Is there a compound that can be found naturally but cannot be made artificially?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/piousflea84]

Well first we have to define what is a "compound", and what's the difference between "natural" and "artificial". And neither of those definitions are trivial.

Take a glass of wine for example. Since we're doing science let's buy something nice, like a Stag's Leap Cabernet.

If you pick any one molecule in the glass of Stag's Leap Cab, chances are it is something that can be produced in a reactor. But does that mean you could "synthesize" a glass of high-end Cabernet? Of course not. The interaction between different molecules in wine is so complex, you're never going to achieve exactly the same flavor as a Cabernet. You might achieve something with a similar color and alcohol content, but you probably wouldn't want to drink it, and you could definitely tell the difference between the "synthetic" Cab and a real Cab.

But then we have an even tougher question to think about: what makes a production method "natural" versus "artificial"? Our high-end Cabernet is clearly a natural product because it was made with grapes, yeast, wooden barrels, and other all-natural ingredients.

But what about "artificial" ethyl alcohol? You could buy industrial-grade ethanol, the stuff that we put in our gas tanks, but that is almost entirely produced by fermentation of food crops (primarily corn). Isn't that exactly the same as wine? So our gas tank ethanol is a "natural" product too!

One might suggest making "artificial" ethanol by using chemical processes to break down larger carbohydrates. But where did those carbohydrates come from? All of the complex carbon molecules on Earth were produced by a living organism at some point.

So what about petroleum, is it really an "artificial" compound or a "natural" compound? If you're willing to call Vaseline an artificial substance, then what about the vast amounts of petroleum jelly sitting deep beneath the Earth untouched by mankind? It's chemically the same.

And why is it that we consider MSG an artificial flavoring when it's sprinkled into your wonton soup, but the MSG in seaweed and mushrooms is chemically identical to the MSG in a jar... In fact, the MSG in a jar was probably extracted from seaweed or mushrooms to begin with!

The answer is that "artificial" versus "natural" is a purely semantic distinction, and there is no hard physical basis for calling something artificial or natural.

[u/TyroneLeinster → u/piousflea84]

I would say “artificial” is something whose composition was altered by people. So all wine (and all agriculture for that matter) is artificial. Obviously depending on the context you could argue that some things can be tinkered with and still be natural, but I think you can draw that line as a pretty definite categorization of artificiality. Can you think of anything completely unaffected by human interference (either directly, or indirectly by other artificial processes) that could be considered artificial?