Can life begin today as it did 4billion years ago

[SW VandeCarr]

Let's hope that propositions stays in the non-science section. It's experimentally verifiable, but that would be B-A-D.

OK, your "hypothesis". What do mean experimentally verifiable? Say you completely sterilized some marine/tide pool environment (and were able to keep it sterile somehow). You say aerobic life might start de novo in a million years. That's an instant in geologic time, but a bit long for a government grant. I don't think we've seen a proton decay yet, but that experiment is a microsecond affair compared to waiting around for new aerobic life to start.

I don't care to speculate about the fraction of organisms that adapted vs. those that died out; for one I'm not even sure how that would be measured in principle. You don't happen to have any numbers or information on that, do you?

Of course not. I just said that a mutation in just one individual might have been sufficient to get an aerobic species going. Obviously some anaerobic species survived since they're still around, producing nasty purulent infections (probably revenge against us aerobes).

But I'm not saying that at all! If I gave that impression, I'm sorry to have mislead you; if your point was some kind of analogy, I missed it entirely. (Sorry.)

(RE: Early Precambrian aerobic abiogenesis) I'm just saying that if (natural) aerobic abiogenesis were possible, it most likely would have happened then (as the anaerobes were dying off creating locally sterile environments) as opposed to now.

 

[Count Iblis]

The building blocks of life likely evolved in space:

http://www.astrochem.org/PDF/Bernsteinetal2002.pdf

 

[SW VandeCarr]

The building blocks of life likely evolved in space:

http://www.astrochem.org/PDF/Bernsteinetal2002.pdf

Yes. I think it's generally accepted that organic compounds exist in space. These would include some amino acids and, I believe, purines and pyrimidines.