The justification for spending tens of billions of dollars on space exploration is that it of course helps us know about planets and stars and the universe, but the big thing we may find is life on mars or some moon. And this will help us understand how life began.
But when you ask most people if they really care about how life began, they do not!
But you are here, so maybe you do. The bad news is, we know very little!
The origin of life “is not just emergence of structure, it’s the emergence of a particular kind of dynamics, which is Darwinian. It’s the emergence of structures that reproduce. And the ability for the properties of those objects to influence their reproductive rates. Once you have those two conditions, you’re basically in a situation where Darwinian evolution kicks in,….What Jeremy is showing is that as long as you can harvest energy from your environment, order will spontaneously arise and self-tune.
“You can take all the molecules you have in the biochemical database and stir them with a spoon, and life will not happen,” says prebiotic chemist Kamila Muchowska of the University of Strasbourg in France, who is not a SCOL member. “Life is a process; it’s not a frozen fixture.”
There are some very good wiki sites with an excellent coverage of this issue:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-biochemists-view-of-lifes-origin-reframes-cancer-and-aging-20220808/ (quote below)
Many if not most scientists stand by theories that life started with self-replicating mixtures of RNA and other molecules… Your book argues that the flow of energy and matter structures the evolution of life and is how metabolism “conjures genes into existence.
The purist view of “information first” is the RNA world, where some process in the environment makes nucleotides, and the nucleotides go through a process that makes them link up into polymer chains. Then we have a population of RNAs, and they invent everything, because they’re capable of both catalyzing reactions and copying themselves. But then how did the RNAs invent all of metabolism, cells, spatial structure and so on? Genes don’t actually do that even today. Cells come from cells, and genes go along for the ride. So why would genes do it at the very beginning?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-simpler-origin-for-life/
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/history-of-life-on-earth/history-life-on-earth/a/hypotheses-about-the-origins-of-life
The ribosome may have first originated in an RNA world, appearing as a self-replicating complex that only later evolved the ability to synthesize proteins when amino acids began to appear. Studies suggest that ancient ribosomes constructed solely of rRNA could have developed the ability to synthesize peptide bonds. In addition, evidence strongly points to ancient ribosomes as self-replicating complexes, where the rRNA in the ribosomes had informational, structural, and catalytic purposes because it could have coded for tRNAs and proteins needed for ribosomal self-replication. Hypothetical cellular organisms with self-replicating RNA but without DNA are called ribocytes (or ribocells).
As amino acids gradually appeared in the RNA world under prebiotic conditions, their interactions with catalytic RNA would increase both the range and efficiency of function of catalytic RNA molecules.Thus, the driving force for the evolution of the ribosome from an ancient self-replicating machine into its current form as a translational machine may have been the selective pressure to incorporate proteins into the ribosome's self-replicating mechanisms, so as to increase its capacity for self-replication.