[extropy-chat] HISTORY: Solved & Unsolved Riddles

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Nov 07, 2003 at 08:56:38AM -0500, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:

> Of course, if there were any imbalances in the concentration of one
> enantiomer in the primordial soup, that enantiomer would be much more likely
> to become the standard, but, one way or another, a standard had to choose
> itself.


The enantiomer excess-driven probabilities play no role given that prebiotic
organics is nonchiral, in comparison to a randomly emerged stereoselective autocatalyst, that rapidly 
depletes one half of the ursoup racemate. Ditto autocatalytic set.

It's the frozen aftermath of a spontaneous symmetry breaking event, 
driven by quantum noise at molecular scale. Could have been exactly 
the other way round, no need to invoke
assymetries of spacetime or polarized pulsar radiation destabilizing
a part of the molecular cloud accreted into presolar nebula. These 
are negligible nudges, if we assume
emergence of the autocatalyst is a rare event. We can get data on this
if we see unrelated self-replicating chemistries over the solar system.


-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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