Comments by "" (@tekannon7803) on "Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318" video.

  1. I'm very loosely paraphrasing Dr Jim Tour of Rice University--(Do your own research)--but his analysis of the simplest cell is so astounding in that for example, the membrane of a simple cell has 10 to the 78 billion possible combinations for it to work, but only one combination can work. The chance of everything happening at the right time and right temperature becomes the lottery of the universe, because for a cell to be alive all of the components have to get connected at the same time and at specific temperatures. The Carbohydrates on the membrane if I recall are more complex than the DNA and RNA combined. Would the elements necessary for these complex mechanisms to be constructed have combined to form the RNA and DNA out of a hydrocarbon vent under the oceans? Each particular mechanism in a cell must be created and put in place at exactly the right time and with the right temperature. If not, the lipids for example, would caramelize if, say, they were left alone for 3 weeks, meaning that they would have to be created again if they were not functional when the other components of the cell came together. But like Jim says, nature doesn't have a lab book. How would it know that it was necessary to create the missing part of a cell? In a cell, when one product is produced in one part of the cell that is needed in another part of the cell, a bridge is constructed to transport the material, and afterwards the bridge dissolves; this is incredible and shows that cells are really biological factories. Lex and Nick, you both kick the wind out of me in debating this subject, but what it seems like to me is that the possibility of life forming and a cell becoming alive are so infinitesimal that I think we have to find other avenues of possible sources before we find where and how life began. Undeniably, life is what has happened on the Earth. What comes to my mind is this: could the Earth have been terraformed so that life could be seeded here?
    1