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2. Spores hitchhiking on impact ejecta sounds exotic until you realize that anywhere life is present at all spores will be everywhere and extremely sturdy. That desktop wallpaper you have of planets crashing together and kicking off an epic debris cloud? Everything not molten is full of spores.
3. Religious explanations are not in the same universe of seriousness as 1 and 2. Opening with a religious talking point and closing with a false equivalence is mega sus.
> In the redshift range 100 . (1 + z) . 137, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) had a temperature of 273–373 K (0-100◦C), allowing early rocky planets (if any existed) to have liquid water chemistry on their surface and be habitable, irrespective of their distance from a star.
> In the standard ΛCDM cosmology, the first star-forming halos within our Hubble volume started collapsing at these redshifts,allowing the chemistry of life to possibly begin when the Universe was merely 10–17 million years old.
From: The Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe - https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613
In comparison, our beloved sun is estimated to have been born 9.2 billion years after the Big Bang, a third of the way into the universe's history so far.
> The Sun is approximately 4.6 billion years old, while the age of the universe, based on current estimates, is about 13.8 billion years.
So our solar system is not that old, relatively speaking. We're among elders, some stars are three times older than the sun.
> In the future, however, life might continue to emerge on planets orbiting dwarf stars, like our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, which will endure hundreds of times longer than the sun’s.
> Ultimately, it would be desirable for humanity to relocate to a habitable planet around a dwarf star like Proxima Centauri b, where it could keep itself warm near a natural nuclear furnace for up to 10 trillion years into the future.
Several caveats apply, chiefly that heavy elements weren't produced for a while in significant quantity, but were produced fairly early on due to large stars exploding relatively quickly, when they were merely tens of millions of years old, if that.
Ejection: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-25736-5_3
Reentry: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Not to mention the constant trickle of "X survived in space" stories that we get every time someone bothers to collect and culture a sample. The amount of success at every stage with, frankly, very little effort spent tuning the conditions, multiplied by "bacteria are everywhere" makes hitchhiking less crazy than it sounds. Our intuition misleads us because bacteria are so much better at handling acceleration (easy if you're small) and dessiccation (everywhere is a desert if you're small) than anything we are used to thinking about.
An upper bound probability for the RNA world hypothesis is 10^-1018. A reasonable interpretation is that the RNA world hypothesis is impossible in the real world.
You are being severely restricted by your imagination. You seem to have presupposed that random abiogenesis is impossible and reconstructed the facts to support that claim because you can't conceive of the alternative.
Planets are really, really big. Any one chemical reaction is on the scale of molecules. If you let those figures compound for a long time, the number of total reactions gets very, very large. Far larger than you imagine. Many times more.
1. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/first-direct-chemical-sy...
But if the "solution" could be composed of a couple of separate smaller parts, that would be stable and linger for a long time, it would be much easier. 40 nucleotides have 10^24 combinations, so only 10^7 tries per second would be needed... over a billion years. And all of the necessary parts would need to be created and then meet in the same place and somehow combine. So, still not easy, but this case doesn't sound so outrageously improbable.
In the end, maybe it is extremely improbable for life to happen, and only one in 10^n suitable planets develops life, and Earth was just very lucky to experience this peculiar phenomenon.
I don't see the word "random" anywhere in the article. By random maybe you mean it's seemingly indeterministic? Regardless of the nature of the underlying process, at the classical level, the environment acts as a deterministic filter, ie, other chemical processes.
The TLDR of his theory is that life originated in alkaline hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, where natural energy gradients could have driven primitive metabolic reactions before the development of DNA.
Book goes into a lot of layperson-accessible detail.
Why spend time making this point? Nobody believes that this occurred randomly: it occurred via evolution.
The mutations are a random part of evolution, but the process overall is not random at all - no more so than your immune system (which randomly generates antibodies, then selects against those that target innate epitopes), or stable diffusion (which starts with random noise, then marches up a gradient toward a known target).
It is the selection step that makes similar processes non-random, because a random selection step would just be noise.
Evolution is just a sort of way for low entropy structures to form from randomness. It’s still random all the way down.
The man is just trying to reconcile a belief in god with the scientific reality. He needs to bend the evidence to fit his identity he cannot bend his identity to fit the evidence because that could break his identity. The fact he commented here on this topic is sort of unhinged. It seems like the article presented evidence that is strikingly against his world view and he needed to justify something in order to prevent his identity from rearranging itself according to external reality.
is not a valid inference. It is a category error dressed up as science.
Demonstrating that intelligence can produce life (or a lifelike system) is the opposite of demonstrating that intelligence is not required. It is literally evidence in favor of the design hypothesis, not against it. The only thing it would rule out is a very narrow version of young-earth creationism that says “God would never let any natural process produce life under any circumstance”.
Also, scaling from “possible on a planet” to “therefore no intelligence was required anywhere in the process” is still the same non sequitur, moving the (apparent) design from the origin of the first cell to the origin of the cosmic initial conditions and laws that permit planetary abiogenesis.
This equation of “intelligent design = creationism = Adam and Eve” is a cultural artifact of the American culture wars, not a reflection of logic or the global scientific community.
That is not my chain of reasoning, nor has lab created life has ever been created. So what you're saying can never be used as valid proof of creationism. And I certainly did not use that evidence to make such a claim. Additionally I never said god does exist or does not exist.
The point I was making was that the complexity curve has to meet the floor at some point, and thinking about how this happens and what that looks like is interesting.
I was familiar with RNA world but wasn't aware of how much progress had been made.