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Comment by brokeAstronomer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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