Cometary Impacts May Have Provided Key Elements of Life 85
trendspotter writes with news of research indicating that impact events might be responsible for seeding the Earth with reactive forms of the precursors to amino acids. From the article: "Early Earth was not very hospitable when it came to jump starting life. In fact, new research shows that life on Earth may have come from out of this world. Lawrence Livermore scientist Nir Goldman and University of Ontario Institute of Technology colleague Isaac Tamblyn (a former LLNL postdoc) found that icy comets that crashed into Earth millions of years ago could have produced life building organic compounds, including the building blocks of proteins and nucleobases pairs of DNA and RNA. Comets contain a variety of simple molecules, such as water, ammonia, methanol and carbon dioxide, and an impact event with a planetary surface would provide an abundant supply of energy to drive chemical reactions."
The paper (PDF).
Comets are nothing but Intergalactic Spermatazoa (Score:5, Informative)
Except.. (Score:2, Interesting)
..that life emerged billions of years ago.
Not that I am finding fault with the underlying theory, but still..
CAPTCHA: creator!
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And comets only appeared last Tuesday?
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I know that reading TFA is not in fashion on /. but can you at least read the summary? It says, "..that icy comets that crashed into Earth millions of years ago could have produced life building organic compounds." That's what I was pointing out. Sheesh.
Re:Except.. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I for one am extremely unfashionable and actually RTFA:
"The flux of organic matter to Earth via comets and asteroids during periods of heavy bombardment may have been as high as 10 trillion kilograms per year, delivering up to several orders of magnitude greater mass of organics than what likely pre-existed on the planet," Goldman said.
The words "heavy bombardment" have particular meaning in the context of solar system history; the most well-known being the (not quite ubiquitously accepted) Late Heavy Bombardment [wikipedia.org], on the moon, 4.1–3.8 billion years ago. The bit about "millions of years ago" was probably added by the public relations science writer and should have been "billions." They get this stuff wrong all the time.
Re:Except.. (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this even a new idea?
I've heard this for quite some time now, and I thought this was a prevailing understanding.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this even a new idea?
I've heard this for quite some time now, and I thought this was a prevailing understanding.
It's like that news story that comes up every few months... Scientist Discover Signs of Water on Mars!
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You would prefer "scientists now pretty sure water was on Mars, not even going to bother any more"?
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You would prefer "scientists now pretty sure water was on Mars, not even going to bother any more"?
That's rather like what The Onion might write. Except that it would probably be a good idea to stop going all ThePriceIsRight over every piece of info that comes back from the Mars rovers in the first place.
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Yes.
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Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
1492...
Guy finds previously unknown land and peoples. No need to follow up.
Guy with terrific PR connections finds "previously unknown land", if you don't count the Vikings, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Polynesians, etc.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which, oddly enough, they never do.
Much of history boils down to "the world was invented by white Europeans because we wrote the history books".
People tend to downplay just how much stuff we actually knew even 2000 years ago and act like it wasn't there.
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Which, oddly enough, they never do.
Much of history boils down to "the world was invented by white Europeans because we wrote the history books".
People tend to downplay just how much stuff we actually knew even 2000 years ago and act like it wasn't there.
Like I said: terrific PR connections. Same guys that convinced the world that Edison invented the light bulb, that the Wright brothers invented the airplane, and that Graham Bell invented the telephone.
Hmm... I should get them to write my resume.
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You don't count the Vikings, Chinese, etc. because they didn't do anything with the discovery. Their "knowledge" of the Americas didn't translate to anything that noticeably impacted history or civilization either there (Norway, China, etc.) or here (North America).
The occasional potsherd or remnants of an abandoned village don't amount to anything. All of them left the equivalent of "Kilroy was here" marks and nothing more.
Columbus' "discovery" shook the world.
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I'm sure that people 'invented' vulcanized rubber long before Charles Goodyear as well. It's not unlikely that some latex got dropped in a fire at some point and discovered as the ashes were cleared. But if something is discovered and then forgotten, we really don't consider it a true discovery.
