Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases • Hacker News Board

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#51

Post by dmix » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

jonmc12 wrote: post #9

> Carell’s team has shown how all nucleobases could form under one set of conditions: two separate ponds that cycle through the seasons, going from wet to dry, from hot to cold, and from acidic to basic, and with chemicals occasionally flowing from one pond to the other. I've enjoyed Bruce Damer's explanation of related theory, "The Hot Spring Hypothesis for the Origin of Life". Search "goldilocks chemistry" for some…

Bruce gave a good summary presentation on his research (if you prefer this format):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsfCIR_6K0Y

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#52

Post by miles_matthias » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

If you’re looking for a good fiction read relating to this, I just finished “Origin” by Dan Brown, would recommend.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#53

Post by UnFleshedOne » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 10:11 PM UTC

The_rationalist wrote: post #49

GistNoesis wrote: post #47

>The chemistry is also a “strong indication” that the appearance of RNA-based life was not an exceedingly lucky event, but one that is likely to happen on many other planets, he adds. Does this mean a new lower bound for the fl factor for the drake equation ?

Than why all earth living beings come from one common ancestry rather than many different ones?

First mover advantage probably. If abiogenesis is common but not too common, whatever starts reproducing first might have a few billion years to spread everywhere and take over all possible niches.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#54

Post by tapland » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 10:27 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #42

aazaa wrote: post #17

> Carell, an organic chemist, and his collaborators have now demonstrated a chemical pathway that — in principle — could have made A, U, C and G (adenine, uracil, cytosine and guanine, respectively) from basic ingredients such as water and nitrogen under conditions that would have been plausible on the early Earth. The reactions produce so much of these nucleobases that, millennium after millennium, they could have a…

There's a multiverse theory that there are many possible or existing universes with different physical constants, affecting everything from chemistry to orbital mechanics, and the reason we are having this conversation is because this universe was conducive to the formation of highly organized lifeforms capable of abstract thought. In this line of reasoning "Why this set of constants" doesn't matter, because only the…

Wow. You just found a reason for you not to get into science.

Now most of the rest of us are still curious to find out how stuff works around here.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#55

Post by TheRealPomax » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

The_rationalist wrote: post #49

GistNoesis wrote: post #47

>The chemistry is also a “strong indication” that the appearance of RNA-based life was not an exceedingly lucky event, but one that is likely to happen on many other planets, he adds. Does this mean a new lower bound for the fl factor for the drake equation ?

Than why all earth living beings come from one common ancestry rather than many different ones?

Mostly: because billions of years have passed. Even if it turns out there we millions of different self-replication mechanisms that were complex enough to give rise to (an abstract form of) competition, early Earth has a period of hundreds of millions of years in which each and everyone one of those had plenty of time to run their course to extinction.

Remember that that single common ancestor was _not_ alone on the planet. They might have been millions or even hundreds of millions of other potential ancestors, but if there were, all of them died out before the start of the fossil record.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#56

Post by aomega08 » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

miles_matthias wrote: post #52

If you’re looking for a good fiction read relating to this, I just finished “Origin” by Dan Brown, would recommend.

I am amazed by the timing. Literally finished reading the book this morning and spent most of the day deep in Wikipedia researching primordial soups.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#57

Post by Gatsky » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 10:58 PM UTC

These abiogenesis experiments are a little strange... they aim to show that something could have happened. Whether that is what actually happened is considered less relevant and in fact can probably never be determined. Does anyone really believe that it is impossible to get spontaneous nucleotide generation under certain conditions (the conditions also being speculative)?

The really interesting thing would be finding nucleotides or nitrogenous bases where there isn’t life, eg on Mars or an asteroid.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#58

Post by andy_ppp » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

I sometimes find the chances of us being here so remote, it can't really be just survival of the fittest can it? There must be other means for evolution to be more intelligently selective. I'm arguing that you'd see some kind of evolved "invisible" hand rather than an actual maker behind all of this.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#59

Post by unexaminedlife » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

Has anyone proven that the "soup" has to be liquid?

I'm no chemist, but I was curious one day so I looked through the chemical composition of humans, and was surprised to see that almost all of the base elements from the periodic table that we are composed of are lighter than air. Just ran the numbers again for this post: ~96.2% oxygen,hydrogen,nitrogen,carbon ~ 3.8% calcium,phosphorus, potassium,sulfur,sodium, chlorine,magnesium

The highest atomic number for any of these elements is 20 (calcium), while krypton is listed on wikipedia as a "major constituent in earth's atmosphere" with an atomic number of 36.

EDIT: And in fact it gets more interesting when you analyze the chemical composition of DNA / RNA.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#60

Post by scoopertrooper » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 11:13 PM UTC

The_rationalist wrote: post #49

GistNoesis wrote: post #47

>The chemistry is also a “strong indication” that the appearance of RNA-based life was not an exceedingly lucky event, but one that is likely to happen on many other planets, he adds. Does this mean a new lower bound for the fl factor for the drake equation ?

Than why all earth living beings come from one common ancestry rather than many different ones?

The 'common ancestor' dates back to about the same time as the late heavy bombardment. It's been theorised that earth may have been suitable for life earlier than originally hypothesised, but the bombardment wiped the record.

If this is true, then there may have been many independently evolved microorganisms pre-bombardment, but only a few colonies survived because they happened to live deep underwater near volcanic vents. Perhaps also, in this era of reduced genetic diversity, one colony was especially capable of adapting to the new environment and quickly outcompeted all the other surviving colonies.

Or maybe aliens did it. Who knows.