” is the first thing scientists postulate is that these materials just self assembled and started working on its own?”
obviously.
And an experiment can be performed to prove it. We’ll go for something MUCH simpler than a single cell organism too, say a nano-sized CF-53 Panasonic i7 laptop with Windows 7 Professional x64 with integrated nano-solar cells for power.
First, we fill a billion (or so) beakers full of the necessary elemental powders, say a few ground up laptops and bootable Windows W7 x64 OS CDs, put some sea water in, and then bombarded the laptop soup in the beakers with lightening for a few hundred million years (or so).
What are the chance of getting our nano-laptop and OS. Pretty good, right? After all, that’s a WAY simpler setup than a self-replicating cell.
Do you think that we would eventually obtain a few simple diodes, later followed by an integrated circuit chip forming in the beaker? And then the chip should eventually RANDOMLY evolve all by itself into the laptop (with operating system) after being bombarded by cosmic rays for an even long time after that? After all, bombarding an integrated circuit with cosmic rays would be like bombarding an Intel i7 fabrication plant with 20mm depleted uranimum shells from an A-10 Warthog, and expecting to get an i9 processor coming out afterwards.
If organic life formed by accident in a similar scenario, then certainly there should be no problem with obtaining the laptop and operating system in a like fashion, because after all, the laptop and OS are a few thousand trillion times simpler than, say, the Homo Sapiens species. In fact, we should obtain the laptop and OS much faster because they are so much simpler.
I wonder how long we’ll have to shake our beakers?
I’d say that bootie shaking has caused more life to form than beaker shakin’!