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Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
The idea that comets might be the source of early prebiotic components is old, but this specific research demonstrating that the high pressures and temperatures involved in impacts is capable of converting the simple, common molecules found on comets into more complex prebiotic structures is new.
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But, wouldn't those same pressures and temperatures be involved in a volcanic eruption? "We came here from another world" sounds more like an episode from Enterprise:TNG than a valid scientific theory. There is no practical implication, and no possible way to test it until we can get to other planets and find some samples that haven't been corrupted by being on this planet.
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Yes, and that is how these molecules (including water) have traditionally thought to arise. TFA does some more modeling to suggest that cometary impact would produce the appropriate chemicals. I am unaware of any similar research done on volcanoes but 1) I'll bet it exists and 2) I'll bet that the results have significant similiarities.
This is really pretty handwavy - modeling conditions on theoretical impacts. But unless somebody is planning on moving a comet to a earth shattering kaboom orbit, it's the
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It really depends on what you mean by 'we' and your stance on how life forms in the universe.
If by 'we came from another world' you mean the basic chemical precursors for life came to planet Earth through things like comets, and somewhere along the way something happened through chemical processes... sure. Because the elements in your body all came from burned up stars, so it's not like the sele
Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I don't know what's new about this.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16215-meteor-impacts-may-have-sparked-life-on-earth.html [newscientist.com]
"Yoshihiro Furukawa... used a high-velocity propellant gun to simulate the impacts of ordinary carbon-containing chondrite meteorites .... recovered a variety of organic molecules, including fatty acids, amines, and an amino acid."
There was a multi-part Nova episode called "Origins" where they also demonstrated this. I can't remember the scientist or laboratory, but they put some simple organic compounds inside a metal plug and then fired a high speed projectile into it (or maybe they fired the plug into a target?). When they opened the container, they found that they had created more complex compounds like amino acids. It looked like a translucent liquid at first, and came out looking like dark slime.
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Chondrite meteorites aren't comets.
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They bring it up every now and then just to stir up the "Creationists".
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Is this even a new idea?
I've heard this for quite some time now, and I thought this was a prevailing understanding.
No, it's not new at all, but there is at least one "news" story on it every year.
See here [telegraph.co.uk] for 2012's, or here [space.com] for 2011's, here [phys.org] for 2010's, etc., etc.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:4, Funny)
Is this even a new idea?
BTW, did you hear Voyager has left the solar system?
And then what? (Score:1)
So a comet comes smashing into the earth and generates a scattered smattering of amino acids and nucleic acids. Then what?
How exactly does this arrange itself into life? How much of a critical mass of these varied building blocks are needed for them to somehow self-assemble into a primitive, reproducing set of chemical reactions (aka lifeform)? I mean, this is like saying that if one dude tossed Lego bricks randomly around the world periodically over millions of years, eventually some of them will fall i
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I'm pretty sure we're still working on that last part. The event doesn't have to be that probable, however, due to the Fermi paradox—if it were probable, we'd be tripping over alien civilizations on a daily basis.
That being said, though, an early solar system might have quite a lot of comets with unstable orbits. Any small chunk of rock capable of floating through a dust cloud or nebula might potentially crash into a planet in the solar system. It's been theorized that all of the water on Earth [wikipedia.org] arrive
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if it were probable, we'd be tripping over alien civilizations on a daily basis.
All of whom had developed the technology to MOVE THEIR CIVILIZATION trillions of miles on a regular basis.
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Then we wouldn't meet them, would we?
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How does it arrange itself into life? Or at least the precursors?
If only we had science for an answer.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/10/simple-reaction-makes-the-building-blocks-of-a-nucleic-acid/ [arstechnica.com]
"all the reaction required was copper ions and some UV light."
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Building blocks, like cytosine????
""But the group from Cambridge showed it was possible to build relatively simple compounds into a three-ring chemical that could then be converted into cytosine, an RNA component."
http://arstechnica.com/science/2009/05/origin-of-life-building-an-rna-world-from-simple-chemicals/ [arstechnica.com]
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Making an educated guess about what probably happened based on available evidence is completely different than 'believing' it to be so. If/when new evidence is uncovered the understanding of life's origin will improve and evolve.
