My friend & I are dipping our toes into understanding cosmology, big bang, origins of life, etc. The subject is daunting to say the least, but I think I am coming to grips with some ideas:
[ul]Based on our current understanding, we are able to have an idea of what was going on in the universe as it existed moments after the big bang and any time after that.[/ul] [ul]After the big bang, there was an abundance of inorganic matter and energy.[/ul][ul]Under the right circumstances, energy + inorganic matter = organic matter, aka abiogenesis.[/ul]
I realize I may be way off here, if so this might be moot, but my question is: do we have any clues as to where the inorganic matter and energy came from? Is this question even knowable? I have no problem with the concept of abiogenesis, but can you have an analogous situation with non-living matter? Energy? Aelectrogenesis?
I realize this is very close to GD material, but I would really like to stick to facts of what we know as opposed to conjecture/faith/opinions.
There’s no difference between living and non-living matter. It’s just matter. The trick is in the configuration - so the term ‘non-living’ is at best superfluous, or worse, confusing.
Next, matter is energy - matter is just the way energy likes to organise itself, in perhaps a similar way as salt is the way sodium and chlorine like to organise themselves. But matter is energy - so there’s only really the energy to account for.
Organic, in chemistry, deals with carbon chemistry. Organic compounds are not necessarily found in living things, nor originated in them.
As for where inorganic matter and energy came from, it came from the singularity from whence the entire universe sprang during the big bang. Before that, we haven’t the foggiest. There are theories about multiverses and black holes, but we can’t see past that point in history, and there’s a good chance we never will.
Hydrogen, helium, and a touch of lithium were produced in the Big Bang itself. If you want to know where those came from, that’s a topic for another post (and if you ask about three follow-up questions after that, you’ll get into “I dunno” territory). The hydrogen and helium coalesced into the earliest stars. Stars fuse hydrogen into helium, and helium into heavier elements, up to iron or so. Some of those stars were very large, and relatively quickly exploded, producing elements heavier than iron in the process. The remnants of those explosions cooled off, and as they did so, the elements combined in various ways, forming things like water, methane, carbon dioxide, and ammonia, as well as small amounts of more complicated things. The remnants then gradually coalesced into more stars, and some of the material (including some of the interesting, non-hydrogen stuff) formed into planets around those stars. Our own Solar System is, so far as we can tell, from approximately the third generation of stars in the Universe, so the planets (including Earth) were able to get a fair amount of water, ammonia, and the other interesting things. And it’s those simple inorganic compounds which eventually led to the complicated organic compounds.
After the Big Bang, the universe a relatively tiny hellstorm of flaming energy beyond belief, quite possibly beyond any theoretical maximum temperature as we can understand. Some of this would have coalesced into matter, but most matter comes from stars, which create matter as they burn Hydrogen fuel.
Hydrogen IS matter. Stars don’t create matter, they just change one form of it (hydrogen) into another (helium) and release energy in the process. The rest of that post is just meaningless garbage.
Well we are working our way backwards on the “origin of life” to “origin of the universe” chain, hence the distinction. Life apparantly sprung from nonlife, so now we just need to figure out where that nonlife came from and we are golden, right?
For the rest of you, thanks for the responses. I am doing some more reading and will likely have more questions in the near future.
Life is, so far as we know so far, some interesting chemical reactions on a wet surface of a planet. Really, it is a very minor footnote in the universe of matter…
