Since we seem to be having such fun with big numbers, we can work it out. It turns out that 4100 individual strings of RNA 100 bases long would have a combined mass of 1050 kilograms. So this is how much we would need, in order to have a single copy of most strings and therefore a reasonable chance that one of them would have all its bases arranged correctly to be a self-replicator. However, the entire mass of the Milky Way galaxy
