🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1346@tdat.teradata.COM> swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen) writes:

> This last is an extremely unlikely requirement.  The basic upshot of the
> Urey experiment and its follow-ups is that organics form spontaneously
> under most non-oxidizing 'medium-energy' conditions.  The presence of
> organics in interstellar dust clouds just confirms this basic ubiquity.

The Miller-Urey experiment is widely acknowledged to be irrelevant,
as it assumed an atmosphere that likely bears little resemblance
to the early earth.  Specifically, methane and ammonia are unlikely
to have been abundant in the early atmosphere, as they are destroyed
within centuries by UV light.

When performed with more reasonable gas mixtures, the experiments have
much lower yields.  And, in any case, all that these experiments
indicate is that some of the basic molecules of life are rather stable
(and, importantly, that others are not), not that a particular source
is where they first came from.


> Now it is true that under current conditions life might have a problem
> developing, but since these oxidizing conditions were *caused* by life,
> this is not a particularly significant issue.

The unstated assumption here is that life would *not* have had a hard
time originating back then.  We simply don't know enough about how
life started to say this.


>Now, it is true that we do *not* know the exact range of temperatures
>and pressures under which the ubiquitous organics are able to generate
>life forms, but this is a much smaller level of uncertainty than you suggest.

Au contraire!  Our ignorance about origin of life is profound, and
very little progress has been made in dispelling it.  There is no
really plausible model for the origin of life.  We're missing at least
one, and possibly several, fundamental ideas.

	Paul F. Dietz
	dietz@cs.rochester.edu