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In Brief
The 10 Unsolved Mysteries
1. How Did Life Begin?
2. How Do Molecules Form?
3. How Does the Environment Influence Our Genes?
4. How Does the Brain Think and Form Memories?
5. How Many Elements Exist?
6. Can Computers Be Made Out of Carbon?
7. How Do We Tap More Solar Energy?
8 What Is the Best Way to Make Biofuels?
9. Can We Devise New Ways to Create Drugs?
10. Can We Continuously Monitor Our Own Chemistry?
More In This Article
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Overview
Atom Power
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Overview
The Scent of Your Thoughts
1 How Did Life Begin?
The moment when the first living beings arose from inanimate matter almost four billion years ago is still shrouded in mystery. How did relatively simple molecules in the primordial broth give rise to more and more complex compounds? And how did some of those compounds begin to process energy and replicate (two of the defining characteristics of life)? At the molecular level, all of those steps are, of course, chemical reactions, which makes the question of how life began one of chemistry.
This article was originally published with the title 10 Unsolved Mysteries.
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23 Comments
Add CommentThe first sentence - "The moment when the first living beings arose from inanimate matter almost four billion years ago is still shrouded in mystery" - perpetuates the dogma that life on Earth arose from inaminate matter and this review of the mystery of life's origins does not do justice to the panspermia hypothesis that life may have originated elsewhere in the universe long before the birth of our solar system. Furthermore, now that the concept of multiverses is in play, life might ante-date our particular 'big bang' if the seeds of life were already present in dust or cometary type material from a previous 'universe'.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, why not rampant new life/replicating molecules out of the current broth. It's surely favorable to life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"So, why not rampant new life/replicating molecules out of the current broth. It's surely favorable to life." The answer to this good question may well turn out to be that any such attempts at a 'solo' run for life on Earth were swamped by incoming bacterial spores.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs we know that bacteria can exist deep within our rocks, could probably survive being blasted to escape velocity by cometary impacts and can survive the conditions of space it seems highly likely that life with a common DNA code will be found to be universal, at least in our galaxy.
The trouble with much of scientific thought is it's shackled by history, by which I mean much of our current thinking processes're still conditioned by the Newtonian Mental Big Bang, (especially given how it still successfully panders to much of our normal everyday physical experience).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut if the Astronomical Big Bang theory's correct, then the initial superheated period was immediately succeeded not by the solid material level of things of Newtonian physics but by the emergence of the likes of the subatomic particles and conditions corresponding to quantum physics, etc.
In other words, Newton's 'world' emerged out of Einstein's 'world', the exact reverse of their historic denouements as ways of thinking.
My point being isn't it much more likely the impulse for life arose not at the level of the material physical substrate, but at the quantum level, especially when you factor in the lack of discovery of the graviton means gravity still remains only described, not explained?
You may be right, but it doesn't really change the essence of the problem. Whether it happened on Earth, elsewhere in our Universe, or in another Universe, the question is still......how?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBecause the current "broth" is full of lifeforms which eat any pre-biotic molecules which might form.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUsing the term "highly likely" in this context is a bit hubristic. We really don't know at all. We just don't know. Maybe we will someday. Let's not pretend we know more than we know. Knowing what we don't know is a good first step toward increasing knowledge.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour thinking is flawed because...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI doesn't matter WHERE life came from!
IT'S STILL THE SAME PROBLEM....HOW?????
Your right, we don't know, the how or why, about some of the most common everyday things.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI saved you comment, because you expressed the problem beautifully. Thanks
It does seem "highly likely" to me based on the current evidence. However, a more cautious academic prose would have been that " .....it could well turn out to be that life with a common DNA code will be found to be universal, at least in our galaxy".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRegarding the 10 unsolved mysteries in chemistry...... allow me the opportunity to add what I feel might well be the most profound question that we, as human beings, can ask:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWere human beings allowed the choice to choose to become human beings? And if not allowed such a choice, would it be reasonable for us to consider ourselves as creatures who are truly free to choose given that we were deprived the most basic of all freedoms, the choice to choose "to be" (to exist) as a humam being along with the other choice, the choice to choose "not to be" (not to exist) as a human being.
Well yes, human beings might be considered to have a limited degree of freedom in that they have the opportunity to respond to an assortment of things of which they have little or no control over; nature (the genetics supplied to them as human beings), nuture (the culture in which they live, the parents they will have, the economics of their situation etc.)
However, in conclusion, it is my opinion that one cannot consider a human being to free (to have free choice) (if, and unless) he, at least, had the choice to choose to be a human being.
What do you think?
