No, I don't think there is any best temperature for that to happen. But I'll let someone else say the same thing.
From Primordial Soup to the Prebiotic Beach
| What about submarine vents as a source of prebiotic compounds? I have a very simple response to that . Submarine vents don't make organic compounds, they decompose them. Indeed, these vents are one of the limiting factors on what organic compounds you are going to have in the primitive oceans. At the present time, the entire ocean goes through those vents in 10 million years. So all of the organic compounds get zapped every ten million years. That places a constraint on how much organic material you can get. Furthermore, it gives you a time scale for the origin of life. If all the polymers and other goodies that you make get destroyed, it means life has to start early and rapidly. If you look at the process in detail, it seems that long periods of time are detrimental, rather than helpful.
A number of people tried prebiotic experiments. But they used CO2F, nitrogen and water. When you use those chemicals, nothing happens. It's only when you use a reducing atmosphere that things start to happen.
Temperature seems to be a talking point regarding prebiotic hypotheses. We know we can't have a very high temperature, because the organic materials would simply decompose. For example, ribose degrades in 73 minutes at high temperatures, so it doesn't seem likely. Then people talk about temperature gradients in the submarine vent. I don't know what these gradients are supposed to do. My thinking is that a temperature between 0 and 10 degrees C would be feasible. The minute you get above 25 degrees C there are problems of stability. |
Go to the Devil's Paint Pot at Yellowstone National park and sit for a while observing the clumps of bubbles that form up and persist for amazingly long times in mud that's hot enough to scold you. Individual bubbles, as you and the author have noted, do not persist, but the clumps do.
This is because these hot mineral vents contain what it takes to build polymers with hydrophobic and hydrophilic heads, which a) reinforce the bubbles to make them persist, and b) when one bubble bursts, the neighboring bubbles inherit the burst bubble's load of re-enforcing polymers.
This is a very broad hint as to how a complex chemical cycle can take on an enduring life in a medium, any one of whose compontents are evanescent due to high temperature. A crystalline rock face containing enzymatic organics embedded in it's structure could take on the same role. Unless the temperatures are high enough to melt rock, there are plenty of opportunities for persistent structure at temperatures far higher than are comfortable for us. Like most modern cavils, this author's are predicated on the unconscious assumption that RNA-world entities want a nice, comfortable, unambiguous, though flexible, skin to be in--discard this notion and you can observe that there are plenty of potential structuring elements at higher temps.
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ribose degrades in 73 minutes at high temperatures
...And mRNA, the basic translation tool of modern DNA life, decays even faster.
By my lights, almost nothing persists in RNA world. In RNA world, you are one giant step closer to life (or whatever) being just a naked chemical cycle. RNA world, under my proposal, does not have fixed structures to decay, it is a chain of temporary chemical plants that produce other RNA, which is shipped to yet another temporary chemical plant to build yet another RNA, to be shipped to yet another chemical plant...and, finally, the end product ends up at the chemical factory floor that's just like the one we started with.
What has to persist, is that usable energy is obtained by this cycle--nothing else is required to persist.