https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

This answer is currently unknown. For example, the argument you give for why it could not be hydrogen particles is faulty. Just because we cannot replicate something in a lab right now does not entail that we can never do it. Even if we humans can never practically do it (it requires a level of resources and precision that humans just cannot replicate), that does not mean that it is impossible and never happened.

Even statements like, "Before the Big Bang, there was nothing," are dubious. The singularity in the Big Bang model, to my understanding, is simply the point where our current models and understandings breakdown and cease to function. There may be something beyond the Big Bang, but we have no way of knowing this right now.

Difficult to answer your question. You're not talking in minutes but in terms of billions of years. I think the distance of time has obscured important clues to discovering the answer.

Every attempt to answer this question is going to be naked speculation.

God did it, duh.

I'm going with aliens.

Before the Big Bang, there was nothing — Ellie

Stop reading Lawrence Krauss and his ilk please.

Life, as we would define it, didn't begin in this part of this galaxy until:

a) enough supernovae had produced enough of the heavier elements all the way up to gold and uranium
b) this elemental dust started to accumulate in the vicinity of what would one day become our solar system
c) the dust formed a disk, and the disk began to get lumpy, and the lumps started forming our star and planets
d) the planets formed spheres, the sun ignited
e) debris (heavy lumps of matter congealed in the disk) began to be attracted to the heavy planets and collided with them, heating the planets, and adding more matter (like water)
f) cycles of collision, heating, additions of matter including water, cooling, eventually produced some planets that were wet and reasonably cool.
g) geological processes kept the early planets (like earth) in physical turmoil for quite a long time — The Ancient Crank

This all took... billions of years before the environment on earth was stable enough for anything like even an inanimate large complicated molecule to survive. The large complicated molecules were not life.

At some point -- we don't know when, we don't know how, we don't know where on earth, inanimate matter came together, somehow, and through unknown steps, became "capable of duplicating itself". Life was created.

It may have been in a cool mud hole; it may have been in a hot under-sea vent. We don't know. We do know that the early life forms existed in a reasonably stable environment that we would find utterly intolerable. But, as it happened, the early life transformed the atmosphere by throwing off large amounts of a very poisonous gas--oxygen. New forms of life evolved that could use oxygen. We eventually evolved from organisms that could utilize oxygen and expelled carbon dioxide.

And in the fullness of time, it came to pass that we are here, wondering how the hell we got here.

"Life" may have begun in other places before and after life formed in this spot. It's entirely possible, and very difficulty to investigate because everything in the universe is very far apart.

My favourite theory is 'panspermia'. It is the view that proto-organic material exists throughout the Universe, and that when the right conditions arise on some planet, life begins to evolve according to local conditions. It was put forward in a book by cosmologists Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickhamrasinghe in a 1970's book called The Intelligent Universe, of which I have a copy. He argues (pretty persuasively, I must say) that many of the vast clouds of interstellar dust and gas observed by astronomers contain large amounts of proto-organic material, that might be carried around on comets. So the name 'panspermia' conveys the idea that comets might be concieved as sperm, and the fertile earth as an ovum:



I find that idea satisfying on many levels. First, because it suits our scientific age. Second, because it doesn't rule out a religious view of life (although a lot nearer to Giordano Bruno's than to orthodox Christianity's).

I think Fred Hoyle came up with the idea, because it was he who had discovered 'carbon resonance', which is the uncanny attribute of the carbon atom that make it suitable as a basis for complex matter and life, as part of his ground-breaking work on nucleosynthesis. This anticipated some of the ideas in the later 'anthropic cosmological principle' (indeed, when Hoyle discovered carbon resonance, he said 'this is a fix'.)

In any case, one of the implications of the idea is that some forms of life might have different stellar origins than others - something which is tantalisingly suggested by the recent discovery that octopus DNA basically seems alien.

Fred Hoyle got a bad reputation because he was (presumably) wrong about the "big bang". He preferred the "steady state theory". It isn't like he came up with one idea in his life that happened to be wrong. He was a notable thinker.

