Topic: The Origin of Cellular Life on Earth - page 2. (Read 1757 times)

Oh man. If someone invented a "time viewer" I would give all my bitcoins and half my testicles for one!

I have watched the full first video now. And it seems, as I said in my first post above, that there is enough of an understanding of the primordial soup idea (although I didn't use the term "primordial soup" that is what it is about), that scientists are attempting to finally put together a plausible method that the whole process could have come about.

Up until now, all the ideas that had been formulated, were ideas only. There wasn't any complete enough scientific evidence that provided a clear way that it could have happened. It seems that some scientists think that they have found a way that really might have worked, one that they can back up scientifically.

Of course, without a time viewer or time machine, nobody can tell for sure if it happened this way. That's because there are too many variables that might have made things different than the way that they think it might have happened. Perhaps someday we might have a time viewer that we can use to actually use to take a look back.

I am a biologist, but it doesn't help. Where life comes from is one of those central issues in science that still does not have an answer. I am at work and could not watch the videos. However, it sounds like the "primordial soup" idea. That is where a mix of complex molecules start a chain reaction that leads to a replication of the original state.

That is what I learned in school, but I am no longer sure about.  I say this because, although we have been able to make organic molecules by simulating the early Earth since the 1930s, we have failed to create life. Something else is going on also. I have no clue what it is, but my guess is that it involves physics that we don't understand yet.

As far as we can tell, life on Earth is part of a single occurrence. Since then life has branched and evolved into countless varieties of the same phenomena. The differences between me and a tree are really trivial. We are just different expressions of the same molecule.

Mind blown.  


Well, not for all of us. I do not believe in scientific theories because of faith. I can do the experiment and PROVE the truth of something. No faith, testable results are all that science entertains.

Atheism isn't really a religion but it still hinges on a sort of blind trust that all assumptions thus forth are logical and rational even if they themselves cannot rationalize it, which makes it just as contingent on this faith factor as religion.

Sorry. I wasn't trying to trample on your religion. I was simply pointing out some things in the beginnings of the first video.

Boy, some of you atheists are touchy about your religion. And I suppose I would be about Christianity as well, if Christianity were simply based on blind faith.

What I don't understand is how atheists can hang onto a religion that so constantly says "maybe," "possibly," "if," and all kinds of other limiting factors that show that nobody really has any kind of a clue about the foundations of the religion. You guys are distinctly admirable in your bravery, blind though it may be.

Having read just the above 2 sentences, I already knew you were a religious fruitcake.


And this is where I stopped reading and clicked your ignore button.

I have watched about half of the first video so far. It isn't impressive. Throughout all of the language used, there permeates this "rope" - not a simple "thread" - that everything being talked about is uncertain. I think, so far, that the thing that they are looking for is a way to formulate a somewhat realistic idea of how life could have come about spontaneously, even though they don't have a clue if it happened this way or some other.

In other words, up until now there have been all kinds of ideas about evolution. Some of the ideas make sense, and some of the ideas don't. Science is trying to combine enough of the ideas that make sense, in such a way that they will finally have a potentially possible working method for life to have spontaneously emerged.

This working method won't be known to be the way that it happened, but rather, it will simply be one way that it almost for sure could have happened.

This is a shot of hope in the arm for the atheist religion. Up until now, atheism has been built purely on blind faith, simply because the "snippets" of science that seemed to point at evolution as being real, could never be combined in a way that could plausibly have worked. In other words, all the possible paths that evolution could have come about, building itself from inanimate material to the life that we see around us today, were so full of holes that nobody could know if any of them were even possible.

Well, it's a start. Gotta start somewhere. The first millimeter on a million mile trip.

Im not a chemist or biologist,  and a fair bit of this went over my head, but I found this series of lectures fascinating nontheless:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqPGOhXoprU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ5jh33OiOA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfq5-i8xoIU

It explains how chemistry and physics could have produced simple, RNA based life.

For the record, Im a firm atheist, but what little I know of how a (modern) cell works and how extremely unlikely it appears something that complicated  "just happened", always made me think it gave good ammunition to deists or people who want to believe life was seeded by aliens or whatever. Not that either proposition explains anything, its just that I doubted science would be able to explain it in my lifetime.

Anyway, seeing the above lecture, Im stunned to learn how simple and common chemical and physical processes make it entirely plausible that cell  based life just "happened". Or even "had to happen".  So much so, that Im even taking much more serious the odds of finding life within our solar system (like on Europa moon). Given the number of stars and planets in the universe, I never really doubted there is other life out there, but within our solar system, that seemed a huge stretch to me. But now I cant wait for us to drill in Europa or land on Titan.