As I recall-though it's been many years-this was something of a premise in Farmer's Riverworld series. Once you've taken the first pass though historical mineral etc. resources, you don't really get a second pass.
Out of curiosity, if you reject religion, what other possibilities are there?
I don't think religion is needed at all for this. I also don't think this has to be a common thing (after all, here on Earth it only happened once, but it's also possible that once life is widespread it makes it very difficult for emergent new forms of life to take off).
The articles I read assert that life began just 500 million to 1 billion years after formation of earth. 3.5-4.1 billion years ago with an earth age of 4.5 billion.
Are you suggesting that abiogenesis didn’t start on earth, but self-replicating molecules started evolving in earths protoplanetary disc?
Serious question, haven’t encountered that theory before. It’s kinda panspermia-lite.
Presumably like your parent, I believed this was a discussion about the probability that life has originated elsewhere in the galaxy / universe, independently of life on Earth.
Nonuniform physics—call it colliding universes or whatever, but the processes that gave rise to life on Earth may not be possible anywhere in this universe now. Including labs on Earth!
Did I miss some big announcements? Where has anyone created life from inorganic material reactions in a highly controlled environment?
Serious question, not trolling.
Seems to me that would be an insta-Nobel.
Unless life originated directly at the formation of the universe and panspermia is how life got to this planet, the only logical explanation is that life somehow emerges from “nothing”. We don’t know the exact mechanism and it seems much more likely that life originates on a planet rather than in space & arriving at a planet. The “intelligent” panspermia explanation (i.e. aliens seeding life throughout the universe to preserve it) would still require an inorganic origin for life.
**Not my sub-field. Extremely complex models. Much is still unknown.
And if “out of nothing” is the baseline condition, the most likely explanation is that it happens where there’s a lot of energy to sustain it while not enough to kill it, which means planets at the boundary of thermal activity (since we need something more direct than photosynthesis which is a relatively complex capability that came late in Earth’s cycle as far as we know).
Trying to intuitively and logically reason about something with no answer in sight, all while assuming the truths of our era, may ultimately be pointless.
Our universe, logical though it may be, plays by its own rules, and many things will be simply irreconcilable until those rules are further elaborated on.
As an aside the big bang also does not really answer the prerequisite question of where the initial inorganic matter/energy came from. The idea there being some sort of a quantum fluctuation, which then begs the question of its origin. I suppose it's just turtles all the way down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_Space
And if the turtles feel bored out of their minds, they go full
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros and eat their own behinds.
Which solves the problem of recursion, hen&egg nicely.
Consider black holes, white holes, wisely.
The question of free will? Just checksum errors in the substrate.
Because entropy, of course!
Chill...
OK let's pretend to forget for a moment that we have no definition for "life". Here is what we know:
- tons of examples of life turning into non-life
- zero examples of non-life turning into life
- a crapton of non-life around us
- a lot of examples where life exists where we were thinking it should not be possible
I think it raises a bit the idea that life is in a way special and fragile at individual level but not that fragile as a whole.
It's a big mistake to say we have to run an experiment that produces living organisms from nothing to say we know how it works. And that likely took millions of years. That feels like an excuse to argue that it can't happen without some external power (not the sun, ha).
Our type of society is probably much much rarer because you need access to mineral and energy deposits to go through each technological phase. For example, because of all the mining we’ve done, if humanity were to disappear it’s highly likely the Earth would not sustain another technological society because all the “easy to get to” deposits of crucial metals & things like oil are gone and there’s no way to bootstrap a technological society (it’s possible other kinds of resources could be developed to build other kinds of technology so who knows).
I think based on our existing body of knowledge, life is likely extremely plentiful throughout the universe at one point in time or another. Some form of intelligent life is highly likely wherever we find any life that manages to stick around through bilions of years. A highly technological adept species of life though is highly likely an extreme rarity and a planet gets one shot at developing it. Whether any manages to escape their home planet remains an open question that likely only we will manage to answer over the next thousands of years if we make it that far.