The number of potential molecular compounds, or the number of possible DNA sequences, is astronomical. We have barely begun to explore.
Hate to say it, but most DNA sequences/molecular compounds are probably useless. The Library of Babel is far less than 0.000001% good novels, for instance.
Of course they are. The point is that there must be some amazing ones hiding in that enormous haystack.
Quoting Romer:
To see how far this kind of process can take us, imagine the ideal chemical refinery. It would convert an abundant, renewable resource into a product that humans value. It would be smaller than a car, mobile so that it could search out its own inputs, capable of maintaining the temperature necessary for its reactions within narrow bounds, and able to automatically heal most system failures. It would build replicas of itself for use after it wears out, and it would do all of this with little human supervision. All we would have to do is get it to stay still periodically so that we could hook up some pipes and drain off the final product.
This refinery already exists. It is the milk cow. Nature found this amazing way to arrange hydrogen, carbon, and a few other miscellaneous atoms by meandering along one particular evolutionary path of trial and error (albeit one that took hundreds of millions of years). Someone who had never heard of a cow or a bat probably would not believe that a hunk of atoms can turn grass into milk or navigate by echolocation as it flies around. Imagine all the amazing things that can be made out of atoms that simply have never been tried.
Hate to say it, but most DNA sequences/molecular compounds are probably useless. The Library of Babel is far less than 0.000001% good novels, for instance.
Of course they are. The point is that there must be some amazing ones hiding in that enormous haystack.
Quoting Romer:
https://paulromer.net/deep_structure_growth/