fully excluded on Mars, and there is a reasonable chance of finding something on Europa, Titan or other big moons.

In the galaxy overall from what we know now about occurrence of planets in habitable zones, there likely should be tens of million earthlikes with a substantial sized moon.

Re: Scientists discover chemistry that may help explain the origins of cellular life

#39

Post by tasty_freeze »

photojosh wrote: post #31
tasty_freeze wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing arguing against this is that there was little free atmospheric oxygen, and thus little ozone. According to Nick Lane in his book, "Oxygen", UV light at the surface of the earth was 30 times greater then than now. Life has had a lot of time to build up mechanisms to protect against UV light [1], including sophisticated dna repair mechanisms and creating sophisticated antioxidants and regulation mechanisms. B…

Thanks for the book recommendations— right up my alley as I very much enjoyed Lane's "Vital Question" too.

The full title of the first book is "Oxygen, The molecule that made the world", and was published in 2002. I'm not sure how much things have changed in the past 17 years, but presumably it is mostly still up to date.

The first half of the book is about the history of oxygen on the planet and interesting details on how we can know it. The second half of the book is about oxygen processes on life mostly at the cellular level but also some at the whole-organism level.

The book is pretty dense but it is fill with enough interesting ideas, such as why it is believed that cells had developed the ability to produce antioxidants before there was much free atmospheric oxygen. There is a discussion of how can it be that at every cellular division there is a certain fraction of transcription errors, yet the germ line still can pass on for billions of generations and still produce a healthy population.

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