As far as my knowledge goes, which is very little - earth had a reducing atmosphere early on in the development of life, which would make abiogenesis much easier by making the production of macromolecules more generally spontaneous. Instead, we now have an oxidizing atmosphere, making breakdown tend to be spontaneous.
Moreover, it’s possible that circumstances were never favorable for abiogenesis. Rare events do happen, after all, and if at some point the circumstances were truly favorable, then we might expect it to have happened more than just once in Earth’s history (or the history of all of the planets we’ve investigated for life). But we haven’t found evidence for multiple abiogenesis events.
Combining those two notes, although it certainly isn’t impossible that abiogenesis continues to happen every now and then, it was probably never likely, and may be even less likely now.
Gugteyikko t1_j8ijwmg wrote
Reply to Is it possible that abiogenesis is still happening right now on earth? by dolekanteel
As far as my knowledge goes, which is very little - earth had a reducing atmosphere early on in the development of life, which would make abiogenesis much easier by making the production of macromolecules more generally spontaneous. Instead, we now have an oxidizing atmosphere, making breakdown tend to be spontaneous.
Moreover, it’s possible that circumstances were never favorable for abiogenesis. Rare events do happen, after all, and if at some point the circumstances were truly favorable, then we might expect it to have happened more than just once in Earth’s history (or the history of all of the planets we’ve investigated for life). But we haven’t found evidence for multiple abiogenesis events.
Combining those two notes, although it certainly isn’t impossible that abiogenesis continues to happen every now and then, it was probably never likely, and may be even less likely now.