An article mustering all the optimism it could begins with the story of the obsolete and misguided Miller and Urey experiment.
“Stanley Miller and Harold Urey famously reproduced the conditions that existed on Earth some four billion years ago. They mixed water, ammonia, methane, and hydrogen in a sealed flask, heating it and zapping it with sparks to simulate lightning. The experiment is famous because within a few days, the flask began to fill with complex organic molecules such as amino acids, which are the building blocks of life.”
The point is made that, “If the building blocks of life are simple to produce, then perhaps life itself might not be so hard to create. It raised the tentative possibility that life may arise in the universe wherever conditions permit.”
Not until the authors’ feel that the reader’s are sufficiently brainwashed with the optimism of evolution occurring do they reveal the caveats of their origin of life theory.
“But Since the precise conditions in which life evolved on Earth took another eight to nine billion years to emerge, amino acids cannot be a sign of life potential at all, as had been thought after the Urey-Miller experiment. “Their existence in samples is by no means an immediate precursor of life,” say Kauffman and co.”
“This also explains why attempts to extend experiments like Urey and Miller’s over months and years have never yielded anything interesting. Even computer simulations of the origin of life have never yielded clear evidence of how the step can be taken from amino acids to auto-catalytic chemical networks and then to self-reproducing molecules of life.”
“Clearly, there is much work to be done.”
Clearly, no matter how much work is done, it will never be enough to do that which is impossible.
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First evidence that amino acids formed soon after the Big Bang, by Emerging Technology from the arXiv, July 9, 2018, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611588/first-evidence-that-amino-acids-formed-soon-after-the-big-bang/
Ref: http://arxiv.org/abs/1806.06716: The Clock of Chemical Evolution
