[ExI] Panbiogenesis news

Flexman, Connor connor_flexman at brown.edu
Sat Mar 7 02:14:15 UTC 2015


>
>
> Loeb might have made the mistake of trying to pin down the time too
> precisely. I don't think it happened quite that early since life could not
> have formed before carbon and oxygen atoms did. But there was still plenty
> of negentropy left after the first stars formed and went supernova in the
> first few hundred million years after the big bang. The first stars were
> 100-1000 solar mass monsters that would have raced through their life cycle
> in a few million years spewing the stuff of life across the cosmos.
>

And yet when the universe was between 273 and 373K, the blackbody spectrum
still was peaking at the order of an electron volt. This means nearly
everything would have been getting ionized. Do you think that life happened
after this? or during, and that somehow this radiation didn't destroy all
complex molecules?
Further, the epoch of 300K was about 15 Myr after the Big Bang. The first
generation of stars didn't light up until roughly 500 Myr afterward. So
your conjecture about speedy stars doesn't fix the lack of heavy elements
here.

Well yes. Any discussion of the origins of life are necessarily
> speculative. Unlikely? Life itself is seems rather unlikely. The sheer
> negentropy required is mind boggling. This is why despite knowing the
> chemical constituents of life and having access to them, nobody has yet
> been able to put them all together in a test tube and create de novo life.
> I came up with panbiogenesis to explain this empirical recalcitrance of
> biogenesis without having to resort to some metaphysical "vital spark". If
> the current physical milieu does not allow biogenesis to occur, then
> biogenesis must have occurred when the physics itself was "different". And
> it so happens that the early universe being warmer, denser, lower entropy,
> and full of free energy fits the bill.

Stuart LaForge


Creating life in a test tube in the 21st century vs creating life on a
2*10^8 mi^2 planet over 10^9 years is very different. Many orders of
magnitude. The physical milieu 4 billion years ago may be hard to make life
in but taking it back to 15 million years after the big bang seems like it
might be even worse.

Connor
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