31–40 of 180 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the competition might be too fierce for any new life to develop
We could artificially create a sterile, large pool of the ingredients and see what happens. I've read about experiments like this but only at lab beaker scale.
One longstanding theory is that life first began on Earth when asteroids carrying fundamental elements crashed into our planet long ago. I'm no expert but this sounds strange. Surely those fundamental elements would also form in vast quantities on their own on an entire planet with volcanoes and oceans? Wouldn't a couple asteroids be the literal drop in the ocean in comparison? The missing part is how do they form se…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All it means is you can say "if life is rare, it's not because these specific small chemicals can't be produced". Which is a rather weak thing to say. It doesn't imply life isn't rare, or that further advancement the existence of these small building blocks is easy or inevitable.
> All it means is you can say "if life is rare, it's not because these specific small chemicals can't be produced". This is absolutely a good finding to have in your pocket.
One longstanding theory is that life first began on Earth when asteroids carrying fundamental elements crashed into our planet long ago. I'm no expert but this sounds strange. Surely those fundamental elements would also form in vast quantities on their own on an entire planet with volcanoes and oceans? Wouldn't a couple asteroids be the literal drop in the ocean in comparison? The missing part is how do they form se…
I guess it depends on how you define life, and whether we'd even recognize it when we see it, assuming we're looking in the right places. I'd also imagine that any type of chemistry that harvests energy from the environment is liable to find itself as a food source at the bottom of the food chain now that earth is teeming with life. I think that self-replication, and ability to harvest chemicals and energy from the e…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the competition might be too fierce for any new life to develop
We could artificially create a sterile, large pool of the ingredients and see what happens. I've read about experiments like this but only at lab beaker scale.
One longstanding theory is that life first began on Earth when asteroids carrying fundamental elements crashed into our planet long ago. I'm no expert but this sounds strange. Surely those fundamental elements would also form in vast quantities on their own on an entire planet with volcanoes and oceans? Wouldn't a couple asteroids be the literal drop in the ocean in comparison? The missing part is how do they form se…
The timing of the delivery is what's important here. These building blocks, organic matter, and water would have been depleted in the proto-Earth due to Solar irradiation. There needs to be some mechanism that delivers these ingredients from the outer Solar System. Bombardment by smaller rocks makes the most sense, and was likely triggered by the migration of Giant Planets, leading to a period of heavy bombardment (o…
They’d also have to contend with re-entry.
I mean, even if the starting state require to bootstrap life have impossibly low chance to happen random, multi-world interpretation implies that there will be some worlds where it happened, and observation of life is only possible in such worlds..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but it seems impossible to experiment on the scale that would have happened in nature where there would have been millions of localized "test tube experiments" ongoing for millions of years. Of course people can, and do, try to replicate early earth environments and self-assembling proto-cells, but I'm not sure how intellectually satisfying any self-replication success from these "designer experiments" would be…
My personal theory is that the conditions for life are plentiful in the universe but it probably took an unbelieavable number of random chemical/mechanical events to form the first proto-lifeform. The discovery comes after these building blocks of life were detected on another asteroid called Bennu, suggesting they are abundant throughout the solar system. Yet actual life remains to be discovered...
We've barely started to look, other than on Mars, and notably we are seeing possible signs there. There may even still be primitive life there.
If we do find life of Mars, or say Europa, i.e. in the very first places we look for it, that that would be highly suggestive that it is extremely common (at least in primitive form).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The timing of the delivery is what's important here. These building blocks, organic matter, and water would have been depleted in the proto-Earth due to Solar irradiation. There needs to be some mechanism that delivers these ingredients from the outer Solar System. Bombardment by smaller rocks makes the most sense, and was likely triggered by the migration of Giant Planets, leading to a period of heavy bombardment (o…
Huh? Those smaller rocks would be even more irradiated, as they have no atmosphere? They’d also have to contend with re-entry.