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by jacmac » Mon May 03, 2010 8:03 pm
Siggy_G,
I have seen that abstract and I liked it.
It has been too long to remember details, but Buckminster Fuller, years ago, said that viruses bridged the organic and inorganic realms. Organic while active and inorganic (crystals) when dormant. This points to a continuum of "life".
From wikipedia:
"Viruses are most often considered replicators rather than forms of life. They have been described as "organisms at the edge of life",[21] since they possess genes, evolve by natural selection,[22] and replicate by creating multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly. However, viruses do not metabolise and require a host cell to make new products. Virus self-assembly within host cells has implications for the study of the origin of life, as it may support the hypothesis that life could have started as self-assembling organic molecules.[23][24]"
Or perhaps self-assembling inorganic matter ( electric plasma ) that does its self assembling in proximity to basic organic chemicals such as in the Miller- Urey Experiment:
"The Miller-Urey experiment was an experiment that simulated hypothetical conditions present on the early Earth in order to test what kind of environment would be needed to allow life to begin. The experiment is considered to be the classic experiment on the origin of life. It was conducted in 1953 by Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey at the University of Chicago.
"The experiment used water (H2O), methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3) and hydrogen (H2) - materials which were believed to represent the major components of the early Earth's atmosphere. The chemicals were all sealed and circulated inside a sterile array of glass tubes and flasks connected together in a loop, with one flask half-full of liquid water and another flask containing a pair of electrodes. The liquid water was heated to add water vapour to the chemical mixture and the resulting gases were circulated around the apparatus, simulating the Earth's atmosphere. The flask with heated water represents water on the Earth's surface and the recycled water vapor is just as water evaporates from lakes and seas, before going into the atmosphere and forming into rain. SPARKS WERE FIRED between the electrodes to simulate lightning storms (believed to be common on the early earth) through the water vapors, and then the vapors were cooled again so that the water could condense (simulating the oceans) and trickle back into the first water flask in a continuous cycle.
"At the end of one week of continuous operation, Miller and Urey observed, by analyzing the cooled water, that as much as 10-15% of the carbon within the system was now in the form of organic compounds. Two percent of the carbon had formed amino acids, including 13 of the 22 that are used to make proteins in living cells, with glycine as the most abundant.
"The molecules produced were simple organic molecules, far from a complete living biochemical system, but the experiment established that the hypothetical processes could produce some building blocks of life without requiring life to synthesize them first."
The electric energy seems to be everywhere and at all scales. I am somewhat overwhelmed sometimes. Perhaps I am drinking too much coffee??
Later,
Jack
Last edited by
jacmac on Mon May 03, 2010 8:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
