I don’t understand the need for a C-C bond. Almost any chemist would agree that methanol and dimethyl ether are organic.
Asking for a C-H bond is probably the closest you’ll get to an agreement, though you still get edge cases like urea and carbon tetrachloride. Is there any reasonable rule that will consider urea organic but cyanic acid inorganic? And yet that’s the difference that Woehler’s contribution hinges on.
I think my definition is probably the best: anything that contains carbon, with certain exceptions [what exactly all of the exceptions are will be argued]
It just seems weird to me that we still aren’t capable of creating industrial process that would be both more efficient and cheaper than growing plants…
We do have one industrial process that indirectly produces food from thin air - the Haber process for ammonia synthesis, which is used to make nitrogen fertiliser. It is estimated that over half the nitrogen atoms in a typical human come from the Haber process. Your DNA and proteins, all built from the air
Carbon “chains” of length 1 only make an organic substance if they are “in line” with longer chains. H-CH[sub]2[/sub]-OH is valid because H-CH[sub]2[/sub]-CH[sub]2[/sub]-OH is. Often even a chain of length 0 counts, as in H-OH.
Why? Plants have been slaving away at this problem for a billion or so years of evolution, and they work on the nano scale. Life is pretty damned awesome at chemistry. It’ll be hard to beat.
Probably not a terribly useful analogy - wheels are a mechanical feature of machines (and only especially useful in a single context: roads). It’s possible for machines to exist without wheels.
It’s not possible for life to exist without food. Synthesising and metabolising food is something that living things have to do - therefore, they have been obliged to be working on the process since the start.
It’s possible, of course, that some founder effect or other constraint means that living things still haven’t stumbled on (or are restrained by design from) the most optimal methods of making food, but they have been doing this a long time, competitively, so it’s likely they’re doing it quite well.
I’m just saying evolution does not necessarily has to come with the best solutions. For example, you could certainly point out mistakes in human body that wouldn’t be made by intelligent designer (I’m not giving any here, but you can find plenty articles on the internet …although it’s a controversial subject)…
There are very good reasons why you won’t find a wheel in a living system that we don’t need to get into here.
I would also argue that evolution will tend to be better at optimizing chemical reactions than it is at optimizing physical design features, but that’s little more than a personal opinion, so I won’t argue it.
And it may well be that there are better solutions to be had, but we haven’t come close to finding them yet. We can’t even replicate photosynthesis in a tube yet with anything close to the efficiency of the most primitive plant.
You’re not wrong about this in principle - evolution does paint itself into corners, it’s just that this one particular thing is very fundamental to the existence of living things - so it has been ‘in development’ since the get-go (and yet we know it’s still amenable to change - organisms can digest plastics, etc) - If evolution has anything close to optimal, it’s likely to be this.
Keep in mind, it’s not just the food that’s evolved-- It’s us, too. We can, in fact, engineer better energy-storing compounds than those that have evolved. If we were going to make life from scratch, we’d probably design it to run on octane, which has a higher energy density than fats and sugars. But we can’t run on octane, so we still need to produce those inefficient fats and sugars.
I knew someone was going to point that out. It’s impossible to make any point about biology without someone bringing up irrelevant exceptions to the rule. It’s biology - there are ALWAYS exceptions to EVERY rule. I didn’t think it was worth the time to discourse about the difference between a subcellular molecular motor and a multicellular, large-scale structure.
So what the OP is asking if you can make food from non-biotic/abiotic compounds? Clearly they’d have to be organic compounds in the chemistry sense.
I’d think that with enough time and effort, someone could probably engineer a chemical process to create carbohydrates from petroleum, but I don’t know if anyone actually has done this.
