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While life from Mars is literally far-fetched, abiogenesis anywhere is itself a fantastic story. All scenarios of life’s emergence are stories of staggering complexity with intricately layered plotlines and distinct dependencies.
For one, the cellular containment issue in the pyrite-life scenario (scaffolding) also affects the plausibility of the RNA-world hypothesis, which relies heavily on catalytic peptides for protocells to form.
Like different sides of the same coin, protein-like enzymes play an analogous role in gene-first models to the ribozymes that play a central role in several metabolism-before-replication scenarios.
