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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

Isn't life thought to have started in "conditions that we humans consider to be absolutely inhospitable".

Yes, but to quote the annoyingly semi-reasonable creationist Ken Ham: “We weren’t there. We didn’t observe it.” (Note: I am not a creationist, I do agree with the logic of that argument, but I also see no scientific basis for any religious origin story of life to have more scientific basis than others).

We have recreated the conditions that predate life and found that organic molecules were formed, but we’ve never observed the leap from organic molecules to organic life. So the best we can do barring the invention of a time machine is look for life elsewhere from Earth to try to fill in the blanks.

You see a man lying still on the ground, blood pooling around his body, and a woman standing close by gripping a knife with bloody hands. What happened? “We weren’t there. We didn’t observe it.”

That only works because humans have killed each other, not to mention animals, many times in the past, so all of us are familiar with the process. We're yet to observe any instance of abiogenesis at all, anywhere.

We don't merely make predictions based on patterns we currently observe. We also make predictions and reason about the past based on reason, causality, and other theories we can demonstrate to be true.

She tried to save his life by removing the knife, then she went in to shock? Probably not the explanation you had in mind. This is not a good metaphor.

You see? You are still able to make theories based on what you know and causality, and we can debate about which theories are most likely to be true. Not directly observing something is the beginning of theorizing. We don't just give up on knowing.

It's more interesting to think about the thing that we know in spite “We weren’t there. We didn’t observe it.” For example:

How were the continents a long time ago. Like Pangaea and before. Yes, we have good understanding of the continents before Pangaea.

How did bird evolve? [spoiler alert] They are small dinosaurs!

How is the center of the Sun? [I'm not sure that this falls in the original meaning of “We weren’t there. We didn’t observe it.”, but it is included in the literal meaning.] In some books of 100 years ago you can find weird explanations about the origin of the energy of the Sun.

Why the time of and orbit of Pluto is 3/2 of the time of the orbit of Neptune? Was this also true in the origin of the Solar system?

Where does the Moon comes from? [Weird story, hope you already know it.]

Most of this things were discovered in the last 100 years. I'm missing a few that were discovered before and are so mixed in the popular culture that it is impossible to imagine that thy were unknown before.

We still don't know how the first life form appeared, and I think we are cueless for now. We don't even know if they[we?] used ADN, ARN or something else. [ARN looks nice]. Did they get the energy "eating" organic molecules, from some H2, or something else? Protein-first or membrane-first?

We will never observe a leap from organic molecules to organic life, because (probably) there is no leap and because it (probably) takes too much time. The plan is to understand a few key steps, reduce the huge leap to a dozen of small steps, perhaps with substeps. Hopefully try to simulate the substeps in the laboratory, experimentally or by computer, and be sure that the path is correct enough. I hope that one century is enough, but perhaps I'm too optimistic.

The answer to “We weren’t there. We didn’t observe it.” is: We don't know ... for now, but it never stopped us in past to know a few amazing thing, so we are optimistic.

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