Gene, I ran across this the other day. It's an interesting summary of the current theories around the origination of life.
https://futurism.com/abiogenesis-7-scientific-theories-origin-life-one-new-one/
From my view, the RNA is an interesting one, as there is some indication that the DNA replication system we currently employ has its roots in RNA, and that life may first have used RNA in information coding. That doesn't actually preclude the idea of simple metabolism/reactions however, as there is a need to get to the state that RNA is your information.
Pretty much all the amino acids we use in our body exist in some sort of local minima for energy... otherwise they wouldn't be stable. That would imply that given some energy, and the right proportions of carbon/oxygen/hydrogen (some of the most common elements in the universe) you will form amino acids... more interestingly, after you have strung protein strands together (secondary structure) they will (under most conditions) spontaneously fold into their tertiary structure. This was something we depended on for simple protein purification techniques. The ability to encode these through RNA is the most interesting, and challenging part. But perhaps that came later. Perhaps the first life was a simple replicating RNA machine. Then you simply have to find a way for RNA nucleotides to form. It's again, carbon oxygen and hydrogen... not tough to assemble together. Given the time in our planet, energy wasn't an issue. The question more becomes a "what specific conditions" and "how long did those conditions have to exist for there to be sufficient interactions of molecules for the first RNA strand to appear, and have an ability to self-replicate.
All this takes enormous amounts of time, and huge numbers of failed reactions however. Molecules have to bump into each other over and over and over again before the right combination under the right energy would get what you need. Fortunately, something we've had is time... If we're estimating that life originated 3.8 to 4.2 billions of years ago, on a planet that formed 4.54 billions of years ago, that means we had 300 to 700 million years for this to occur. That's not something you're going to "replicate" in a lab with our current tech.
victor809 wrote:
