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

RNA is easily created by random reactions. But it probably isn’t producing living things frequently. That process took a while on Earth, and we’ve never observed it to have happened anywhere else.

Even if it did, it would almost certainly be out-competed by existing life, which has had billions of years to evolve. We know this because all known life today appears to descend from a single common ancestor. That means no new life in the billions of years since that ancestor has managed to compete well enough to survive in a world of existing life.