RE: Organic Molecules Found 400 Light Years From Earth
August 12, 2017 at 3:35 pm
(This post was last modified: August 12, 2017 at 3:35 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
Trying to unpack the disagreement here, and steer it onto a better course.....
Are we trying to gauge the relative "ease" of life arising out of organic chemistry? It's certainly easier than life arising out of inorganic chemistry, and for the reasons that brian suggested. Carbon is the stuff of life precisely because of how many bonds it's capable of making, just for starters. It has little competition on that count. Without that ability the complex organic compounds we see in our kind of life wouldn't be possible.
Silicon, maybe, but it wouldn't be as easy, and it just gets more difficult from there. Ultimately though, I don;t know that you're both using the same metrics or even talking about the same thing. It seems as though you're wondering whether or not abiogenesis is rare or common, rj - but I'm not sure that it matters either way in the context of brians response or the subject of contention...as we would only be discussing a rare natural event, or a common one. Both are natural. Life is organic chemistry either way - and even if god played in the dirt, he played with organic compounds, without which, life as we know it would not have been possible. Does it actually matter what stirred the soup, fundamentally?
Are we trying to gauge the relative "ease" of life arising out of organic chemistry? It's certainly easier than life arising out of inorganic chemistry, and for the reasons that brian suggested. Carbon is the stuff of life precisely because of how many bonds it's capable of making, just for starters. It has little competition on that count. Without that ability the complex organic compounds we see in our kind of life wouldn't be possible.
Silicon, maybe, but it wouldn't be as easy, and it just gets more difficult from there. Ultimately though, I don;t know that you're both using the same metrics or even talking about the same thing. It seems as though you're wondering whether or not abiogenesis is rare or common, rj - but I'm not sure that it matters either way in the context of brians response or the subject of contention...as we would only be discussing a rare natural event, or a common one. Both are natural. Life is organic chemistry either way - and even if god played in the dirt, he played with organic compounds, without which, life as we know it would not have been possible. Does it actually matter what stirred the soup, fundamentally?
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