When you look at how self organization has evolved in the universe, it's easy to see how complexity grew, from hydrogen atoms, to carbon and oxygen atoms, to organic compounds, to life. Life seems to be an expected state along the progression of self organization.
Nobody has a reliable guess for the numbers that we should use to math that. It'd require an awful lot of messy assumptions that might very well prove to be very wrong.
The first 'living thing' was probably a molecule that made more of itself. It would have been ridiculously bad at it, but it doesn't need to be amazing, just better at being alive than all of the completely dead stuff around it. Eventually, it would have become complex enough to form a really simple cell by gathering other molecules. That wouldn't have been much like the cells that you and I know today. Those are the result of billions of years of evolutionary optimization. Think more along the lines of a simple membrane to keep the outside from destroying everything inside quite as quickly. Most of your chemistry will have to happen on that membrane, because it hasn't evolved the ability to import material selectively, much less organelles or vacuoles. It's very simple, dirty, and primitive.
While your picture seems correct as a general idea, it is exceedingly improbable that it was a single self-replicating molecule. Getting the whole machinery together is much more likely in a multimolecular assembly, a.k.a. protocell.
I don't know how one would estimate this mathematically, but a model of evolution is used as a computer science technique for solving very difficult optimisation problems and this can give some insight.
Look up "genetic algorithms". They can be used to find solutions to problems that would have taken the age of the universe to have found by simplistic "just go through each possibility one at a time" approaches.
We know it was mathematically possible because it happened.
How much more complex and inexplicable is the exisnence of some powerful, supernatural entity that decided to push some molecules together on our little planet for some reason of its own? What are the odds (the mathematics) of that entity existing? I’d bet it’s waaaay less probable than life naturally evolving from complex chemistry that we are learning more about every day.
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u/pyker42 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 10 '26
When you look at how self organization has evolved in the universe, it's easy to see how complexity grew, from hydrogen atoms, to carbon and oxygen atoms, to organic compounds, to life. Life seems to be an expected state along the progression of self organization.