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>>>I agree it’s an open question, but I think it’s highly likely with lots of circumstantial evidence that life is an evolutionary emergent phenomenon where inorganic material reactions create life. We already know that’s the case in highly controlled environments.

Did I miss some big announcements? Where has anyone created life from inorganic material reactions in a highly controlled environment?

Serious question, not trolling.

Seems to me that would be an insta-Nobel.

I overstated that life from inorganic in a controlled laboratory environment is what we have evidence for. What we do have evidence for is organic compounds forming from inorganic environments and we’ve shown certain kinds of RNA can self-replicate.

Unless life originated directly at the formation of the universe and panspermia is how life got to this planet, the only logical explanation is that life somehow emerges from “nothing”. We don’t know the exact mechanism and it seems much more likely that life originates on a planet rather than in space & arriving at a planet. The “intelligent” panspermia explanation (i.e. aliens seeding life throughout the universe to preserve it) would still require an inorganic origin for life.

This is what I referred to as "speculation" in the literature for life's origins on Earth. This speculation is a good first theoretical stab... or it might not be. Until life is created from inorganic matter in a laboratory (enabling us subsequently to estimate how rare or not it might be elsewhere in the observable universe), we should substantially dial back our confidence from "life is likely extremely plentiful throughout the universe at one point in time or another".

I agree that we are limited to "speculating" due to n=1. However, personally my sense is that simple life is more likely to be ubiquitous than not. This is informed by the fact that currently there is no evidence that conditions on early Earth were particularly unique in comparison to first principles modelling of rocky planet atmospheres**. This coupled with the relative speed with which simple life emerged points to it being a relatively probably event, though we can't be certain. I expect that with missions such as PLATO and the upcoming HWOs we'll have a better sense of the conditions on mature Earth like planets in the habitable zone. Though studying a large sample of early Earth's shortly after formation may be out of our reach for a while yet, depending on which particularly mission gets chosen.

**Not my sub-field. Extremely complex models. Much is still unknown.

To me the simpler question is “if life didn’t originate from inorganic conditions somehow, what other explanation is there? Life came into being with the creation of the universe?”. It’s possible the latter explanation is what happened, it just feels extremely unlikely. So the more likely explanation is that life originates from inorganic conditions. Then the question is where? Is it on a planet or in space? Panspermia doesn’t have a lot of traction because the mechanism of action seems too complex to have a good probability of success unless intentional (but then you have a question of how did life that started panspermia intentionally begin & you’re back to needing it forming spontaneously out of nothing).

And if “out of nothing” is the baseline condition, the most likely explanation is that it happens where there’s a lot of energy to sustain it while not enough to kill it, which means planets at the boundary of thermal activity (since we need something more direct than photosynthesis which is a relatively complex capability that came late in Earth’s cycle as far as we know).

Taking a slight sidetrack to relativity, consider just how absurd our universe is. To maintain the consistency of the speed of light from all reference frames, time (and 'real' distance) are instead the variables, and there is every reason to believe this is correct. If you didn't know this to be the actual case, it'd feel absurd to even consider it.

Trying to intuitively and logically reason about something with no answer in sight, all while assuming the truths of our era, may ultimately be pointless.

Our universe, logical though it may be, plays by its own rules, and many things will be simply irreconcilable until those rules are further elaborated on.

As an aside the big bang also does not really answer the prerequisite question of where the initial inorganic matter/energy came from. The idea there being some sort of a quantum fluctuation, which then begs the question of its origin. I suppose it's just turtles all the way down.

The Turtle way down is called 'Rechnender Raum' also known as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_Space

And if the turtles feel bored out of their minds, they go full

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros and eat their own behinds.

Which solves the problem of recursion, hen&egg nicely.

Consider black holes, white holes, wisely.

The question of free will? Just checksum errors in the substrate.

Because entropy, of course!

Chill...

> To me the simpler question is “if life didn’t originate from inorganic conditions somehow, what other explanation is there? Life came into being with the creation of the universe?”.

