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The difference is more on survival. A closed loop metabolism is indeed a good boundary marker. Viruses would fail this. But many have “closed but for a few critical dependencies”, and the argument here is that when life depended on metals like this, it’s more critical dependencies than closed loop.

Somewhere in there is a transition. But it’s poorly defined, and so the argument can be there was a bifurcation of sorts.

Hardly. There are nucleic and amino acids pretty much in every star system, we now know. But not during the big bang. Theres a lot of intermediate stages before stars are young enough to have the mix of chemicals to give rise to these precursor chemicals to life.

Its stages, but it’s a bit hard to say “early stage was a single origin, then we count each bifurcated radiation as a separate start point”. Why not call it convergent evolution, which it would be, over a very long time period?

No, because conditions have changed markedly. For metals to act as catalysts, and replace some metabolic enzymes, they need to be in highly reduced conditions. This was true in early Earth, but about 2.5 billion years ago, we had the great oxygenation event, and over the next billion years free oxygen has gone up enough that you won’t find the reduced conditions where metal can take over the job of metabolic enzymes in much of Earth anymore.

That is, what sustains today’s life prevents new proto-life for forming. You need to have the fancy gadgets life has today to continue to survive and replicate on Earth.

Note though, it was other life forms that contributed to the great oxygenation event, too. This is all a continuous web.

Coacervates, liposomes, acetogenic precursors, etc are all commonplace and could be considered proto-life. Some scientists have even argued that viruses are proto life. Prions (misfolded proteins that can self-replicate) and plasmids (non-chromosomal DNA strands that play a major role in horizontal gene transfer) are also candidates for proto-life that blur the line between living and non-living

For what it's worth, metals are still critical catalysts all over biology, they just tend to be encapsulated in biomolecules.

I always found it odd that there's only one single origin of life point or even just a single common ancestor considered in history. Shouldn't entirely new life develop all the time on earth? I mean the ingredients and building blocks are still there, the environmental situation still should work out, like availability of water, temperatures, etc. We should see a constant emergence of new life all the time. Why would that process stop, just because some other life already exists? Maybe we just can't detect this, because whatever new life happens to appear —more or less— resembles life that's already there.

Hash competition from life might cause them to go extinct, and even if it happens again it just gets out-competed to extinction fast.

Maybe, or maybe it was eaten into extinction.

Geology over large time-scales is profoundly unforgiving.

No it’s not that simple. We don’t fall dead the moment we don’t get vitamin D. We can stay alive long enough to get more.

That wouldn’t have been the case in these early beings, that were simply not capable of doing anything without these metals.

The science alert article should make this more clear, as its easy to get that impression.

Yes I saw that, but the concept of "life" being quite blurry, I feel it still has an impact on the equation.

Honestly just more “biology has enormous areas without enough data that need filling in” causing previous generalizations (e.g. the central dogma of information flow being replaced by protein regulation of gene expression, non-coding DNA, even neurons and egg cells being produced thru life) to be overthrown, more than anything, IMO.

Were that to happen it could be the worst news humanity ever receives, since it would greatly increase the chance the "Great Filter" is in front of us, not behind us.

Actually I don't think there is life outside of Earth. I think we are truly alone in this universe.

There is likely simple basic life as advanced as bacteria around the universe

But high level life was likely a series of complex accidents that is not reproducible or would be radically different than us

One of my absolute favorite PBS Space Time on the subject

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abvzkSJEhKk

I'm not a biblical scholar, but I think the "loving creator" thing was invented by people and not necessarily in the Bible. I'm pretty sure Old Testament God is pretty vengeful.

Theistic Evolution is wide-enough belief, especially with Protestants.

I don’t think what you are pointing at is a real issue.

Something exists. Therefore, on of the following 3 must hold: “one or more things exists or have existed which were not a consequence of another thing existing”, “an infinite regress of things existing as a consequence of other things”, “a cycles of consequences”.

The purported absurdity of life arising by chance is not about life existing, but about it arising by chance as a consequence of other non-living things.

The idea that god coming from nothing is absurd, well, that absurdity seemingly has to apply somewhere, as all 3 cases of the trichotomy above seem around as absurd? Eventually something has to be without explanation, whether it be a thing or a chain or cycle of things.

Or, were you not aware that most people who believe that God exists believe that God is the first cause?

Apparently you weren’t aware of that, because you said something about magic and stardust??

The dogma in many religions is that nothing created God or at least, there's no way to know. He exists outside our time and space. So from our perspective, God has always existed. If you believe that free will is true, then he can see all outcomes of the universe at once. If you don't believe in true free will, he sees the single timeline at once, from the big bang to the heat death of the universe.

Personally, I don't believe in any religions. They were all developed before we had a much clearer idea of how our world works and there's just too much folklore mixed in with actual, yet primitive, philosophical discussions to abide by any of it. But like with the simulation theory, we have no way to know what exists outside our time and space so you shouldn't worry. If there is some bored extra dimensional teenager simulating our universe on their GPU, it ultimately doesn't matter because we'll never know.

I believe that according to Catholic and Orthodox thought, God is Being itself. If you're familiar with Plato and Aristotle, God is the Form of Being. If not, I guess you could say God is Being as a noun, or God is where the idea of Being comes from. God exists because he is existence itself. (He is also Life and Love, in the same way)

the Sun