Stuff I wish I had known in science class.

At 13, I didn't have a lot of ammunition when my science teacher asserted that life simply popped into existence from non-living matter. Here are a few of the things I've learned since then:

1. Fermi’s Paradox: Scientists estimate that there are 100 billion planets in the Milky Way. Not the universe – just our ‘neighborhood,’ our galaxy. Many of them are older than earth. In 2013, it was determined mathematically that 40 billion of those should have the conditions needed to support life.

If life can come into existence spontaneously it potentially could have done so 40 billion times, creating hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of intelligent races long before Earth even sent out its first man-made radio wave. By now, those other intelligent systems should have invented long range space travel. Wouldn’t their explorations have focused on all the signals coming from Earth? So the question propounded by rocket scientist Fermi was, Where is everybody? Space around earth should be a celestial traffic jam of UFOs every night.

2. Science claims the “Miller-Urey” experiments created life in a test tube in 1952. The Miller-Urey ‘primordial soup’ consisted of hydrogen, methane, and ammonia. However, the majority of methane and ammonia in the universe comes from the waste products of LIVING things. Did my science teachers know that and forget to tell me? Very little of it is found in non-biologic formations, and none is found in the sediment layers that predate life on earth. That's kind of like starting with some eggs and saying, "Watch me make a chicken."

3. Amino acids have a ‘twist,’ referred to as being “right-handed” or “left-handed.” The amino acids created by Miller-Urey were equally divided between “right-handed” and “left-handed.” But the amino acids that make up living things are all left-handed.

4. Amino acids also come in forms called alpha and beta. Miller-Urey’s amino acids were equally divided between both. But living things use only alphas. Now think: if life requires ONE, and ONLY ONE, of four forms of amino acids, left-handed alphas, how could a random collection of all four forms have resulted in life?

5. Amino acids are not life. They are the building blocks of polypeptides. The total number of polypeptide combinations from 20 amino acids is 20 to the 146^th power, (a 20 followed by 146 zeroes) yet only 50 of those 20 gazillion combinations are the correct ones for life. The 20 or 30 amino acids Miller-Urey came up with didn't evolve into polypeptides. In fact, they had to be removed from the 'primordial soup' to prevent them from breaking down again.

6. Polypeptides are not life, either. They are merely the building blocks of proteins. The possible number of protein combinations from 50 polypeptides is a number a thousand times larger than the mind-boggling number in point 5, above! Yet out of that immense number of possibilities, only 250 of those proteins are the right ones for creating a living organism.

7. If you have the right 250 proteins, you still don't have life. The right 250 proteins are simply the building blocks used by the intelligent instructions within a living cell to create the DNA and the structure to create a new cell. 

8. While amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, amino acids do not ‘join’ to form proteins. That would be like suggesting that if you put bricks into an acid bath they will 'join' to form a brick wall. They won't - they would simply dissolve. In the same way, unprotected proteins – such as a conglomeration of amino acids floating in a primordial soup – quickly break down into individual chemicals.

9. The simplest protein known is ribonuclease. Its ingredients are 17 different amino acids, used in various combinations to form a chain. But it is a chain 124 amino acids long, in exact order. The first two amino acids in the chain are lysine and glutamic acid, in that order. Of the 17 amino acids relevant to this protein, what are the odds of a lysine amino acid linking to a glutamic acid, in a primordial soup containing trillions of amino acids? If the soup was made entirely of those 17 amino acids and nothing else, the odds are still 1 in 289.

10. What are the odds of those two amino acids, linked in the correct order, linking up to threonine, the 3^rd amino acid in this protein? Now the odds are 1 in 4,913. With each additional amino acid in order, the odds grow exponentially. To get all 17 linked in the right order, the odds have been calculated at one chance in a number that would be written as a 1 followed by 552 zeroes. If you're thinking that this is more than the number of characters in this paragraph and the one above it, think bigger. That is a larger number than the total number of seconds the universe has been in existence. In fact, it is larger than the total number of atoms in the entire universe!

11. And even if the right 17 amino acids did somehow manage to link up in the correct order, they are still unprotected, floating around in that supposed primordial soup, with no way to replicate. And self-replication is one part of the definition of life.

12. Scientists believe that the simplest organism that could be called living would consist of no fewer than 250 different proteins. It's a theory - no organism that simple has been found in nature. So they’ve taken the simplest known form, a bacterium with 901 base pairs in its DNA, and they are working at stripping away parts of that DNA to make it simpler. They have managed to get it down to 473. But at 472, it is no longer living. And for an organism with 473 base pairs to evolve would require 531,000 instructions, each happening in the right order, at the right time.

13. Now, go back to the amino acid question at the top. Remember, right handed versus left handed, and alpha versus beta? Imagine a bag full of billions of mixed Legos – red, green, white, and blue. Suppose you want to build a white spiral staircase of Legos. Imagine drawing Legos out of the bag, one at a time, 531,000 times, and only getting white ones.

Oh, and just to be fair, you can’t use your eyes, your hands, or your intelligence…

Feel free to leave a comment. To read another of my columns on a scientific subject, click here.

Bill K. Underwood is the author of several novels and one non-fiction self-help book, all available at Amazon.com.You can help support this site by purchasing one of his books.