Comments on: Building New Life in a Lab May Succeed Before We Find It Among the Stars

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 02:40:43 +0000

This is completely beyond the topic at hand, but Steve Benner has made himself out to be quite the fool: “And a lot before, given the disassembling of NASA by the current administration.”

Seriously?

Someone should inform him that NASA’s budget has remained steady throughout the current administration, and that if he is referring to the retirement of the Space Shuttle, that this was ordered by the -previous- administration -and- that it was the right thing to do for the sake of science and exploration; how are we supposed to find life elsewhere if we are busy dicking around in low Earth orbit? Is Dr. Benner aware of the fleet of robotic spacecraft that NASA has dispatched throughout the solar system? Is he aware that the Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity, will be landing at Gale Crater next year so as to, among other things, look for evidence of Martian life?

I have become quite upset recently over the fact that a large number of people–scientists among them–imagine that our days of space exploration are over and done with and remain mournfully ignorant of the fact that we must -move on- from time to time! In this case, we are handing LEO over to entrepreneurs, and are setting course for the asteroids and Mars!

By: Raisin Bran

Raisin Bran — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:27:53 +0000

Fascinating!!

By: Torbjörn Larsson, OM

Torbjörn Larsson, OM — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 21:02:27 +0000

That was a very well written piece. Personally I would like to have an update on Szostak’s self assembling protocells, because it would be a more complex system (with added RNA to RNA replicase). But I can see how Joyce work fits in too, and it was a welcome update!

And kudos to Overby to start with the evolutionary definition of life, and leave until later the NASA definition. The latter fits detection of individuals instead of research on populations.

Instead I would argue with Joyce on the point of “how you can say” how frequent life is on habitable planets. The short time to first life permits that.

Consider: we can take a simplest possible Poisson model for abiogenesis attempts. Plug in Earth age ~ 5 Gy and first life ~ 1 Gy; its normalized delay is 0.2. With an exponential one-distribution stacking up its probability mass early, and having a one-tailed distribution, it is close to or shy 3 sigma.* So it could be a valid model, and a Poisson process gives ~ 35 % life probability @ 5 Gy.

Amazing what you can do with one lousy data point. (O.o)
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* I know that there was a PNAS paper based on Poisson models published last week that comes to a different conclusion. This model that I have commented on since around a year ago should not be touched by that. If life is, arguably, early it would be a testable and simplest model.