Theoretical origin of life: review article (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, November 14, 2015, 00:02 (3297 days ago) @ David Turell

It points out how difficult the problem is:-http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/inside-a-new-effort-to-discover-lifes-origins/415278/-"To kick off the meeting, I'm going to do the only thing I can reasonably do, which is ask the dumbest scientific questions I can think of: Did life originate more than once 4 billion years ago? Do we know for sure that origins of life events aren't happening today, on the Earth? If life's origin was a process that took tens of millions of years, how can we hope to repeat that process in an experiment? And what do we even mean when we say that something is “alive”?-"The truth is that the question of life's origins is about as vexing a problem as science has ever faced. Ask a hundred random scientists to tell you how they think life originated and you will probably get a hundred slightly different answers. To compound matters, technology keeps opening new doors out of which new questions spill.-***-"Therein lies one of the most frustrating aspects of the study of the origins of life; juicy pieces of the puzzle appear all around us, but we still can't fit them together successfully. Even defining what life really is represents a challenge. Without a good quantitative measure of “aliveness,” it's actually difficult to talk about origins. That puts us in danger of falling into the ancient Greek philosophical mosh pit, debating whether or not a flame is alive.(my bold)-***-"Whatever the origins of life were on Earth, it's hard not to marvel at the curious organisms that came along 4 billion years later with the capacity to worry about such questions. And here, on Japan's fragile crustal island, for tonight, at least, the mood is optimistic that we might yet crack the puzzle."-Comment: I'm not so confident.