: OK put it this way, how did life develop in the first place? It can't just
: pop up like that, from a rock. You have the big bang theory, yeah sure,
: but it doesn't explain at all how life can appear. Gigantic dead planets
: of air, water and earth can't just magically of evolution create a life
: form. That was more what I thought about, those small creatures in the
: sea, built on one or two cells. How did they came to be?
Wow, this OT thread is getting too heavy for me. Goran, you're getting into some heavy duty philosophy here, and into the very argumetn between science and religion. Personally, I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, but it has been some 50 or more years since the first experiments where scientists recreated earth's early atmosphere in a flask, sent high voltage discharges through it to simulate lightening and created organic molecules - the most basic building blocks of carbon-based life. Every chemical reaction that creates new molecules from others has an energy of activation and a probability of occurring, just based on the random nature of energy distributions from heat. Given the right ingredients in the soup, lipid bi-layers, the basis of the cell membrane, will form spontaneously and they will even form bubble-like structures that resemble cells and reproduce by budding. Is this life? No, but it's a step in the evolution of the most fundamental forms of life. What really gave life its start, however, was the formation of nucleic acids. This molecules, which have the ability to store energy among other things, have a natural ability to self-assemble chains of like molecules. They also have the ability to assemble protein sequences, some of which by pure random chance will have enzymatic properties that lower the energy of activation for other chemical reactions, speeding up the development of new molecules. Given enough time and the right environment, anything will happen. There's a great book called the River that Runs Uphill that chronicals two journeys - a raft trip by a group of famous scientists through the Grand Canyon, and the journey of life. In theory, life shouldn't form at all because it involves increasing entropy - it would be like a river flowing uphill. What makes life unique is that as improbable as the formation of complex organic molecules may be, each new complexity makes the next one more feasible. At our stage in evolution, the complexity of biologic systems is so significant that the propagation of life is inevitable - the river flows uphill.