Panspermia is an attractive theory from several POV, but it doesn't solve the problem of how organic molecules (like methane and a bunch of other ones) became life. Some process which we have not grasped took place which combined non-living matter in such a way, over time, that it could reproduce its simple 'self'.

t doesn't solve the problem of how organic molecules (like methane and a bunch of other ones) became life. — Bitter Crank

Hoyle had his eccentricities but I think he is still widely respected. I don't think he is regarded as a crackpot.

But in respect of the origin of DNA - maybe we'll never know! It might be a problem of the same order as: why, when the Universe emerged from the Singularity, did it have attributes such that stars>matter>life were able to be formed? From a scientific viewpoint, there ought not to be any reason why it turned out this way, it seems it could just as easily, in fact much more likely, just have been a soup of random stuff. So, I don't know if 'reverse-engineering' the process by which DNA came to be, would be any easier than reverse-engineering the actual physics of the Big Bang, which itself has a number of huge questions over it.

But I think the 'warm little pond' type of neo-darwinism, which imagines life as a kind of chemical reaction that then gets elaborated by the 'darwinian algorithm' is a hopeless over-simplification.

//ps//actually having read the Wikipedia article on Hoyle, I note the following:

After his resignation from Cambridge, Hoyle moved to the Lake District and occupied his time with a mix of treks across the moors, writing books, visiting research centres around the world, and working on science ideas that have been nearly-universally rejected.

I think panspermia was probably one of those. But I still like it. X-) //

Before the Big Bang, there was nothing. — Ellie

The Big bang is a very dubious concept. It's what an inadequate understanding of time and space leads us to believe in.

But... how do you know the Big Bango is dubious and inadequate. You got something better? (I certainly don't -- but then, Hoyle's Steady State theory would be fine by me.)

But I think the 'warm little pond' type of neo-darwinism, which imagines life as a kind of chemical reaction that then gets elaborated by the 'darwinian algorithm' is a hopeless over-simplification. — Wayfarer

I don't think Darwin applies to the beginning of life, which before it becomes life is only chemistry.

Right, the warm slop in a ditch theory seems to not be the best bet, just because there is probably not enough going on in the hole, not enough energy, not enough chemical activity. Lately (maybe because it's just "hotter") the super-heated deep see vents are a preferred bet.

The deep sea vent bet is that all these chemicals and intense heat provided both raw material and sufficient energy to make something happen. The life that resulted would have derived it's energy from the active chemicals in the water, like sulfur. It wouldn't be very much like the carbon cycle bacteria of a later age. But it would be alive, reproducing, growing.

Don't ask me how. Don't know.

I believe it is General Relativity theory which leads to the conclusion of the Big Bang, and I don't think that this theory provides us with a good representation of the relationship between space and time. So I think the Big Bang theory is a product of this inadequate understanding of the relationship between space and time.

As funny as it sounds, this may be actually true.

Of course I'm talking about the very beginning of the universe itself - the right sort of natural laws, the right kind of stuff, the right location, the right time, the right whathaveyou. It's just too much of a coincidence to say it's just chance.

The big bang happened folks. It was undeniably the heat event that is responsible for the cosmos at large. "Beginning", "Everything", "Infinite", these are red-herrings; we know an expansion happened.

So here we sit, some 13.75 billion years later, scratching shaking our heads and asking "how" at every turn.

We don't know how life formed, but we know that it did: that's the problem. And some of the possibilities are fascinating.

An earthly primordial soup is one possibility. 3-4 Billion years ago the right atoms and molecules were bouncing around in a naturally occurring mixture of inanimate elements and the first "self-replicating coil of proto-DNA" occurred by chance. Something to note here is that only a few chemical bonds would be required to set up a molecular structure that replicates by assimilating more molecules from the environment into it's structure (the same principle that allows a large ice crystal to form and grow from a single seed crystal). The rest is time and more chance.

It occurs from this that we're either very lucky or that life isn't such an unlikely combination of matter that comes about from the random mixing of elements. It's very tempting to say that since life seems like a very unlikely random combination of matter, that it's therefore more likely that life originated from elsewhere in the universe and drifted to earth, but because we only have one data point in our sample group (we won the lottery of being alive) in reality this tells us nothing about the prevalence of life elsewhere other than "it's possible".

