Problem is most of us learn biology and evolution from the 6th to 8th grade so we have a middle school understanding of the concept that is never really increased because most of us are not biologists. But when you advance your understanding of the subject, you really just get additional questions and problems with fewer and fewer answers unless you are willing to be blindly dogmatic about concepts and accept that we can’t explain it but it must have happened like that.
And that seems to be true across almost all of the sciences, which is our best ability to answer all these questions. But it’s hard for most people to study something that is the “path to the answer” when it still doesn’t completely get you to the actual answer. In some ways we are making amazing discoveries and figuring out complex problems, but the solution to the really simple questions still seem to elude us.
And abiogenesis is a statistical impossibility. Just the formation of a single protein, let alone the mindbogglingly more complex ability to self-replicate.
I hear ya. Looking at the math when it comes to the chemistry and eventually biology, is REALLY convincing, however. I’m not going to try and bore you with it, but the probabilities are well beyond absurdities. 1x10 to the -180th power (or something similar) for the formation of a sufficiently long amino, which then has to fold itself PERFECTLY in order to be a protein. Which then has to find a BUNCH of other proteins, that just so happen to be there , at the exact same time.
And all of that eventually has to form proteins, that contain INFORMATION. Which is really the big thing. Information that leads for self replication, metabolism, and on and on. The idea of Irreducible complexity comes up. Multiple functional systems have to all pop into existence simultaneously, and all actually function.
The numbers are truly difficult to imagine. And although not strictly impossible, they are as close to impossible, as being practically so.
Sorry, if this all sounds a bit disjointed. Just waking up, and trying to respond before taking off.
All life has certain things in common, for it to be considered “life.” According to NASA, those things are: Cellular organization, the ability to reproduce, growth & development, energy use, homeostasis, response to their environment, and the ability to adapt.
For those things to come into existence abiogenically, they have to overcome all the same obstacles, and here’s the absolutely critical part: they have to do so simultaneously! Obstacles that are, for all practical purpose, statistically insurmountable. And for that to happen, not just once, but “thousands or millions” of times is simply fantasy.
I’ve read some estimates of 70 quintillion planets in the universe. In that context, intelligent life on millions or billions of planets over the last 13 billion years sounds reasonable. So, where is everybody? One thing seems certain… bs artists casting clickbait on YouTube haven’t a clue.
And yet somehow, life finds a way. Tardigrades shouldn’t be able to exist in the vacuum of space, but they do. Nematodes shouldn’t be able to survive being frozen for 45,000 years, but they do. It’s possible extremophiles exist on asteroids, so any number of planets in the “goldilocks zone” probably harbor nanobes, prokaryotes and even eukaryotes. Once you’ve made that leap into life, the possibilities for more complex forms of life increase exponentially.
Another thing to consider is the function of time. Excluding black holes, time exists throughout the universe in a fairly linear fashion. There’s little reason to believe time, space and the elements are radically different in other star systems, much less other galaxies. So the function of life and how far it evolves is probably a function of where the orbital masses are when the conditions to support life exist. That “when” is finite and that includes this marble. It’s likely that in a couple billion years, the conditions on earth will no longer support eukaryotic life. That won’t mean it doesn’t or didn’t exist, it just means anything examining the earth in that timeline will have missed the goldilocks zone timeline.
I’d say we’re a long way from being able to even evaluate whether a particular mass in space meets the criteria for supporting life at that time, yet the likelihood that a mass supported life at some point in its timeline is significant. Given the near infinite possibilities within the known universe, the odds that intelligent life exists on some other planet is pretty high. The real question is whether we’ll find any before life on earth ceases to exist, and whether we’d even be able to reach it with more than just a message in a bottle from a long extinct species.
I’m not talking about the ability of life to survive extreme conditions; I’m talking about abiogenesis. The ability of life to form from non-life in the first place. The numbers of potentially life supporting planets and age of the universe sound pretty compelling until you look at the numbers I was referencing. 70 quintillion is as an absolutely astronomical, and pretty much unimaginable number. Surely life would have formed somewhere among that 70 quintillion, right?
Well, the numbers I’m talking about dwarf 70 quintillion in the same way that a single person on this planet is dwarfed by the universe, but many many times over. 70 quintillion has 19 zeros. A lot of zeros. The numbers I’m talking about, for the formation of a single protein have 180 zeros. Yeah. Numbers that will fit 70 quintillion so many times, we probably don’t even have a name for them. But suffice it to say that number has approximately 167 zeros behind it.
For a little perspective, the number of atoms in the entire universe is speculated to be between 1x10^78 and 1x10^82. For a bit of reference, the number of atoms in the human body is around 7x10^27. As you can see, the difference in the number of atoms in a human compared to the number in the entire universe is many times closer in comparison.
Not saying it is categorically impossible, rather that “implausible” is the greatest understatement I can think of at the moment.
ETA: I don’t remember where now, but I do remember seeing calculations based on strict probability of single celled organism forming, and if memory serves, those numbers were less than 1 in 1x10^10^100. (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 zeroes.)
Something happened. We keep coming up with a something that relates to what we see about life after the fact. But we don’t know anything really about what that something was. And statistical odds are kind of meaningless when we don’t even know what the something was. But something DID happen.
We clearly have not been able to get organic goo to come to life in a lab so something is still not there.
N = 1 planet with life on it we know of, any attempt at statistical likelihood is a WAG at best. It’s not even worth discussing at this point. The claim abiogenesis is “statistically impossible” is offset by the fact we are here. Same thing we get to every time we go down this road, three choices:
Abiogenesis
God(s) did it
Panspermia (1)
I try to remian open to all three, understand why it’s assumed by the sci/med community it’s the first one until evidence suggests otherwise.
That’s pretty much where I arrive at every single time, just leaving the door open for some “fourth option” that we can’t even conceptualize at this point. I tend to lean towards panspermia / cosmic seeding because statistically it would best explain how life could be found on all those disparate planets if in fact life is found widely distributed throughout the universe because it seems like our planet isn’t fantastically unique from many others that should exist out there. Of course that is based upon completely unsubstantiated belief only.
It would just strike me as terribly odd if we were in fact IT and the only thing happening in the entire universe and here I’m talking about life at the biological level, not space ship operators. But many places should be loaded with bacteria and similar life forms and if we are very, very lucky possibly algae or plankton.
Technically the moon hosted life for a time, but we did it unintentionally so that’s actually 2 for panspermia.
All kinds of things are possible, including those we can’t even imagine. But it’s hard enough to explain how simple life might have self materialized one day, some place, some where for the first time. Prime movers that put them into place are even more difficult to explain.
Just brings us back to our usual problem of speculating based on n = 1 we have. It may be under the right conditions (distance from a star, liquid water, various substrates needed for life that are quite common, etc) and enough time *, life is virtually inevitable and common, or it’s rare under any condition but exists elsewhere (view I favor), or so rare we are all alone. It can’t be answered at this time regardless of the WAG bantered around as to probabilities.
Human mind can’t process numbers that large, be it trillions of galaxies containing trillions of planets, billions of years, etc and is rejected.
Yep, I really don’t see any argument there. Pretty much where I keep landing too. I’ve long accepted that we probably won’t be getting these answers but it’s always fun to think about and while speculation is limited to the point of being almost pointless, it’s an entertaining topic.