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The Conundrum of Life's Origin

72 点作者 Brajeshwar4 个月前

9 条评论

A_D_E_P_T4 个月前
Amino acids are common enough -- glycine has been found in comets and, controversially, even in the interstellar medium. Other amino acids have also been found in comets.<p>Comet organics, under pressure, can turn into amino acids <i>in situ</i>: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.llnl.gov&#x2F;article&#x2F;36016&#x2F;amino-acids-could-be-produced-within-impacting-comets-bringing-life-earth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.llnl.gov&#x2F;article&#x2F;36016&#x2F;amino-acids-could-be-prod...</a><p>It&#x27;s also presumed that cometary ice bombardment is the source of Earth&#x27;s surface water, as ice or water present any earlier would have boiled off when the planet was young and hot.<p>It&#x27;s not much of a stretch to imagine that comets brought amino acids, organic compounds, and minerals to Earth as they were bringing water ice. A lot of those aminos and organics would turn into tar, but some would be protected from UV radiation by that same tar. With a heat source, maybe some lightning strikes, a good location, and a lot of luck, you get RNA...<p>What we can&#x27;t yet do is assign a probability or likelihood to this process. But the ingredients should be common enough.
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Ericson23144 个月前
I never like the emphasis on genetics and information in a lot of origin of life stuff. IMO it is too extensional; what is needed is good <i>intensional</i> reasoning.<p>At the heart of chemical life is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Autocatalysis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Autocatalysis</a>, this is a great intensional definition of the reproductive side. That just leaves the evolutionary side.<p>What do &quot;genetics&quot; achieve for reproduction. From the autocatalysis point of view, they create a <i>family</i> of &quot;nearby&quot; autocatalytic sets: because different nucleic acid sequences reproduce in much the same way, the conditions needed to propagate one should also propogate another. This in turn makes <i>safer mutations</i> and....Lamarckian inheritance! If you, a microrganism get a good mutation which makes you fit, and then you split, you pass that mutation on.<p>Genetics are sufficient for the above properties, but are they necessary? Probably not! We can probably find other things which have such a &quot;dense&#x2F;smooth mutation space&quot; with fewer local maxima traps. Perhaps it is fine to say such things definitionally encode information, but IMO information still comes second, philosophically.
thangalin4 个月前
My book dives into the timeline of life&#x27;s origins as well as summarizing how we know what we know about roughly when life started:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;impacts.to&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;lowres&#x2F;impacts.pdf#page=10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;impacts.to&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;lowres&#x2F;impacts.pdf#page=10</a><p>The little orange dot represents where the events happened along the timeline between the start of the universe and recent times.
yowayb4 个月前
The meanings of both life and intelligence have been obscured by human conceit. We simply cannot accept that we came from what is essentially a random process over eons (which makes it no less extraordinary, but imo far more understandable). The science and math of LLMs and GPTs has been around for a while, but it took time and effort (people putting stuff online plus GPUs) to finally make it usable.
m3kw94 个月前
Just think about it, a conscious being deciding what a life should be. There is certainly a bias towards how we were made.
A_D_E_P_T4 个月前
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;585kK" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;585kK</a>
standardly4 个月前
I have a layman theory on protocell organization. It can&#x27;t explain replication, but hear me out. So one of the most likely candidate locations for abiogenesis, purportedly, are hydrothermal vents. Now, consider Cymatics (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cymatics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cymatics</a>). Maybe you can draw the same conclusion I did.<p>Wave formations are a source of order amidst the chaos (pressure waves in this case). This may be testable, even. If it did hold any truth, then the popular, common mythos&#x27; of &quot;the Word&quot; or &quot;speaking things into existence&quot;, or creation via music etc... maybe was more intuitive than we realized :)
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ljsprague4 个月前
&gt;it has to be able to reproduce and evolve by natural selection<p>Not sure why something has to be able to evolve by natural selection in order to be considered alive.
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pinoy4204 个月前
I mean. It was God (whatever that means to you).
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