I do however choose to subscribe to the notion of pan-spermia (it's of no real consequence to do so). Why settle for proverbial volcanic muck when you can imagine whole nebulae of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon? We know that extremophile bacteria (and even multi-cellular organisms) can survive the vacuum of space, so assuming there is or was enough "mixing" of matter within a galaxy or even inter-galactically, then why could old and distant genetic material not start reproducing again once it is carried to a suitable environment?

It makes abiogenesis easier to imagine (while explaining life on earth) in light of how complicated all carbon based life actually is; the more unlikely abiogenesis seems, the more I use pan-spermia to make the odds seem reasonable.

Logically though, whether or not abiogenesis is super unlikely (we're alone in the universe), or actually not uncommon at all (the universe is downright lousy with life), the mere fact that we are here and are alive can be of no help in making a determination either way. If I understood @Wayfarer correctly, when Hoyle said "the fix is in" after discovering the uncanny properties of carbon which makes it necessary and uniquely suited to facilitating life, he was wrong to think that this meant anything beyond an understanding and description of existing genetic mechanisms. It's not surprising that in discovering the physical mechanisms of our own biology we discover parts which play fundamental roles, if non-carbon based life emerged elsewhere, it too would incorporate unique properties of diverse parts in it's composition. Lightning is strikingly uncanny in the natural world, but we don't look at it as if it's existence is some miraculous mystery (oh but we used to) because we understand it. We understand the conditions that cause lightning, how it works, and now it's no more mysterious than a polished river stone. Until we actually understand abiogenesis there will be no satisfying answer, only mystery.

Our only consolation is mystery and speculation, so toward that end:

Pan-spermia is a compelling theory, but what if Hoyle was right in that carbon based biological life was designed, built in a lab, and sent out into the universe to replicate and infest goldy-locks planets toward some unknown end. What might our designers look like?

And as we all realize by now in our heart of hearts, machine based artificial intelligence will be the only form of life suited to explore deep space. Self-replicating machines, if robust enough, could represent the genesis of a form of life that could make biological life look like swamp grass.

Is that how evolution really happens?

I think it's interesting that the 'origin of life' is the one type of event for which the favoured scientific explanation is that it was a chance occurence. In all other matters, one expects a scientific hypothesis to provide a cause, or a reason, for what it seeks to explain. But not here.

If I understood Wayfarer correctly, when Hoyle said "the fix is in" after discovering the uncanny properties of carbon which makes it necessary and uniquely suited to facilitating life, he was wrong to think that this meant anything beyond an understanding and description of existing genetic mechanisms. — VagabondSpectre

It was nothing about genes at all - it was about why matter exists. In the very early universe, there was no matter at all; the matter you and I and everything around us consists of, was the result of stellar explosions ('we are stardust'). But those in turn rely on a sequence of apparently unlikely events.

Hoyle knew that nuclear reactions can sometimes be greatly amplified by the phenomenon of resonance, similar to the way that an opera singer can shatter a glass by hitting a certain pitch. Carbon nuclei can resonate too, if the masses and energies of the colliding particles that go to form it are just right. Hoyle worked backwards — he knew the particle masses and energies, and he used them to predict the existence of a carbon resonance.

He then pestered Willy Fowler, a nuclear physicist at the California Institute of Technology, to do an experiment to test the prediction. And sure enough, Hoyle was right. Carbon has a resonant state at exactly the right energy to enable stars to manufacture abundant carbon, and thereby seed the universe with this life-encouraging substance.

Hoyle immediately realised just what a close-run thing this mechanism is. Like Baby Bear’s porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the energy of the carbon resonance has to be “just right”. Too high or too low, and the consequences for life would be catastrophic.

So what determines the carbon resonance? Ultimately it depends on the strength of the force that binds protons and neutrons together in the nucleus. That force is one of the unexplained parameters of basic physics — one of the knobs on the Designer Machine if you like. If the strength of the force that determined the carbon resonance was only a fraction stronger or weaker, it is doubtful there would be observers in the universe to worry about the distinct absence of carbon.

Hoyle himself was deeply impressed by this discovery. “It looks like a put-up job,” he quipped. “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics,” he later wrote. — Paul Davies

This is, I think, an early anticipation of the so-called 'anthropic principle'. The point of this is that the circumstances that enabled the formation of matter, and thereafter living organisms, is dependent upon very specific attributes of a small number of constants, which is the theme of books such as Lloyd Rees' Just Six Numbers or the more recent A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos, Barnes and Lewis.

