Scientists get closer to solving chemical puzzle of the origin of life

In OoL, there will be steps. Some could be easy, others potentially very hard.

By their very nature, the easier steps will be understood first. Understanding them therefore doesn't say much about how the hard the overall process is.

An analogy is those collect-all-the-letters games one sometimes sees from grocery stores or fast food restaurants. If you collect all the letters in some phrase, you win a big prize. When you start playing the game, the letters come quickly, and the phrase fills in promisingly. But there's one letter that never seems to show up. The contest ends and your phrase is still incomplete. What happened, of course, is that all the letters except that one were just distractions. That one letter was very rare and controlled how many times the prize would actually be awarded. The contest exploits the unconscious bias that the letters have to show up with the same probability. They're all just letters, right? There's a feeling that when you get a letter you're closer to winning, but unless it's that rare letter you're not significantly closer at all.

Here is the paper linked in that piece:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk4432

"On early Earth, the reaction could have taken place in small pools or lakes of water, the authors said. Large oceans, though, would have probably diluted the concentration of the chemicals."

This has interesting implications for possibility of life in places like Enceladus or Europa--places that may not have any isolated areas for these chemicals to interact over long periods of time.

By analogy, amino acids are to proteins what a pile of bricks are to a house. Have we made any progress on figuring out what could have possibly caused the amino acids to become arranged into proteins?

If you read between the lines, I know this sounds like an argument for creationism, but it's because I'm an atheist that I find the question so frustrating/compelling.

What about ATP? We depend on it but it has to come from somewhere.

See https://shkrobius.livejournal.com/401292.html

Ever since Sagan showed the flask of chemicals getting zapped, creating a goo of amino acids and whatnot, I've wanted to know how life started.

Then I want to know the role of disruption in the emergence of us (intelligence). Randomizers cataclysmic events, plate tectonics, seasons, lunar tides, epochs, and so forth. Would evolution have stalled had there not always new niches being created? Should SETI be focused on planets (in the goldilocks zone) which have had pretty rough histories?

I wonder if AI could help us with the problem of how life started. Either through simulation or some extension of existing programs like the ones used for drug discovery and protein folding. I know AI is not some kind of panacea for difficult problems, but it might be able to suggest things like the experiment detailed in the article and predict results.