In OoL, there will be steps. Some could be easy, others potentially very hard.
By their very nature, the easier steps will be understood first. Understanding them therefore doesn't say much about how the hard the overall process is.
An analogy is those collect-all-the-letters games one sometimes sees from grocery stores or fast food restaurants. If you collect all the letters in some phrase, you win a big prize. When you start playing the game, the letters come quickly, and the phrase fills in promisingly. But there's one letter that never seems to show up. The contest ends and your phrase is still incomplete. What happened, of course, is that all the letters except that one were just distractions. That one letter was very rare and controlled how many times the prize would actually be awarded. The contest exploits the unconscious bias that the letters have to show up with the same probability. They're all just letters, right? There's a feeling that when you get a letter you're closer to winning, but unless it's that rare letter you're not significantly closer at all.
Just because a step is easy doesn't mean it's easy to understand and vice versa.
Just because you understand something doesn't you it's easy or hard.
Or to use your letter game:
You got an E, without knowing the phrase you don't know if it's a rare letter or a common one, especially if even don't know the language of the phrase.
"On early Earth, the reaction could have taken place in small pools or lakes of water, the authors said. Large oceans, though, would have probably diluted the concentration of the chemicals."
This has interesting implications for possibility of life in places like Enceladus or Europa--places that may not have any isolated areas for these chemicals to interact over long periods of time.
I'm so glad this has finally been pointed out professionally!! Every time I hear about life on Enceladus or Europa the very first thing I think about is the dilution problem. Maybe in pockets underneath the volcanic vents, but the heat would seem to rule that out, no?
It's pretty hard not to have _some_ capacity to have puddles or pockets of some sort. If nothing else, you can have infiltrates and cavities in rocks or ice, or pools/puddles/lakes on top of frozen areas.
By analogy, amino acids are to proteins what a pile of bricks are to a house. Have we made any progress on figuring out what could have possibly caused the amino acids to become arranged into proteins?
If you read between the lines, I know this sounds like an argument for creationism, but it's because I'm an atheist that I find the question so frustrating/compelling.
Even if you had the answer to that question, I think it should not soothe your atheism/creationism concerns. The bigger question would still remain on why anything exists at all.
> The bigger question would still remain on why anything exists at all.
Yet, if nothing existed, there would not be anyone asking the question. This doesn't actually answer the question, but it is funny to think about.
Many years ago I read a non-testable hypothesis that stuck with me. What is the simplest, most parsimonious explanation for why this universe exists? The most extreme end of simplicity would be that every self-consistent set of axioms forms the universe that can be derived from it.
For example, a universe may exist consisting only of the empty set. Another universe may consist of the natural numbers up to 42.
Our universe, with a significantly richer set of axioms, has led to an abundance of the hydrogen atom. And we all know that hydrogen is a colourless gas that, if left to its own devices in sufficient quantity and for long enough, progressively transforms and starts thinking about itself.
> if nothing existed, there would not be anyone asking the question
This is called the Anthropic Principle. I believe you can take it further, in that universes that develop intelligent life may develop the technological capabilities to create new ones (e.g via powerful colliders).
They essentially propose that RNA molecules would be ligated to a small number of amino acids and would then use them for catalysis, and from there evolved the ability to create proteins that are not covalently bound to RNA. So this bridges the RNA world with the RNA-peptide world, and from there it's much easier to conceive of how we arrived at modern biology.
There's a good reason to think that this was the path, since in all organisms today, tRNAs are ligated to single amino acids during translation.
not answering your question, but TIL that there are also GTP, UTP, and CTP, having somewhat similar functions, but each fulfilling one or more (much) smaller niches than ATP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleoside_triphosphate
Ever since Sagan showed the flask of chemicals getting zapped, creating a goo of amino acids and whatnot, I've wanted to know how life started.
Then I want to know the role of disruption in the emergence of us (intelligence). Randomizers cataclysmic events, plate tectonics, seasons, lunar tides, epochs, and so forth. Would evolution have stalled had there not always new niches being created? Should SETI be focused on planets (in the goldilocks zone) which have had pretty rough histories?
I wonder if AI could help us with the problem of how life started. Either through simulation or some extension of existing programs like the ones used for drug discovery and protein folding. I know AI is not some kind of panacea for difficult problems, but it might be able to suggest things like the experiment detailed in the article and predict results.
By their very nature, the easier steps will be understood first. Understanding them therefore doesn't say much about how the hard the overall process is.
An analogy is those collect-all-the-letters games one sometimes sees from grocery stores or fast food restaurants. If you collect all the letters in some phrase, you win a big prize. When you start playing the game, the letters come quickly, and the phrase fills in promisingly. But there's one letter that never seems to show up. The contest ends and your phrase is still incomplete. What happened, of course, is that all the letters except that one were just distractions. That one letter was very rare and controlled how many times the prize would actually be awarded. The contest exploits the unconscious bias that the letters have to show up with the same probability. They're all just letters, right? There's a feeling that when you get a letter you're closer to winning, but unless it's that rare letter you're not significantly closer at all.