[mypalmike]

What makes it fundamentally impossible to know the origin of life? It seems we are likely to develop and refine experiments and theories that approximate the initial conditions and processes by which life took hold. Some of the details of how it happened are certainly lost to time, but it seems there's a lot of room for exploration towards a fairly valid model.

[posterboy]

I think they may be arguing semantics of knowing versus believing, and especially the loss of information to the eventual increase of entropy.

I don't think there's a calculation to prove it because it would require a very thorough definition in the first place, which could be taken as a sufficient answer in its own right. The answer is of course 42.

On another note, at "17 hours ago" and no response I guess they are still writing trying to work it out, or gave up, if they are anything like me and my random blurts

[meetups323]

We can know an origin of some life, but never the origin of our own life. It's simply not testable, and without tests it's not science.

[crazygringo]

That's not how science works.

You can't ever test anything in the past, so by your logic nothing in the past can be considered scientific. By your logic, plate tectonics can't explain the past movement of continents.

Which is, of course, wrong.

We can absolutely test aspects of a theory, verify its general validity, see that it best correlates with past evidence, and therefore infer past causes. Nothing of that is unscientific -- to the contrary, that's precisely how science works.

[meetups323]

If all we had was observations of modern day plate tectonics it would be foolish to back-propagate the same motions billions of years in reverse and claim ones methods were "scientific".

Luckily, we have things like fossil records to justify such conclusions. They provide the second point with which we can "fit a curve" when exploring history.

With this "origin of life" stuff, we don't have that second point of confirmation. We think up a bizarre process, execute it, and see that it produced some molecules that we see in modern day life. We then have the gall to say that we've discovered "the origins of life"? Yeah right... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27974369

[ReactiveJelly]

But to say that we could find several plausible theories and not know _something_ of value is teetering on Last Thursdayism.

[meetups323]

If I may use a programming analogy, the process described is akin to NPC agents in a browser based MMORPG Rowhammering a bunch of random bits into some exposed ArrayBuffer until a Counter div appears on the page, then claiming they have some deeper understanding of the origins of life in their universe.

Do they have a deeper understanding? Perhaps. Have they come anywhere near the "origin of life"? Nope.