FLO - the Holy Grail for astrobiologists

FLO stands for "first living organism."

As the search for life elsewhere in the solar system and beyond intensifies, the focus is on the moment when life began.

Stanley Miller's legendary experiment in 1952, when as a young graduate student in chemistry he electrically charged a flask full of components of the earth's early atmosphere and produced amino acids, is considered the beginning of the modern science of origins.

In order to find FLO, astrobiologists must first arrive at a working definition of "living."

Some say living means imperfect replication, since only then can mutation and and selection and evolution occur.

Quartz crystals make exact copies of themselves and have done so since the beginning of the earth, yet no one would claim them to be alive.

Would they?

For FLO to have happened at all, it had to overcome the universe's most prohibitive law, the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that all matter tends toward entropy, the dissipation of energy.

All life is in utter defiance of that law, a bound, energy-gathering stay, however brief, against entropy.

The other essential requirement for imperfect replication is that there has to have been a first bit of information, however crude, some kind of biochemical message or code, to begin to convey.

What was that first message?

A number of chemists are now trying to recreate in their labs a rough approximation of the elusive and still ill-defined transition from the purely chemical to the biological.

[via Charles Siebert and the New York Times magazine]
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I read Siebert's article, "The Genesis Project," with interest.

More interesting, though, was thinking about the critical phase-shift, from chemistry to biology.

How reminiscent of the essential mystery at the heart of physics, namely, how does the quantum world of indeterminacy create the well-defined reality we all agree on and live in?

As one physicist put it, describing the process, "And then a miracle happens."

So with chemistry and biology: a miracle happens.

And yet there are those who would claim that science is objective while religion is all make-believe and voodoo.

I say, show me the difference between the two.

Because I'm not seeing it.