A grain of sand in the Sahara

The space outside our atom , or our grain of sand, is the space of the never-born proteins , the proteins that are not with us - either because they didn t have the chance to be formed, or because they came and were then obliterated. This arithmetic, although trivial, bears an important message in order to reproduce our proteins we would have to hit the target of that particular grain of sand in the whole Sahara. 

Of course one could also assume that the total number of energetically allowed proteins is extremely small, no larger than, say, 10 . This cannot be excluded a priori, but is tantamount to saying that there is something very special about our proteins, namely that they are energetically special. Whether or not this is so can be checked experimentally as will be seen later in a research project aimed at this target. 

The assumption that our proteins have something special from the energetic point of view, would correspond to a strict deterministic view that claims that the pathway leading to our proteins was determined, that there was no other possible route. Someone adhering strictly to a biochemical anthropic principle might even say that these proteins are the way they are in order to allow life and the development of mankind on Earth. The contingency view would recite instead the following if our proteins or nucleic acids have no special properties from the point of view of 

Some may say at this point that proteins derive in any case from nucleic-acid templates - perhaps through a primitive genetic code. However, this is really no argument - it merely shifts the problem of the etiology of peptide chains to etiology of oligonucleotide chains, all arithmetic problems remaining more or less the same. 

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