The first life

Hey sidelined,I think what Coragyps was getting at was that if something that has characteristics of life (whatever those might be) is at some point produced under lab conditions, it's highly unlikely that what was produced would be exactly like what really happened. IOW, they might produce "life", but not necessarily (or even probably) "our" sort of life. All those experiments will show is that abiogenesis works. Not which particular replicator actually produced the LUCA on earth.

Hey Sidelined,I think that's pretty much what the researchers involved in this topic are doing - playing around with initial conditions and chemistry to see what [i]might[//i] occur. The big problem, of course, is that the data on early atmosphere, early conditions, and early composition of the "soup" for that matter is very sketchy. IOW, they're trying different combinations of conditions to see if anything pops. The bottom line is even if science somehow manages to create a self-replicating system, it might not necessarily be under the same conditions as what brought about the "life event" on Earth.What we really need to do is explore the galaxy until we find a planet that is in that state - and watch what happens. I sometimes think I was born a few millenia too soon.