Life, The Universe, and Everything:

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by paddoboy, Apr 5, 2020.

  1. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    https://www.universetoday.com/14530...-universe-just-not-in-our-region/#more-145304

    Life Could be Common Across the Universe, Just Not in Our Region:

    The building blocks of life can, and did, spontaneously assemble under the right conditions. That’s called spontaneous generation, or abiogenesis. Of course, many of the details remain hidden to us, and we just don’t know exactly how it all happened. Or how frequently it could happen.

    The world’s religions have different ideas of how life appeared, of course, and they invoke the magical hands of various supernatural deities to explain it all. But those explanations, while colorful tales, leave many of us unsatisfied. ‘How did life arise’ is one of life’s most compelling questions, and one that science continually wrestles with.

    Tomonori Totani is one scientist who finds that question compelling. Totani is a professor of Astronomy at the University of Tokyo. He’s written a new paper titled “Emergence of life in an inflationary universe.” It’s published in Nature Scientific Reports.

    Prof. Totani’s work leans heavily on a couple concepts. The first is the vast age and size of the Universe, how it’s inflated over time, and how likely events are to occur. The second is RNA; specifically, how long a chain of nucleotides needs to be in order to “expect a self-replicating activity” as the paper says.

    Totani’s work, like almost all work on abiogenesis, looks at the basic components of life on Earth: RNA, or ribonucleic acid. DNA sets the rules for how individual life forms take shape, but DNA is much more complex than RNA. RNA is still more complex, by orders of magnitude, than the raw chemicals and molecules found in space or on the surface of a planet or moon. But its simplicity compared to DNA makes it more likely to occur via abiogenesis.

    There’s also one theory in evolution saying that although DNA carries the instructions to build an organism, it’s RNA that regulates the transcription of DNA sequences. It’s called RNA-based evolution, and it says that RNA is subject to Darwinian natural selection, and is also heritable. That’s some of the rationale behind looking at RNA vs DNA.

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