Well, RNA/DNA is of course the most logical assumption.

Which other "competing molecules" are there? How does that translate to giving rise to a bacterium? There is no explanation here. Just astrobiologists claiming that it must have happened outside of planet Earth. I think that is total rubbish nonsense. They just want to make their field sound more exciting.

> tries different things when they get stuck.

Ok, that's fine. The question is: how do their claims lead to a functionally logical pathway of life's origin(s)?

If I can expand on why I like this - my understanding from the article is that two realizations came from experiments: 1. No one could produce any plausibly simple self replicating RNA structure 2. Chance events that generate biologically relevant molecules generate them in huge varieties. So restricting yourself to only one type of molecule isn't necessary. A third point that I've heard before but isn't mentioned in the article - there's also no reason that the original life needs to resemble anything found today. Even basic candidates like RNA or lipids soups are essentially free food in today's environment.

As I understand it, the best we could hope for is demonstrating in the lab a series of 'realistic' chemical reactions that generate molecules that can both reproduce and mutate, and perhaps more ambitiously that such molecules mutate and eventually begin to build RNA, DNA, proteins. There's no guarantee that such an experiment even exists (real world timescales and sheer magnitude means that the chance event could be extremely low), so even this best case condition isn't possible. But given this fact and 1&2, I thought their experiments in the latter half of the article on a minimal set of amino acids, and on self-catalyzing and seemingly mutating benzene rings were interesting ways at trying to make some potential progress.

About competing molecules, they mention in the article: "There was also a lipid world, in which the molecules that form cell membranes and contain cellular chemistry came first. There was a protein or peptide world, a virus world, a coenzyme world, a zinc world, and even a clay world" This is outside my field of expertise so I can't verify this, though I've heard people talk about lipids being more necessary since they make small enclosed environments for all the interesting chemical reactions to happen.

I saw your other comment and I agree there are plenty of pretty stupid sounding phrases. I take this for granted (quanta has plenty of this, and my own university adopts the stupidest slogans imaginable). But regardless I do appreciate learning a bit about recent progress field I wouldn't normally read on. I also didn't get much from astrobiology sections - more interested in the chemistry parts.

Here's "clay world": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Cairns-Smith#Clay_hypot...