Synthetic Life...

[BaalChatzaf]

Craig Venter and his team have gone farther than any other group to create synthetic life.  Venter's techniques use living tissue as  a container or carrier, but the product is a genuine replicating genome  whose parts  are from no living thing.  

Please read http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/synthetic-microbe-lives-less-500-genes

and enjoy this TED  video   

Venter has not quite reached the point where he can make replicators in an environment with no living parts but he appears to be getting there. His work and people who base their work on Venter's  may have a pretty good chance of accomplishing making life from totally non living stuff in a non-living matrix.

If that happens will we have the answer to how life might have rise on this planet.  Answer: No.  Why?  Because life arose on this planet  over 3.5 billion years ago under conditions that are no longer reproducable.   We could not say processes such as Venter has arranged happen spontaneously.   What we will have is a -possible- explanation of how life might have come from non-life.  At that point we could definitely say living stuff came from non-living stuff.  Off course this happens when human beings make what happens happen.  But isn't this what God did In The Beginning? We probably will never get an answer to the question  did life arise from non-line by purely natural non-consciously guided  processes.  To answer that affirmatively one would have to be around exactly when such a happening occurred.  This is highly unlikely. 

[Brant Gaede]

The planet may have been seeded--somehow--with life, to begin with, by an unknowable "God" who knows not our what not and may even no longer exist.

--Brant

could the end and the beginning be the same thing?

[Peter]

What is the morality of Panspermia, or directed seeding of life throughout the universe? If the seeds only go to uninhabited planets I would be for it, but not for contaminating an inhabited planet. We could be possibly sending disease to them.     

Peter     

[BaalChatzaf]

5 hours ago, Peter said:

What is the morality of Panspermia, or directed seeding of life throughout the universe? If the seeds only go to uninhabited planets I would be for it, but not for contaminating an inhabited planet. We could be possibly sending disease to them.     

Peter     

U.S. space probes that make planet fall  are carefully scrubbed of microbes prior to launch. 

[Peter]

I think a synthetic life form would have a tough and short life, because it has not been through 4 billion years of assault and evolution from other life forms. 

[BaalChatzaf]

9 hours ago, Peter said:

I think a synthetic life form would have a tough and short life, because it has not been through 4 billion years of assault and evolution from other life forms. 

Some of Venters work might give us an idea of how life -originate-.  Life sustains itself by adaptation.  That is where evolution comes in.  Darwin hypothesized how different species came to be.  He never addressed the problem of how life originated in the first place.  The closest he came to that was to suppose that life started in a shallow warm body of water filled with goo.  He never presented a hypothesize on how life arose.  He only addressed the problem of how life changes in response to the environment. In that regard  Darwin saw a connection between the scarcity of food created by rapid population increase and the "struggle for life"  among the contenders for scarce resources.