Idle Mind;1986750…. said:...with perhaps trillions of chemical reactions happening in the ocean at any given second.
….versus the top 15 metres of the oceans for five million years.
… the ancient seas were a dense concentrations of pre-biotic molecules….
It is an area of active debate. There has been somewhat of a bandwagon effect that followed on from the discovery of organisms living in such environments. The field is, however, wide open and no single concept has been wholly discarded. Even Cairns-Smith retains an active following for his hypothesis of the first genetic code being clay based, even though there is not a shred of evidence to support it.I thought that Darwin’s idea of the “primordial soup” had fallen out of favour long ago. ...... and so on and so forth.
Yes? No?
To be honest, I haven't read too much on the topic in recent years. Were the asteroid impacts really that common? How long did it take the solar system to "settle", at least to a point where the impacts were infrequent enough to allow for early life whether it first arose in pockets below the crust or in the oceans? I have some reading to do, it appears.I thought that Darwin’s idea of the “primordial soup” had fallen out of favour long ago. In other words, first life could not have formed in puddles on land or even in the oceans. Earth was regularly (on a geological timescale) bombarded by large rocks left over from the formation of the Solar System whose impacts were energetic enough to vaporise whole oceans. It’s hard to imagine life forming under those conditions, even on the sea floor at hydrothermal vents. I was under the impression that the consensus had moved towards sub-stratum formation of first life, ie. in pockets of water in the Earth’s crust where extemophiles could evolve protected from the asteroid impacts and where pockets in the rock with mineral shells could act as pseudo membranes, and so on and so forth.
Yes? No?
The balance of opinion is probably along the lines you have stated, but it is certainly not a firmly held position.
How accurate do we think we are with the estimation at life being established at around 3.6 bya?
The end of the Late Heavy Bombardment Period (Which was quite probably more than one period) is dated to around 3,800 million years ago. If you wish to get an idea how sever it was take a look at the moon. Life seems to have been established by 3,600 million years ago, so there is a fairly narrow window for abiogenesis to occur.
and life DID form from a singularity as in a Big Bang
when on both sides of the argument I felt there was agreement that it did..