eli5 – If RNA was created by a soup of chemicals, is it possible that it’s being randomly created in pockets around the world? and could those random rna strands create life out of nowhere?

Question

Sorry If these questions are stupid, I was just randomly thinking about how rna started.

In: 329

Answer 1

We know that the nucleotides that make up RNA, and the sugars, do form under conditions that seem to have existed on Earth billions of years ago. However, our planet’s changed a lot since then — a lot less ammonia and cyanide around these days, for instance. Also it took
making tons of the stuff over millions of years to get something life-ish.

That’s just not going to happen today. Not only are the conditions not right and materials to make it less abundant, but every organism on Earth literally eats the stuff. Everything from bacteria to you has enzymes that break down RNA and recycle it. Any RNA hanging about is typically broken down relatively quickly (certainly not milling about for millennia until a bunch of them make a living thing (which really also requires bubbles of farts too).