From: hal@finney.org
Date: Sat Sep 11 1999 - 09:22:57 MDT
J. R. Molloy, <jr@shasta.com>, writes:
> But on the basis of what scientists have found necessary for life to get
> going, I tend to think life springs up more commonly than anthropic-minded
> folks would like to believe.
It's true that many of the basic building blocks of life, like amino acids,
form pretty easily. But actually assembling some kind of self-replicating
system or cycle is still not well understood. In particular, it is very
hard to find non-biological pathways to synthesize RNA or DNA. At this
point it looks unlikely that the first self-replicating systems used these
chemicals, but there aren't any well accepted alternatives.
There is still a very hard step here, going from the building blocks
to self-replication. Until we have come up with some convincing way
to bridge this gap I don't think we can say that scientific evidence
suggests that life is likely to be common.
Hal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:06 MST