To my knowledge early life most likely used RNA not DNA, the difference being that RNA is capable of doing some basic chemistry and protein stuff so you get away with a lot less RNA than DNA (to my knowledge)
The Bacteriophage MS2 encodes only 4 genes (4 proteins, in about 4000 basepairs). That puts us down to 1067 orders of magnitude instead of 349236.
Since we know that meteorites carried water and basic prebiotic compounds we can increase the chance that a random functional RNA organism forms.
For very basic life to form, you don't need cell walls luckily. warm A puddle with the right compounds and RNA with self-replicating capabilities is sufficient for this.
Additionally it should be noted that mutation and biogenesis aren't fully random processes. Things get tried and evolved or discarded.
We didn't get to humans by randomly attaching hairy arms to a fish, rather, at some point a fish got better at breathing surface air than the others and obtained a survival advantage from it. And then this random "minor but useful advantage" mutation process continues for every generation since about 4.5 billion years ago. If you took a picture of every child and parent, you will never find a picture where you can clearly call "inbetween here we went from ape to human".
Are you thinking there is only ~1/8.7e349236 viable solutions? There is no reason to expect you need to exhaust even a tiny fraction of the space to get something reasonable.
Of course not, but if single ionization events can kill a cell’s ability to reproduce (or worse), there must be some constraints. So where do the numbers land?
I’m obviously missing wide swaths of useful information and understanding. But I’ve looked at this for a little bit and haven’t had the epiphany I need for this to click.
The space of possible configurations can be simply huge, but still you can usually find a reasonable (not optimal) one after only a dozen or hundred attempts.
>"single ionization events can kill a cell’s ability to reproduce (or worse)"
Maybe I don't know what you mean by single ionization event, if it is mutating a single basepair then I doubt it.
I think your other point is probably related to sparsity of viable vs. non-viable configurations and the steps needed to get between them. Of course that's complicated by the contextual interdependecies (are you in a mammal's womb or a submerged egg sac) but to your point you don't need to climb mount everest in a single step. Just get from one solution to another and the viable ones will tend to outweigh the less viable.
Appreciate the help reframing it a bit. I'm still thinking it's too complex but at least there's light at the end of the tunnel. :P
Here’s a summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17125348