Where does life come from?

Pacey says:

If one would like to make a cool $1 Million (google: Gene Emergence Project), international fame, and, most assuredly, a Nobel Prize, all you would need to do is produce life on the lab bench, ex novo. One may have thought that, by now, scientists would be able to produce life in the lab, but this is not the case. It is true that scientists can replicate live, and mix two or more different living things to form a new living thing, but that is a far cry than starting with no life and producing something that lives.

There has been progress in determining how some of the building blocks of life may have occurred. In 1952, Harold Urey and Stanley Miller showed that many of the elements of primordial earth can 'self assemble' into amino acids which are essential for life when given a jolt of electricity from, say, a primordial thundercloud. However, these experiments have fallen short of showing how these amino acids become *alive* and not just mere amino acids.

Those who discuss the "RNA World" (where RNA is believed to predate DNA, and that RNA has both genetic and metabolic functions) fail to determine where RNA came from, and those who discuss Darwin's natural selection can only really comment on how these forces shape life. These theories remain silent with regards to the origin of life itself.

Maybe life evolved from alien RNA that was stuck to an asteroid as it crashed into primordial earth. That, and other strange possibilities, are still on the table when discussing the origin of life on earth.

Pacey is listening to The Tuss - "Rushup Edge" as he writes this, and is nearly convinced that the origins of this music is Richard D. James, an artist who thinks that coming up with a new alias will throw me off the track.