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Atheism has always been based on faith.
Do you think it is faith to not believe in invisible pink elephants that live in your refrigerator?
Otherwise they would state that they can't prove or disprove existence of ... Not even sure I know what they are certain doesn't exist. Omnipotent intelligence? Jesus Chris? Buddha? Aliens designing Earth-life with advanced bioengineering?
You must not pay attention to any of them since any reputable person will state that you cannot disprove the existence of anything. Atheism is the acknowledgement that there is not evidence for these beliefs.
Anyway, atheists are absolutely certain these things don't exist and humans are "meat computers" and you never existed (from your point of view) when you die (all memories of your life gone as well as your conscious).
Many people are certain of many stupid things. Atheism itself does not assert that certainty. There is a difference between someone saying there is a gap in our knowledge and someone saying that gap is
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Sure it is. Scientific explanations are a priori naturalistic. Supernatural explanations are forbidden. What else can science produce. If God, Buddha, or a certain noodly being is responsible, it is not science.
Scientistics typically believe the science can explain everything, it certainly seems to be the best (most accurate and most useful) explanation for a very large number of observable phenomena.
This does not guarantee that it true for any phenomenon though. God could be actively moving atoms, sending
Acts of faith (Score:2)
Sure my thought processes engage many acts of faith every day.
I will have faith that my life, your life, the universe around us and all of history weren't created by an omnipotent being at the end of the very post I'm typing now. But I won't be able to disprove it to you after the fact.
I have faith enough in the documentation of biologic processes to dismiss the idea that one can live only on water and meditation. I believe organs will fail and I will die when my body runs out of fuel.
I have faith that the
commetary life (Score:2, Insightful)
Are we kicking the can down the road now ? Where does cometary life come from ? This is a circular argument.
Re:commetary life (Score:5, Insightful)
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The article cannot make that claim. The raw materials can be shown to have made the trip. The rest is speculation - where there is very compelling reason to speculate.
Take for example this research which is saying that if the average of evolutionary increase of genome complexity approximates to Moore's law, then life would date back ten billion years, necessarily arriving on Earth from elsewhere. Of course, this means that extremely simple microbes would have shown up, but that replication and evolution
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exactly. and comets (and meteoroids/ites) provide annother crucial ingredient: chaos.
a lump of idle rock will take longer to spontaneously evolve life than one with lots of mixing and interaction. kinda like how they think tidal pools and other boundary zones were the first palces life and precursors started to occur. impacts of space objects is another source of that chaotic mixing that leads to neat stuff.
Grammar FTW (Score:1)
In fact, new research shows that life on Earth may have come from out of this world.
It's more fun to read this as life came up from the center of the Earth to the surface.
In laymans terms (since I'm a layman) (Score:2)
I mean, look at our moon and other planets/moons in our solar system. Look at their craters. Look at the craters on our planet. Something hits something else, a peice breaks off and flies toward something else (eventually). Let's say a comet so big hit Earth that gravity from the comet attracts water, bacteria, plantlife, some fish, etc. and then flies off in another direction...carries it somewhere else. If you think about how LONG the universe has been around, this is a scientific certainty that the "buil
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You're jumping ahead of the game. You're describing Panspermia [wikipedia.org] (I always thought that term a tad chauvinistic). This is just splattering pre biotic chemicals around. Then the really interesting part occurs - somehow these precursor chemicals assemble / get transformed / major hand waving into life as we know it.
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Hand waving/science/facts/whatever.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/10/simple-reaction-makes-the-building-blocks-of-a-nucleic-acid/ [arstechnica.com]
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That's a pinky bend. We've got some major hand waving to figure out.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a big proponent of the RNA hypothesis. I think life DID evolve here de novo. We just don't know exactly how.
