Basically the title
In: 7
Mainly because we don’t precisely know what life is. There are thousands and thousands of processes within the most basic elements of life, and probably many of them we don’t even know about yet, and of those processes that we know, we don’t know what they do, there are many that we know that we don’t know how they do their stuff, and many that we don’t know why they their stuff. In short, life is far more complex than any process we know how to create in a lab – maybe we will one day, but for now we just don’t know enough about what life is to create it from scratch.
Because life pretty much sits at the border between chemistry and machinery. Enormously complex molecules make up the structures and mechanisms inside cells, and making them work is not easy. The organisms of today are the result if billions of years of trial and error, mostly error.
Chemically? Early life is extremely fragile. You’re basically looking for the conditions that would make a soap bubble gain the ability to eat and reproduce.
While the actual conditions that created life are unknown, one thing we are pretty sure about is that it probably happened millions of times before life as we know it took hold.
The simple answer is because we don’t know how to do that. It’s like asking, “Why is it so hard to time travel in a lab?” We don’t know how. Maybe if we knew how, it’d be easy.
We’ve never observed the origins of life, so we can only make educated guesses as to what the causes and conditions were.
That’s because life is believed to be a result of random events over a long period of time
As an aside but interesting point, there was an [experiment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment) that aimed to create life in lab and sort-of got good results..
A bunch of reasons.
1. What IS life? It’s hard to replicate something when we are really not quite sure what IT is. Our understanding of life at the very smallest scales is sketchy, we have some understanding but it’s far from clear how it all works at that scale.
2. We don’t really know what the world was like before life. We have some good guesses, but the specifics are still kinda blurry, and the specifics are how it all began. So we are taking a shot in the dark to figure it out.
3. The very first “life” was probably incredibly delicate. In fact, it probably only survived because there was nothing else trying to survive at the time. Even then it probably had to happen millions or billions of times before it “stuck” and survived. Which probably happened over millions of years of random mixing and chance chemistry.
So, basically, we don’t know what the starting conditions were, we are pretty sure that whatever those conditions were still meant that it took billions of tries to get it right, it was incredibly delicate and broke down insanely quickly, and even if we were able to get it to happen again, we might not even recognize it anyway.
It depends on what you mean by “recreate life”. We’re very good at taking cells from living things and growing them in Petri dishes, almost indefinitely at this point. We’re also good at synthesizing any stretch of DNA, RNA, or amino acid chain to make basically any protein. The problem is that there are about 20,000 proteins and even more once you start counting the modifications that can be done to change their behavior/purpose. Some of them will kill the cell if not in a very slim range of concentration. We also don’t even know what all of them do.
Asking how we can’t recreate life now is similar to asking why people couldn’t go to the Moon in the 1930s. They had the manufacturing capability, knowledge of flight, and knowledge of what the Moon was, but they just couldn’t put all the pieces together for another ~40 years.
TL;DR: we have the theoretical capability right now to make the machinery of a cell, but it’s so complex that we don’t know how to do it
We know chemically what we need to know about what life needs. The issue is we do not know how to combine them to make “life” as we know it.
Imagine having a million different lego pieces and you are instructed to make an exact replicate of the Disney castle, except u have to build it in a very specific way or it falls down and have to start again and u don’t have instructions on how to do it
Molecules can interact and bind to each other in so many different ways. For example, amino acids, the foundation for proteins, have 64 possible things they can code for. From there those amino acids can combine and interact with each other in a whole lot of ways. Eventually the amount of proteins you can build is in the thousands. Those thousands can also interact in so many different ways. All of these combinations can be undone by changes in pH or temperature.
1. We don’t know if we can to begin with.
2. We don’t know where the line between a inorganic and organic is.
3. We don’t know the origin of life.
4. Any life made artificially would start off tiny, smaller than bacteria, and it would barely meet the definition of a living thing.
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