I'll repost this link to a BBC article that gives a popular overview of the history and the current state of the origin of life research:

The secret of how life on Earth began

Interesting, from an engineering viewpoint.

The big bang happened folks. It was undeniably the heat event that is responsible for the cosmos at large. "Beginning", "Everything", "Infinite", these are red-herrings; we know an expansion happened. — VagabondSpectre

Sure, you can say "expansion happened", it's happening right now. But we're just referring to something which we have a completely inadequate understanding of. And if you think that you understand expansion, answer for yourself, what it is that is expanding.

Great article, but it left me puzzled, not for the obvious reasons but rather why it did not mention anything about Synthetic Biology, and especially JC Venter. I understand that the people in the article you referenced are looking for the origin of life, how it could have happened and it sounds like it may be an emergent phenomena from what I read. I kept on waiting for the author to bring Venter's work his effort to create synthetic life, even if only in passing, seems like both searches ought to be related, but I don't know enough about it. So why, if you think there is a reason?

It's just too much of a coincidence to say it's just chance. — TheMadFool

What makes you say this?

answer for yourself, what it is that is expanding — Metaphysician Undercover

Space itself is expanding.

Here's the thing though: All the energy we can observe we are damn sure was very hot and very compressed in the moments after the big bang, whatever it was. Whatever caused the big bang, we don't know. When we say that the big bang is responsible for "all that exists", we only mean to say that the big bang is responsible for the space we occupy and the matter that fills it. There could be a multiverse of big bangs, we don't know.

All we know is that we're living in the energetic diffusion of a 13.75 billion year event that we can only describe as very hot and very dense. This understanding might be inadequate, but it is nonetheless accurate.

But of course! the strength of gravitational constants and the strong/weak nuclear forces need to be exactly what they are for "matter" to exist because "matter" as we know it is what came to exist under the current physical settings. If they were different, it's possible fundamentally different forms of matter would have emerged in their place, and subsequent intelligence composed of said matter would be still be amazed at how finely tuned their laws of physics are.

That carbon is abundantly produced in stars, in part thanks to the finely tuned laws of physics, makes carbon prevalent, which makes it readily available as a candidate for use in the composition of life. If things other than carbon were abundantly produced in it's place, perhaps life could/did/would emerge using them as a base instead.

The anthropic principle takes the way the world is and the way humans are, and comes up with the idea that we were made for each-other. But since human life evolved and emerged within the constraints of the world that does happen to exist, our biology is necessarily built upon and around those physical constraints. The atmosphere isn't breathable air because that's what is needed for life, we use air because that's what was available for life to utilize as it evolved in an oxygen rich environment.

In more ways than we know the physical laws and constants which govern the cosmos played a role in creating the specific and local environment we find ourselves in. But in the same way that life on earth evolved around the conditions of the earth, the interaction of matter in the cosmos evolved around the laws of physics. The matter that does exist is an expression of the laws of physics in the same way that life on earth is an expression of what can survive there.

I think it's interesting that the 'origin of life' is the one type of event for which the favoured scientific explanation is that it was a chance occurence. In all other matters, one expects a scientific hypothesis to provide a cause, or a reason, for what it seeks to explain. But not here. — Wayfarer

Our perspective on the possibility of life is sort of like the possibility of precipitation except we know less about the conditions and physical processes which actually causes it to happen.

We forecast how likely or unlikely a specific event happening is, in this case, without ever having seen such an event happen and without understanding how it works. All we have is the hypothetical assumption that it can happen and did happen and a mixed bag of circumstantial guesswork.

The chance involved in abiogenesis is very much like weather prediction, except it concerns an event that is still theoretical. Predicting the probability of life is like trying to predict how likely it is for a storm to form using only "at least 1 storm has existed" as information to base that prediction from. If we had perfect meteorological knowledge and perfect weather monitoring sattelites, we could say with 100% certainty when and where the next storm would emerge because we would understand the physical processes.

