On Thursday, September 21, 2023 at 12:25:44 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
Comments on abiogenesis, in particular the sentiment that explaining the origin of life is a vast mystery, maybe beyond the reach of natural
causes, reminds me of another mystery I grew up with.
Racetrack Playa is a dry lake in Death Valley which is famous for its "sailing stones". Conditions there in the winter are too inimical for
people to visit then, but when they come in the spring, they often see
that large stones have traveled over the plain, leaving long tracks
behind them. How did that happen? The obvious explanation is wind, but
the stones are too big for any but extraordinarily strong winds to budge them, even when the surface is softened by rain. And the wind
explanation does not explain why multiple stones often travel parallel
paths at the same rate.
Other explanations were worse, though. Humans pushing the stones would
leave their own tracks. Other animals would too, and would not have
reason to be pushing stones during a desert winter. Freeze/thaw cycles
would not be so consistently unidirectional. Gravitational anomalies
and space aliens are just too weird. For most of my life, Racetrack
Playa has been, to me, inexplicable.
Unlike abiogenesis, though, the sailing stones happen repeatedly, and
the mystery succumbed to time-lapse cameras left on the site over the winter. The explanation is really quite simple. During the winter,
rain falls, and the plain becomes a real (albeit very shallow) lake
again. The water freezes and later thaws. While it is thawing, the ice sheets detach from the shores of the lake, but they are still anchored
by a few stones away from the shore that stick through the ice. Well,
not quite anchored; even relatively gentle winds blowing over the ice
confer enough force to move the ice sheet, dragging the stones along
with it. Mystery solved.
A mystery which once seemed intractable to me has an explanation which
now seems almost obvious in retrospect. Probably abiogenesis does not
have so simple an explanation, but I bet at least part of the
explanation will also look simple in retrospect.
My prediction: a solution will involve an entropy driven solution.
That's not much of a prediction. It's a trivial thing that entropy
drives chemical reactions and that life is a chemical reaction.
Nevertheless, some (mostly "astrobiologists") still advocate for
nonsensical primordial soup solutions (pun in there, not Campbell's).
This means, as many have noted, that we're looking for a chemical
hypercycle where there's a high energy source that's spinning down
into an energy sync. That's where to look. Looking elsewhere is likely
a waste of time.
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