what are the odds of this happening in primordial earth?

50/50; it either happens or it don't.

100%

Unless biological life existed at the moment of the Big Bang, its existence today demonstrates that abiogenesis happened, right?

I've been thinking about this lately and had the idea that maybe we've been looking at it the wrong way. I believe the common concept is that through some random combination of molecules within some chemical soup a special molecule showed up which had the property of self reproduction. Natural selection then acted on that molecule and its variants to build up complexity to the point of something like "life".

But maybe it was not a single molecule that immerged with the property of self reproduction. Maybe it was a network of molecules whose totality of chemical reactions amongst each other and other environmental molecules resulted in growth in the the size of the network. Pieces of the network containing all molecule-types of the network could then break off and continue to grow separately within the same environment of "food" molecules so that the original network would essentially act as self reproducing. Thus a system with an original network of molecules generating blossoming pieces of itself throughout the environment on which natural selection could act.


PairTheBoard

Same as the odds that you named yourself Ryanb9 on this forum.

According to this recent highly detailed science publication human-like life is highly unlikely to occur in the universe. So abiogenesis is highly unlikely.

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2019.2149

"The model offers a number of testable predictions. First, we conclude that intelligent life is exceptionally rare and that we may possibly be the only intelligent civilization within the observable universe, so long as we assume that intelligent life elsewhere requires similar evolutionary transitions. Although this may seem like a large assumption, there are good reasons to believe that many evolutionary transitions have universal properties (Levin et al., 2017). It also follows if we reason that our civilization is typical. If there were substantially easier evolutionary pathways to intelligent life that did not require such evolutionary transitions, we should expect to observe this easier evolutionary history instead. Although it is hard to show beyond doubt the absence of extraterrestrial intelligence, so far all of our astronomical data are consistent with being alone"

We humans seem to be anomaly in the universe.

I think some of you guys might be missing the point of my question.

If abiogenesis is easy, and common, then we didn't get lucky here on earth. If abiogenesis is hard, and rare, then we got very lucky. I'm wondering how lucky we got.

Is it even possible to put odds to how lucky we were? or calculate the chances?

I would assume that for each year that goes by while scientists are trying to replicate abiogenesis but cant, we should assume we were even luckier than we had thought the previous year? And that once they do figure out how to make life from non life, we can look at that process and say "yeah, thats going to be rare as **** to happen naturally" or we might say "well, that was easy" but we wont know until it happens.

If it never happens, i.e. if we never crack abiogenesis, could we still be able to put odds to it happening? I mean there's a lot of people who are good at maths and calculating ****, right?

I'm pretty lucky either way.

I wouldn't place too much thought about the number of years going by that scientists are putting into trying to make stuff. Mostly because I am pretty sure that labs are slightly smaller than the entire earth and that the earth was around for more than a few years before life emerged.

Rolling hills arise when the earth is left to its own devices. They can, however, also be made by humans.

I don't believe that it is possible to get that I even remotely implied that scientists could never make life.

Making a mound of dirt and or rocks seems somewhat simpler of a task. Probably takes about a day of work if you get several scientists involved who are in reasonably good shape.

If bookies and punters agree on initial conditions and outcomes, then odds are possible.

Do you think calculate the chances is something different to that? Because it isn't.

What I meant was is it possible to put odds on it, and have any assurance in our estimation.

I think you're being a bit defensive. I wasn't trying to say you implied that. I was nudging your comment in a certain direction with my response. I wasn't wanting my response to be a refutation to what you said.

Each year that goes by and we dont have fusion... does that mean we are less likely to ever get fusion? (or fission, or w/e its called) I mean this is a side tangent, but... is that true? That the longer we spend working on X, the less likely it is that we will ever solve X?

No. To put odds on it we'd have to know the mechanism through which non-life becomes life, which we don't.

We have done both fission and fusion. Not, as you note, that this is remotely relevant to your original post.

We haven't created a star, yet they seem pretty common in the universe. It took a few minutes to create nachos, yet it is difficult to imagine that there are plates of nachos spontaneously being made by natural processes elsewhere.

If it takes a beaker with the proper ingredients in the proper proportions with the proper temperature and proper energy gradient of one million gallons to have a 50% chance of life emerging from it in a million years, then the few years we have spent using tiny beakers and ****ing around with the other variables is approximately nothing. Even if we do create it, we still won't know the odds that it exists elsewhere without some other information, much like the existence of extraterrestrial nachos.

Odds are determined by how much is bet on each outcome.

If you win in the long term, you can have assurance in your estimations.

When I google "chances of abiogenesis" I get this:

I don't have a clue how accurate this estimation is. I also cant imagine what those numbers mean, because I cant conceptualize how rare that is, other than "extremely rare." Then again, the chances I ever make out with with Taylor Swift are also extremely rare. The chances that I make out with Taylor Swift while two wild eagles fly over our head are even more rare, but are they 1/10^90k rare? When dealing with large numbers like this (or tiny numbers) the brain tends to break down.

A naive question about probability:

If you flip 300,000 coins, the chances of all landing heads is 2^-300,000. Meaning that there are 2^300,000 equally likely outcomes, only one of which is all heads.

But if you interpret it as meaning that if you repeatedly flip the coins, all heads will tend to occur once every 2^300,000 times, what does that mean?

I am trying to get at a non-circular definition of "chances of", one that avoids using "equally likely" or "tends to". "Odds of", defined in terms of how much is being bet on what, is non-circular.

Maths is like greek to me. I faked my way thru my computer science degree... can you dumb it down for the laymen?

If you flip two coins, there are four possible outcomes: HH, HT, TH, TT. If the coins are not biased, no outcome is likelier than another. The probability of HH is then one in four, or 1/4.

If you flip three coins, there are 2^3 = 8 possible outcomes, and so on.

https://wmbriggs.com/post/4358/

It really depends on what exactly it is you are asking. The most fitting answer seems to be: Either it happend or it didnt.

The issue when calculating how lucky we were is that you have nothing to compare it to.
How lucky are you when you win AA vs 72? How lucky were you to get AA in the first place? How lucky were you to face 72?

This all could be calculated as you know there 52 cards and therefore you have 1326 combinations and so on and so forth.
But how many cards does the game of life have? Could be just one and we were not lucky at all. Could be quazillions and we were never supposed to exist at all....

Flip 300,000 coins in sequence and it's 2^-150,000 that you get a palindrome, and 2^-300,000 that you get life on Earth. The article is saying that both events are similarly meaningless?