OK let's pretend to forget for a moment that we have no definition for "life". Here is what we know:

    - tons of examples of life turning into non-life
    - zero examples of non-life turning into life
    - a crapton of non-life around us

Based purely on that evidence what do you think is more likely: that non-life magically converts to life or, idk, how about it started with life and all that non-life you see is formerly life?

Hm what if you add a forth known:

- a lot of examples where life exists where we were thinking it should not be possible

I think it raises a bit the idea that life is in a way special and fragile at individual level but not that fragile as a whole.

I think you are taking the wrong tack in your approach to this. You keep saying life must arise at the end of an experiment. The thing we can do is work through to dna base pairs arise. If you are then in the right environment for random mixing of these base pairs for millions of years, I do think you'll get microbes.

It's a big mistake to say we have to run an experiment that produces living organisms from nothing to say we know how it works. And that likely took millions of years. That feels like an excuse to argue that it can't happen without some external power (not the sun, ha).

>Our type of society is probably much much rarer because you need access to mineral and energy deposits to go through each technological phase. For example, because of all the mining we’ve done, if humanity were to disappear it’s highly likely the Earth would not sustain another technological society because all the “easy to get to” deposits of crucial metals & things like oil are gone and there’s no way to bootstrap a technological society (it’s possible other kinds of resources could be developed to build other kinds of technology so who knows).

As I recall-though it's been many years-this was something of a premise in Farmer's Riverworld series. Once you've taken the first pass though historical mineral etc. resources, you don't really get a second pass.

Readily obtainable hydrocarbons are lost for the forseeable future. However, haven't we made it easier for future civilizations to obtain minerals and metals? We have extracted, refined and placed them all in concentrated surface areas all over the planet (i.e. city limits)

Except a huge amount of it is alloys. You’d have to reprocess it to extract out the raw materials which is much harder than mining ore and requires a lot more tech. Like things may be bronze plated but you’re not going to find a whole lot of bronze in 1 spot.

Wouldn't the next civilization just find itself mining the remains of human cities? IIRC, the majority of the copper ever extracted is still in use.

Cue Indiana Jones voice: you can’t just mine that—it belongs in a museum!

> I think it’s highly likely with lots of circumstantial evidence that life is an evolutionary emergent phenomenon where inorganic material reactions create life

Out of curiosity, if you reject religion, what other possibilities are there?

Just inorganic material combining at random and eventually, over about 10 billion years, randomly creating something that self replicates in some way, beginning the process of evolution through natural selection and inevitably progressing to life as we know it.

I don't think religion is needed at all for this. I also don't think this has to be a common thing (after all, here on Earth it only happened once, but it's also possible that once life is widespread it makes it very difficult for emergent new forms of life to take off).

Where did you get 10 billion years of random chemistry?

The articles I read assert that life began just 500 million to 1 billion years after formation of earth. 3.5-4.1 billion years ago with an earth age of 4.5 billion.

The universe is about 15 billion years old, and chemistry didn't start with the formation of Earth.

Chemistry in earth certainly started with the formation of earth.

Are you suggesting that abiogenesis didn’t start on earth, but self-replicating molecules started evolving in earths protoplanetary disc?

Serious question, haven’t encountered that theory before. It’s kinda panspermia-lite.

I believe you may discussing at cross-purposes.

Presumably like your parent, I believed this was a discussion about the probability that life has originated elsewhere in the galaxy / universe, independently of life on Earth.

Kurzgesagt did a video on this recently https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JOiGEI9pQBs

Sorry, I meant possibilities other than "an evolutionary emergent phenomenon where inorganic material reactions create life"

Commenter is referring to the case where life is a common occurrence as an "an evolutionary emergent phenomenon where inorganic material reactions create life" in contrast to the case where life has only happened once, which would be more like an extremely lucky fluke where inorganic material reactions create life.

Simulation hypothesis: all this may be much younger than we expect.

Nonuniform physics—call it colliding universes or whatever, but the processes that gave rise to life on Earth may not be possible anywhere in this universe now. Including labs on Earth!

I don't think inorganic material reactions can be described as an evolutionary phenomenon.

It is evolutionary in the sense that the various reactions slowly changes the make up of the environment until the conditions necessary for life emerges.