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"But the group from Cambridge showed it was possible to build relatively simple compounds into a three-ring chemical that could then be converted into cytosine, an RNA component. Now, they've revisited that work and shown that all of the precursors of that reaction can be made with little more than cyanide."
That's a lot of hand waving going bye bye.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2009/05/origin-of-life-building-an-rna-world-from-simple-chemicals/ [arstechnica.com]
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Panspermia [wikipedia.org] (I always thought that term a tad chauvinistic)
No, it makes perfect sense.
You have big planet that's been sitting there developing a fertile environment.
Then out of millions of tiny bits of organic matter navigating a hostile environment one lodges in the fertile environment and using her resources his contribution helps create new life.
So, nope, not chauvinistic. It only works that way as an analogy of human reproduction.
Plus, what, Paneggia? Panovia?
That last one sounds like a c
Re:In laymans terms (since I'm a layman) (Score:5, Interesting)
You'll have to narrow your scope a little: we're pretty sure that all of the interesting bits of evolution (the distinction between bacteria and archaea, the rise of animals, plants, protists, and fungi, multicellularity, and everything since) happened right here. To use a surprisingly good computing analogy, not only do we have the fossil records, but we can compare the source code and see where the forks happened. A lot of the most interesting adaptations are serendipitous re-uses of really old code.
The possibility that living cells might have arrived on Earth is considered something of a toss-up. There have been quite a lot of difficult-to-test proposals about how they could've arisen from fairly basic building blocks here, and they all seem pretty plausible. We're pretty sure about the RNA world hypothesis (the idea that life only started using proteins for enzymes and DNA for storage later, and started off using just what we think of as a makeshift intermediary for everything) but we don't have much of a clue about what happened before that, and we can't say for certain it happened here or not. We also don't know how life went from being a single self-replicating molecule into a membrane-protected cell, nor if there was some storage molecule before RNA that was even simpler to operate on.
However, this article [slashdot.org] is almost certainly wrong because RNA's inherent stability causes it to evolve at a much faster rate. So at the very least, it's still possible that there was enough time for life to evolve here from pure abiogenesis.
No (Score:2)
That's not what is being presented. The idea is that the comet has a high concentration of the chemicals needed to create the more complex chemical building blocks of life when combined with the plentiful chemicals on earth at that time and a lot of heat and pressure. It's collision with the earth would provide that heat and pressure.
There is no supposition of life being transferred from one planet to another here. The resulting chemicals wouldn't be alive, they'd just exist in high concentration allowing "
Impossible (Score:2, Flamebait)
The Earth is only 6,000 years old. Or so says this guy [youtube.com]
So 'Gravity is God'... (Score:5, Funny)
According to TFA, Gravity (capital G) created life (via the kinetic energy of the comets obeying laws of Gravity)
According to Genesis, God created the Universe and life.
Therefore, Gravity = God.
Glad we finally solved that! Can we move on now?
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Glad we finally solved that! Can we move on now?
Sure, now that we've solved the easy bits, we can try to figure out what women are really thinking.
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Glad we finally solved that! Can we move on now?
Sure, now that we've solved the easy bits, we can try to figure out what women are really thinking.
Women don't even know what women are really thinking.
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Why do you hate this universe so much!!!!!
Re:So 'Gravity is God'... (Score:4, Funny)
hmmm...God is unknowable...and we're having trouble tying Gravity into the universal Theory of Stuff...
My Gravity, he's right!
"Solving a 3.5 Billion-Year-Old Mystery" (Score:1)
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Zombies (Score:4, Funny)
I initially misread the headline as "Cemetery impacts..." and assumed that this was going to be a nice discussion of zombies and/or how to be successful with necromancy.
Unfortunately, once again, it's only a discussion of how to set up abiogenesis.
Giveth & Taketh (Score:1)
That idea is a hard sell to dinosaurs.
I doubt life started on planets. (Score:1)
More likely it arose in micro gravity forming bubbles in gas/water clouds, nebula, Oort clouds, etc. flash frozen and then spread throughout the galaxy like dandelion seeds.