Scientists Are Cracking the Primordial Soup Mystery 278
derekmead writes "Scientists have had a basic understanding of how life first popped up on Earth for a while. The so-called 'primordial soup' was sitting around, stagnant but containing the basic building blocks of life. Then something happened and we ended up with life. It's that 'something' that has been the sticking point for scientists, but new research from a team of scientists at the University of Leeds has started to shed light on the mystery, explaining just how objects from space might have kindled the reaction that sparked life on Earth. It's generally accepted that space rocks played an important role in life's genesis on Earth. Meteorites bombarding the planet early in its history delivered some of the necessary materials for life but none brought life as we know it. How inanimate rocks transformed into the building blocks of life has been a mystery. But this latest research suggests an answer. If meteorites containing phosphorus landed in the hot, acidic pools that surrounded young volcanoes on the early Earth, there could have been a reaction that produced a chemical similar one that's found in all living cells and is vital in producing the energy that makes something alive."
Stop acting as if like was an on/off switch! (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no "alive" vs "not alive"! It’s a gradient! And there exists, and existed, every step in-between!
Why is this such a unknown thing in Leeds? Here in Germany, it's already accepted common knowledge.
It's as if they were completely blind to prions, viruses, and other things that are in-between what they like to call "alive" and what they call "dead". Or, and this is what I think, they are deliberately and obsessively trying to force a hard distinction because their rigid (and in this case willfully ignorant) world view is built on it.
You get proteins (not DNA) of bigger and bigger size forming from the same basic building blocks. Like Prions and the normal proteins of our bodies. Now get one that is by accident capable of self-reproducing (probably with the environment and other simpler proteins already doing most of job), and voila, you have something alive enough to fit your arbitrary (and varying with the mood of the day) lower limit.
This is ridiculous and embarrassing for people who call themselves scientists.
Scientists Are Cracking the Primordial Soup Myster (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Here we go again...... (Score:5, Interesting)
We're doing that already - we call the processes science and mysticism, and every backdoor we discover opens the path to the creation of new kinds of mods. Really the only big difference would be the search for cheat codes, and a lot of religious people are already convinced they've found some of those as well, they just won't know for sure until they reach the game-over screen.
Re:Here we go again...... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually we're already at the threshold of creating life in any form we wish - I believe it was a year or so ago that someone successfully implanted a fully synthetic genome into a bacteria and had it develop and reproduce as a new organism. There are (presumably) limits as to how far you can reshape a given cell using the technique, but given the vast spectra of life on this planet we will probably soon be able to create almost anything we can imagine, though some of it may take several generations of successive modifications if we wish to drastically overhaul the internal cellular processes.
Knowing how life (may have) first arisen is largely an intellectual curiosity, much like anthropology, paleontology, or any other historical study. Knowing how we got here may give us some degree of insight into the forces that drive us, but our interpretation will be limited by our current understanding of the processes involved, and that understanding will have already opened the door to any new technologies.