[HN Gopher] Were large soda lakes the cradle of life?
___________________________________________________________________
Were large soda lakes the cradle of life?
Author : geox
Score : 40 points
Date : 2025-03-25 15:42 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ethz.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (ethz.ch)
| toast0 wrote:
| > Large, phosphorus-rich soda lakes are the most likely places to
| have met this requirement.
|
| Cola then, not orange or lemon-lime.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Um, haha, no.
|
| Mountain Dew, duh. Real creatives crave it.
| dfltr wrote:
| It's got electrolytes, it's what abiogenesis craves.
| daveslash wrote:
| But what _are_ electrolytes!? Da ya even _know_?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| In the Midwest they're called pop lakes.
| im3w1l wrote:
| > pfdietz [flagged] [dead]: Oh great, more inherently untestable
| speculation about origin of life.
|
| What is the value in this kind of speculation? I think that it
| can help provide direction for future research. If we think these
| soda lakes were the cradle of life, then we could look for
| remnants of early (even though finding that is quite unlikely).
| We could also try to replicate (steps of) abiogenesis in the lab
| in conditions mimicking soda lakes and plausible variations
| thereof. If that yields promising results it could inform
| exobiology speculation, and as to the purpose of _that_
| speculation, it could inform where we send probes in the very
| long term.
| ergl wrote:
| FYI you can "vouch" for dead comments if you have enough karma.
| But in general, if a comment is dead it is a sign that it is
| not worth engaging with it.
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| I think im3w1l's response is valuable enough to be worth
| showing the original comment's text without reviving it
| entirely
| fsckboy wrote:
| pfdietz has 13 thousand karma since 2018 so that's not a non-
| serious account.
|
| perhaps in this case "he" edit-clobbered his comment because
| it was so unpopular, but what it says now is just off-topic
| and doesn't match the response:
|
| _" It had to do everything because the business case for it
| (that it would have sufficient ROI) required it. Even then,
| the business case was basically fraudulent, and the reality
| was even worse than the critics like Mondale were saying."_
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Not to mention that "speculation", better known as theory, is a
| fundamental and crucial part of science. Some of the most
| celebrated scientists in history are celebrated for their
| theoretical work. Newton, Einstein, Charles Darwin(sure, Darwin
| did a lot of observation as did most biologists of that era,
| but his theory of natural selection, though inspired by his
| observational work, is clearly a theoretical idea, not an
| empirical result).
|
| And of course, skimming over the actual paper in question, it's
| not even theory/speculation really. It's more like a review of
| the existing literature and empirical data on soda lakes, the
| different types of them, and their plausibility for abiogenesis
| based on their ability to maintain P concentrations despite
| significant biological activity.
|
| This is actually someone testing a previously theorised idea
| against the best available data and affirming it as plausible.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Speculation is part of the process by which we formulate a
| *hypothesis*. We then run experiments to test and validate
| this hypothesis. If it is found to be correct then it gets
| promoted to a *theory*.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Another reason is it gives us ideas of what to look for if
| we're trying to find life on other planets or moons instead of
| just dead remnants.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| So this is being suggested purely because of phosphorus
| availability there? How does this compare on that aspect to say
| the the theory that life arose in alkaline hydrothermal vents?
| (Note: Alkaline hydrothermal vents are not to be confused with
| "black smokers", the more famous kind of hydrothermal vent.)
| culi wrote:
| In ecology it's recognized that highly alkaline lakes are some of
| the most productive[0] ecosystems around. Despite this, most
| organisms able to survive in highly alkaline environments are
| considered "extremophiles".
|
| Maybe it's the rest of us that are the extremophiles.
|
| [0] In ecology "productive" is usually measured by the rate at
| which biomass is measured in a system
| m0llusk wrote:
| Potentially also supports the idea that subsurface channels and
| cavities could also have been involved with providing
| environments for early life. There would have been high heat, a
| range of minerals including phosphorus, and a wide variety of
| interconnected cavities that could act as reaction chambers or
| even cells.
| tim333 wrote:
| After reading "The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That
| Sculpt Our Planet" in the nyt I figure the most likely origin
| is deep in the earth. https://archive.ph/VgzKD
|
| Reasons, apart from the phosphorus thing is it's warm and
| stable with chemical gradients to fuel reactions, and some
| rocks have cell like cavities which could be handy. Also
| there's an awful lot of it. I guess you could try some
| experiments with different suitable rocks and chemicals.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-25 23:01 UTC)