What makes it fundamentally impossible to know the origin of life? It seems we are likely to develop and refine experiments and theories that approximate the initial conditions and processes by which life took hold. Some of the details of how it happened are certainly lost to time, but it seems there's a lot of room for exploration towards a fairly valid model.
I think they may be arguing semantics of knowing versus believing, and especially the loss of information to the eventual increase of entropy.
I don't think there's a calculation to prove it because it would require a very thorough definition in the first place, which could be taken as a sufficient answer in its own right. The answer is of course 42.
On another note, at "17 hours ago" and no response I guess they are still writing trying to work it out, or gave up, if they are anything like me and my random blurts
You can't ever test anything in the past, so by your logic nothing in the past can be considered scientific. By your logic, plate tectonics can't explain the past movement of continents.
Which is, of course, wrong.
We can absolutely test aspects of a theory, verify its
general validity, see that it best correlates with past evidence, and therefore infer past causes. Nothing of that is unscientific -- to the contrary, that's precisely how science works.
If all we had was observations of modern day plate tectonics it would be foolish to back-propagate the same motions billions of years in reverse and claim ones methods were "scientific".
Luckily, we have things like fossil records to justify such conclusions. They provide the second point with which we can "fit a curve" when exploring history.
With this "origin of life" stuff, we don't have that second point of confirmation. We think up a bizarre process, execute it, and see that it produced some molecules that we see in modern day life. We then have the gall to say that we've discovered "the origins of life"? Yeah right... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27974369
If I may use a programming analogy, the process described is akin to NPC agents in a browser based MMORPG Rowhammering a bunch of random bits into some exposed ArrayBuffer until a Counter div appears on the page, then claiming they have some deeper understanding of the origins of life in their universe.
Do they have a deeper understanding? Perhaps. Have they come anywhere near the "origin of life"? Nope.
Nominal statistics take into account the current exchange rate, while PPP ignores exchange rates and instead normalizes it in terms of things like Big Macs (albeit expressed in dollar terms instead). PPP is essentially an adjustment for cost of living, and so it generally makes more sense to use PPP when you're referring to per capita statistics (since you're generally trying for a sense of cost living anyways). Conversely, for comparing the size of economies or trade, you want to use nominal, as trade is conducted in nominal terms. There are reasons to go the other way, but these choices should be your first inclinations.
Oh please. https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/vienna - it's just as expensive as other European capitals, <10k/y is barely above poverty level - not to mention with kids. Please define 'comfortable' - because to most people, that includes living in a good area in a city or a detached house outside of that, not having to thrift shop for clothes and not having to grow your own food unless you like to. And most likely a car too, even if it's only an old and small one. And not having to worry about whether you have money to get a new washing machine when yours breaks. No way that's possible on e833 a month (assuming e here - $ is even more ridiculous).
You can live like student for 20k/year in Prague, sharing room with other person and dont go out much. Doable, sure but maybe not a great plan for next 40 years.