Space itself is expanding. — VagabondSpectre

I don't think that's correct, because it is the distance between objects which is expanding, not objects themselves. Objects don't expand. If you think that there is a real entity called "space" existing between objects, which is expanding, then what about the space within objects? If an object consists of parts, with space between the parts, then the space between the parts ought to be expanding, and the object ought to be expanding as well as the space outside it. I think that the concept of spatial expansion is really just the result of our inadequate understanding of the relationships between space, time, matter, and gravity. The theories used here misguide us.

Actually, the space within objects may be expanding, just on a level and rate so low that we do not notice it. I'm not a physicist though, so I have no clue.

I don't think that's correct, because it is the distance between objects which is expanding, not objects themselves. Objects don't expand. If you think that there is a real entity called "space" existing between objects, which is expanding, then what about the space within objects? — Metaphysician Undercover

"Space" isn't your run of the mill object. I'm not a physicist, but I reckon it has something to do with local gravitational fields counteracting the force or effect of constant expansion of space. Objects don't fly apart because the forces binding them are greater than the forces pulling them apart.

I think that the concept of spatial expansion is really just the result of our inadequate understanding of the relationships between space, time, matter, and gravity. The theories used here misguide us. — Metaphysician Undercover

The evidence and experiment based theories guide us, literally and figuratively. We would not be able to make even GPS devices work without using highfalutin theories like general and special relativity. The concept of spatial expansion seems inadequate because our understanding of the universe is inadequate. We want things to be simple and in terms we readily comprehend but unfortunately the universe has unending complexity that stands in the way of adequate/complete/simple understanding. The seeming ridiculousness of some advanced scientific theories is something everyone would have liked to avoid, but the pursuit of truth takes us where it wants to go, not where we want to.

The chance involved in abiogenesis is very much like weather prediction, except it concerns an event that is still theoretical. Predicting the probability of life is like trying to predict how likely it is for a storm to form using only "at least 1 storm has existed" as information to base that prediction from. If we had perfect meteorological knowledge and perfect weather monitoring sattelites, we could say with 100% certainty when and where the next storm would emerge because we would understand the physical processes. — VagabondSpectre

The import of the fine-tuned universe argument, is simply that the causal chain which gives rise to life, doesn't begin at some arbitrary point, when circumstances come together to give rise to complex organic molecules. Those very circumstances also depend on prior causes and conditions, and when the causal chain is traced back, it appears inherent in the fabric of the cosmos.

If [the fundamental constants] were different, it's possible fundamentally different forms of matter would have emerged in their place, and subsequent intelligence composed of said matter would be still be amazed at how finely tuned their laws of physics are. — VagabondSpectre

But that doesn't really say anything. Sure, you can imagine a different kind of universe, but what these arguments are saying is that in order for any kind of matter to exist, then ... .

What these observations do, is undermine the notion that 'life arose by chance'. There is an element of chance, but chance is only meaningful when there are various possibilities, and for there to be domain of possibility, something has to exist already.

All we know is that we're living in the energetic diffusion of a 13.75 billion year event that we can only describe as very hot and very dense. — VagabondSpectre

Just curious, what is your warrant for claiming that we know this? It is obviously a belief; and given certain presuppositions, it is justified; but what makes you so confident that it is true?

Great article, but it left me puzzled, not for the obvious reasons but rather why it did not mention anything about Synthetic Biology, and especially JC Venter. I understand that the people in the article you referenced are looking for the origin of life, how it could have happened and it sounds like it may be an emergent phenomena from what I read. I kept on waiting for the author to bring Venter's work his effort to create synthetic life, even if only in passing, seems like both searches ought to be related, but I don't know enough about it. So why, if you think there is a reason? — Cavacava

Why do you think Venter's work is relevant to the OOL research? In the classic Miller-Urey and similar experiments, researchers were trying to produce - not life, but precursor organics at least - under "natural" conditions that they thought were present on Earth when life began. Venter's team isn't trying to do anything of the sort. They are doing bioengineering using all the latest tools, materials and techniques.

And they aren't really producing life from scratch - there's rather too much hype about their results, impressive as they are. I suppose if someone did pull off such a feat - actually assembling a living organism from non-living components, as opposed to modifying and reassembling parts of living organisms - that would be a convincing argument against vitalism. But who takes vitalism seriously anyway? Not OOL researchers, for sure.