Doug Soderstrom
dougsoderstrom@sbcglobal.net
The bricks of possible life exist already in nature, like the bricks of Lego. And these are in all our universe. They need only somebody which are putting them right together, but not a so big God as religions say, something a lot smaller but a lot intelligent, like in the book Contact by Carl Sagan.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"1. How Did Life Begin?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't know about how, not sure the question really makes sense. But on the question of when life began, I think life began when everything else began. Now that brings up the question of how did everything begin and I'd be tempted again to bring up the issue of nonsense but I'd also be tempted to simply answer: "everything began exactly at the same time nothing began"
M7Q83256
Regrettably I can't afford the sub right no but reading the list of 10 items above ... and being an Organic Chemistry grad ... several of them are most definitely NOT chemistry mysteries...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen we can't explain something we are making of every kind. it's no use to say 'that is wrong', 'that is true', it's better to do so or so, when no proofs are available.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps in the future with better and better simulations we can find out a lot more things. I know only that in our universe that are no miracles. For instance, "Empty" space is filled with pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles. They are created together, move apart, and come back together and annihilate. It seems like they are doing it at random. But in the universe there are no miracles: what seems happening at random must have a reason, a previous event that produces it, even if for us human beings is impossible to determine it with our limited instruments, like the Heisenberg Principle dictates. So, if no miracle is possible, every billionth of billionth of instant must depend from the previous fraction of instant. I repeat, it will be only with very sophisticated simulations that in the future it will possible to know mor truth about everything.
I repeat my comment because I saw there are mistakes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen we can't explain something we are making suppositions of every kind. It's no use to say 'that is wrong', 'that is true', it's better to do so or so, when no proofs are available.
Perhaps in the future with better and better simulations we can find out a lot more things. I know only that in our universe that are no miracles. For instance, "Empty" space is filled with pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles. They are created together, move apart, and come back together and annihilate. It seems like they are doing it at random. But in the universe there are no miracles: what seems happening at random must have a reason, a previous event that produces it, even if for us human beings it is impossible to determine it with our limited instruments, like the Heisenberg Principle dictates. So, if no miracle is possible, every billionth of billionth of instant must depend from the previous fraction of instant. I repeat, it will be only with very sophisticated simulations that in the future it will possible to know more truth about everything.
"Your thinking" (is flawed...)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Your right" (we don't know...)
Maybe: [It's] your right [to think] (we don't know)?
You're right. We don't know.
For the same reasons crystals form due to physical conditions being right for them to do so, life probably arises wherever and whenever physical conditions are right too.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do think however that physical conditions do not always have to match our own for life to arise but like you think there is a kind of universality to the phenomenon, although it doesn't necessarily have to be DNA-based. I like to think life might even one day be discovered on the sun for example, but it won't look like any life we've seen so far and couldn't possibly be DNA-based
"all of those steps are, of course, chemical reactions, which makes the question of how life began one of chemistry"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNonsense. This is a question of physics, which determines the characteristics of the elements that produce the chemistry. There are only 4 known fundamental forces, nothing has indicated there are more, and none of these forces, singularly or in combination are capable of causing naturalistic origins of highly ordered life compounds, let alone self-replicating ones.
So we have a dilemma, the majesterium of science insists it alone can and will determine the origins of life, yet it is laughingly impotent on this account, unable to even suggest how, let alone empirically derive or establish non-falsifiable validity of how. This is a religious faith in a lesser god of man's own making.
Much of the problem is because taxidermists and stamp collectors with no math or physics understanding control the argument - the accolytes of the cult of Chuckie, who was clueless on the foundations of his own belief system.
Information systems do not create themselves - DNA being the most complex in the universe, nor does reason derive from the irrational, aka naturalistic. It all comes down to faith. This multiverse and panspermia metaphysical drivel is the flailing of the Chuckie cult trying to keep its strangehold on its followers, it is not science.
All you do is posit that life went through the exact same process somewhere else first instead of originating on Earth. Either way the process is the same.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo where did that intelligence come from? What you are saying is that the chicken hatched from the egg and then laid the first egg. That would be a closed time loop and there is nothing to indicate that happened and besides all that would end up with is billions of the same chicken existing at the same time in an infinte pointless round of hatching and laying eggs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI quite agree. Perhaps if we recreated the earliest conditions as we believe them to have been when the earlist like forms are estimated to have lived we would have much more success in creating living organisms from inert matter. If I recall correctly the Earth used to be hotter with a lot more oxygen and more lighter gasses in the atmosphere. Perhaps "Primordial conditions" labs would be productive? I recall reading about an attempt at such yielding cell like unliving structures a few years ago.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPost 23 was a reply to post 19 by BrainWorld but the ever lousy forum software that SciAm uses logged me out for no apparent reason. This is on par with the blog commenting software that won't even let me log in at all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe response from the tech support when I tried to get it figured out was: "I can't replicate it." They didn't bother to check which browser, OS or any settings I was using at all. When I responded to offer more information I was ignored. They are clearly Assholes who are incompetent and should be fired.