Ingredients of Life Found Around Sun-Like Star 366
smooth wombat writes "NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope has detected the basic organic building blocks of life in a ring orbiting in the 'habitable zone', that area where Earth orbits the Sun and where water exists on the borderline between gas and liquid, in a nearby stellar nursery. When acetylene and hydrogen cyanide combine with water they form adenine, one of the four bases of DNA. The detection supports the widely held theory that many of the molecular building blocks of life were present in the solar system even before planets formed, thus assisting the initial formation of complex organic molecules and the start of life itself." Though it was a little shakier than this observation, we've discussed the possibility of life elsewhere in the galaxy before.
Re:After further consideration... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:After further consideration... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why mention something weakly supported? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's like saying that because some unknown substance glows, it supports that it is radioactive, because other radioactive things glow.
It also supports that it is a lightbulb.
And also that it is hot...
*taps the subject*
Re:DNA in space? (Score:5, Insightful)
They worked out the probabilities for life as we know it occuring randomly - they were small per trial however you must apply the Law of Extremely Large Numbers - ie a huge ammount of trials. Turns out the number of stars likely to have planets in the habital zone overwhelmed the probability by about 10,000 planets likely to have life of some form.
Don't try to fathom real world probabilities in terms of serial trials of flipping a coin.
Re:Guess I'm just I'm too skeptical... (Score:2, Insightful)
As far as observing this process in actions, it is only a matter of finding planets at the various stages of the process and observing the expected chemical reactions. This will be easier as our ability to make the observations improves.
In fact we are performing these observations on the past, due to the speed of light. However many light-years away the observed solar system is, that is how long ago the events we see now happened.
Re:Ingredients of Life Found Around Sun-Like Star (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny thing is, whenever I ask a "why" question, regarding the origins of life, God's intentions, etc, to one who professes that religion contains all the answers, the answer I typically get when my questions get deep enough is always along the lines of "we cannot profess to know or understand the motive of God and His infinite wisdom; for to do so would be to place ourselves on His level. We must only have faith in His divine plan." Doesn't seem to answer much of anything, in my opinion.
42 purple monkey dishwashers!
Re:statistical black hole (Score:4, Insightful)
No one has ever suggested that a fully formed human chromosome could just pop into existance out of constituant elements. Your example is a straw man.
No explanation has yet been demonstrated of how the initial
chemical constituents formed to produce a DNA/RNA based life form.....No, a lightning strike/spark on an early 1950's high scholl science project that produces some organic slime is not the same thing.
Yes it danm well is, sunshine. That experiment proved that these elements, amino acids etc, were almost guaranteed to have existed in abundance in the early earth. These elements ARE the building blocks of life.
Take a look a a model where a soup of these elements exists, add in factors, look at the probabilites, then multiply by the collasal timescales and particle counts involved and you'll quickly realise that not only was it likely that life evolved out of slime or pools around geysters, it was practically inevitable.
Go back to Kansas and take last years flu vaccine, and go pray to whatever straw man is up there in the sky. We'll be over here in the Age of the Enlightenment if you'd care to join us.
Re:After further consideration... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Guess I'm just I'm too skeptical... (Score:2, Insightful)
People have been gazing through telescopes making observations of hundreds of years before there was "practical space technology". At one point, it was "wild speculation" that the Earth was not the center of the Universe. Building theories to explain observations is how science works. Hard science is driven by educated speculation. A little bit more of "science fiction" has slipped into the realm of "science fact".
Re:Ingredients of Life Found Around Sun-Like Star (Score:1, Insightful)
"Why can't God have created evolution?"
Complete ignorance of certain naturalistic and theistic positions.
"Science asks how, religion asks why."
Religion's questions are however met with no answers.
"Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between."
False compromise.
"Darwin's Origin of Species is a rape-fantasy fulfillment manual."
Patently untrue.
Re:Ingredients of Life Found Around Sun-Like Star (Score:5, Insightful)
Why presume that there are things that science not only doesn't know, but can't? Who's to say that in the future it will always be impossible for us to figure out what was before the Big Bang? As we know it now, no, we don't know what may have been before, but that's why we continue on attempting to discover and learn. We may end up discovering some as-of-yet unknown fundamental principle of reality that illuminates the very questions that we think are unanswerable. Or that quantum mechanics only appears random and probablistic because we currently lack the ability to probe where we need to be able to figure it out, but in the future we may discover how to do it. Making up an answer of "God did it and that's all we need to know so stop asking" helps exactly nothing.
Live long and prosper.
Re:Complexity of DNA (Score:4, Insightful)
I think what some of the posters here fail to understand is the entire thing with :
infinite time
infinite space
infinite possibilities
given those variables, I think it is entirely possible that we might be more "normal" than one would think considering we are made up of the this stuff and the fact that these things have a tendency to fall into place in certain ways naturally.
I actually think it is an thought-cop-out to just declare a "designer" did something instead of coming to grips with the idea of trillions and trillions of stars and infinity.
Re:Intelligent Design (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, since they are billions of light-years away, they just noticed last week.
Re:Ingredients of Life Found Around Sun-Like Star (Score:4, Insightful)
The possibility of gods existing is not concidered by science since the question is one of religeon or philosohpy, not science.
Re:Ingredients of Life Found Around Sun-Like Star (Score:2, Insightful)
Or has it?
Do we have any sort of chance of observing the "Big Bang"? Or other universes. Or the "bulk" (a sort of space outside "spacetime" as we "know" it? Or the origin of life (not to be confused with "origin of species", which Darwin theorized was how that original life form(s) became as varied and complex and interdependent as it is today)? Or do you think we (in this millenia) have any way of actually seeing, measuring, or studying, wormholes or the "other dimensions" inside the "strings" (our best "scientific" theory of everything)? Or almost any of the ideas about cosmology, or origins or reasons for the way things are that yet are considered "good science" (essentially because they don't include "God" or ... uh, the "supernatural"! Uh, sorry, they ALL seem pretty "super, or supra-natural" to me!)
Actually, science is quite willing to consider anything equal to, or even more undefinable than "God", just as long as they don't have to call it "God", or read about it in the Bible first!. But, hey, it's a free country and they are entitled to believe in, and develop a theology about, anything they want. Their theories are often good enough guesses that they actually bear good fruit, and make such things as the technologies that sustain /.!
Just wish they were more tolerant of new ideas! Where would we be if Einstein had not been allowed to replace Newton (whose theoretical construct, by the way, still works best for certain branches of science and technology!)