Doesn’t the anthropic effects also imply that abiogenesis is easier than studies suggest it is, for reasons that we don’t yet understand?
If the chance of our science looking like it does, given that abiogenesis is trivial, is as high as one in ten billion, wouldn’t the anthropic effect make it an even proposition? Is the evidence against abiogenesis being trivial really 10,000,000,000:1 against? (roughly p=10^-11)?
The question could reformulated: “what is more easy: panspermia or abiogenesis?” If we look at Earth, we could see that “panspermia” between different parts of the Earth worked better than abiogenesis. We have only one type of life here.
The answer could come from Mars: if we find life there, and it is of different origin than one on Earth, than abiogenesis is easier. If there will be ours type of life, it will be evidence for easier panspermia.
Also, this article suggests irreducible difficulty of abiogenesis: it needs random generation of the correct string of around 100 bases long. This difficulty is rather general and could be applied to any universe: any life form should pass through random generation of the first self-replicating unit. Such random generation requires enormous amount of attempts.
Here we speak about minimum length of self-replicating string. If first such string 100 bits and the next is 110, the second one will be 1000 times less probable during random generation of strings. Thus longer strings could be ignored.
Doesn’t the anthropic effects also imply that abiogenesis is easier than studies suggest it is, for reasons that we don’t yet understand?
If the chance of our science looking like it does, given that abiogenesis is trivial, is as high as one in ten billion, wouldn’t the anthropic effect make it an even proposition? Is the evidence against abiogenesis being trivial really 10,000,000,000:1 against? (roughly p=10^-11)?
The question could reformulated: “what is more easy: panspermia or abiogenesis?” If we look at Earth, we could see that “panspermia” between different parts of the Earth worked better than abiogenesis. We have only one type of life here.
The answer could come from Mars: if we find life there, and it is of different origin than one on Earth, than abiogenesis is easier. If there will be ours type of life, it will be evidence for easier panspermia.
Also, this article suggests irreducible difficulty of abiogenesis: it needs random generation of the correct string of around 100 bases long. This difficulty is rather general and could be applied to any universe: any life form should pass through random generation of the first self-replicating unit. Such random generation requires enormous amount of attempts.
Which is “the correct string”? Many different strings could self replicate.
Only if the fraction of molecules that can self replicate is microscopic.
Here we speak about minimum length of self-replicating string. If first such string 100 bits and the next is 110, the second one will be 1000 times less probable during random generation of strings. Thus longer strings could be ignored.