Re: OT: Natural recycling at the origin of life

On 26/03/2024 04:13, Jan Panteltje wrote:

Natural recycling at the origin of life
  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240322145524.htm
Source:
  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Summary:
  How was complex life able to develop on the inhospitable early Earth?
  At the beginning there must have been ribonucleic acid (RNA) to carry the first genetic information.
  To build up complexity in their sequences, these biomolecules need to release water.
  On the early Earth, which was largely covered in seawater, that was not so easy to do.
 So, simple :-)

Given how quickly a misfolded protein managed to propagate as BSE when they scrimped on the cooking for cannibalistic cattle feed I suspect that self replicating RNA, proteins and peptides are fairly common.
However, life might still need a fair bit of luck to get started ab initio from entirely inorganic but common chemicals in molecular clouds.
One unusual feature of the Earth-Moon system is that it had large and variable tides with a monthly cycle (Moon orbited us closer and faster in the distant past). This has the effect of making rock pools that isolate from bulk seawater for variable lengths of time up to half a month so that the liquid can concentrate (and get warm in the sun).

 Then us, then chips, AI, what's next?

Fermi's Paradox suggests we are amongst the first in our galaxy to get this far. Otherwise robotic alien probes would be everywhere by now.
Incidentally we may be able to detect industrialised civilisations at a truly great distance if they follow the same path as we did.
Observing CFC's in the high atmosphere can pretty much only come from a civilisation that has mastered organofluorine chemistry. Fluorine is just too reactive and calcium fluoride so incredibly insoluble that it is all scavenged into an inert form very quickly even if some occurs in vulcanism. You have to separate it electrolytically from a molten salt eutectic mix (scary stuff it is too).
--
Martin Brown