New theory of life

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   janesixposted 8 years ago

   Is life inevitable,due to the laws of nature?
   
   "The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life."
   
   "Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.” In a September paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics, he reported the theoretical minimum amount of dissipation that can occur during the self-replication of RNA molecules and bacterial cells, and showed that it is very close to the actual amounts these systems dissipate when replicating. He also showed that RNA, the nucleic acid that many scientists believe served as the precursor to DNA-based life, is a particularly cheap building material. Once RNA arose, he argues, its “Darwinian takeover” was perhaps not surprising."
   
   http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic … y-of-life/

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      Kathryn L Hillposted 8 years agoin reply to this

      Yes, life began in the deep blue sea
      And eventually ended up being me.
      But where did the microbes come from?
      Some say meteorites!
      But none of this is proved at all.
      The scientists aren't sure.

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         wildernessposted 8 years agoin reply to this

         Meteorites, Mars, comets, primordial soup...we'll never know with absolute surety.  Not unless we learn to time travel and watch it happen.

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            janesixposted 8 years agoin reply to this

            Unless it's an ongoing thing. Then we'd be able to replicate it in the lab.

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               wildernessposted 8 years agoin reply to this

               No - if it is possible that it was the soup, we can show that but we still can't show it was the soup.  Same thing for a meteorite or a comet.  Replicating what might have happened won't prove it did happen; just that it might have.

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                  janesixposted 8 years agoin reply to this

                  I agree with that, however what I'm saying is that it might be an ongoing process,and not just something that happened once, billions of years ago.
                  
                  It could be happening today, how would we know it? If we can figure that out (the rules of life), we could create it in the lab easily.
                  
                  I have doubts there was a one-time-only primordial soup scenario. I think life is just an inevitable part of the structure of the universe.

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                     wildernessposted 8 years agoin reply to this

                     And I tend to agree.  Given the conditions at the time, the life we know was probably inevitable and probably developed multiple times.  I think we'd have a really hard time proving that no other type of life (carbon/water/DNA based) is possible - there may have been 100 different forms of life produced on this old ball before one of them took precedence and eliminated the others.  And I really have little doubt that it is going on elsewhere in the universe even as you read this.

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                        janesixposted 8 years agoin reply to this

                        I think life is probably abundant in the universe, but it is probably in the form of simpler forms like bacteria. We are probably lucky on this planet to evolve such a variety of increasingly complex forms. Earth is likely a "garden of eden" type planet, with a lot of lucky breaks. Like having a great climate for producing and maintaining complex life. And having a large planet like Jupiter out there to vacuum up the majority of destructive comets etc. 
                        
                        I bet there is life out there, and we will find it on Titan etc.

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                           wildernessposted 8 years agoin reply to this

                           I disagree about the earth being "perfect" for life (although Jupiter and the moon are good points).  Rather, I think life will evolve, and to something higher than bacteria, most places it is even half way possible.  Titan, Europa, Enceladus and few other spots in the solar system.  I even think we'll probably find that Mars had life in the past and may still harbor simple life.

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   psycheskinnerposted 8 years ago

   Honestly we have no way of knowing.  We know how it happened here; we know how it did not happen on the other places we have data on.  But we have no idea whether or how it may have happened elsewhere which is needed to extrapolate any rules about what the necessary and sufficient causes of life arising on a planet are.

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      janesixposted 8 years agoin reply to this

      True, I am just speculating.

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