On the Origin of Life and Falsifiability

But I'm not sure that this is Popper's sense. I understood him to be talking about hypotheses which are so constructed that no acquisition of data would cause one to abandon them; not merely hypotheses where we are presently unable to acquire the data.Otherwise, as I have pointed out, we would have to say that people constructing apparatus to test a hypothesis for the first time were expending their money and effort on researching a hypothesis which was not even properly constructed. People building the large hadron collider, for example, to look for the Higgs boson, were trying to investigate something which was not even a properly constructed scientific hypothesis, and wouldn't be until they turned it on, when suddenly the nature of the hypothesis would change: it would become properly constructed at the same time that the large hadron collider was.But, as I understand Popper, it was already properly constructed: they could say what data would confirm or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson, and so they set out to acquire the data.

Well, we'd need to know more about RNA. We could follow up on the work of Bernhardt, Kurland, and Harish & Caetano-Anolls.Do you have any ideas as to how we could test if FUCA was capable of surviving space travel?