[ExI] Chemical Origins of Life (was Re: Panbiogenesis)

[Kelly Anderson]

On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 7:22 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 04, 2012 at 01:24:30PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote:
>
>> In principle, since there is no real reason why one philogenesis should be
>> similar to another, it could also be a peculiar direction of terrestrial
>> biology, much more so than marsupials for Australia.
>
> It is completely impossible to tell how typical or atypical our
> origin and history are without having access to at least one,
> preferably multiple samples which originated outside of common causal
> origin. The solar system is probably insufficient, unless we have clear
> evidence of multiple independant origins within this very
> system (improbable due to crosscontamination).

If the life were sufficiently different, say not DNA or RNA based,
then it would probably be sufficient to rule out cross contamination.

>> In other words, some kind or another of procaryotes could in be pretty
>> frequent in the universe, while  eucaryotes may just not be "required".
>>
>> This, irrespective of how much procaryotes species can be diverse and
>> interesting and evolutionary successful, would be a quite boring and bleak
>> scenario from our own perspective... :-/
>
> Right, we're looking for someone we can relate to, or at least
> look upward to.

Good, you read that the same way I did... :-)

-Kelly