Meteorites May Have Delivered Seeds of Life On Earth 277
esocid writes "At the national meeting of the American Chemical Society, scientists presented evidence today that desert heat, a little water, and meteorite impacts may have been enough to cook up one of the first prerequisites for life. The result of that brew could be the dominance of "left-handed" amino acids, the building blocks of life on this planet. Chains of amino acids make up the protein found in people, plants, and all other forms of life on Earth. There are two orientations of amino acids, left and right, which mirror each other in the same way your hands do. These amino acids "seeds" formed in interstellar space, possibly on asteroids as they careened through space. At the outset, they have equal amounts of left and right-handed amino acids. But as these rocks soar past neutron stars, their light rays trigger the selective destruction of one form of amino acid."
Amino Delivery: Under 30 Eons or your money back (Score:4, Interesting)
It is strange that our location in the galaxy led to a slight imbalance in the amount of gravitationally polarized light striking chunks of rock and metal floating in a cosmic dance 4 billion years before I was born....yet that combination of factors resulted in the alanine in my body to contain only the left-handed chiral.
Studies like this are the cause of my personal religious dilemma. Most of the major religions came about 1500-5000 years ago...and at the time they were conceived, they convincingly explained every natural occurrence well enough to placate the masses. I wonder what the Pope would have to say about this study...was God a southpaw??
What the... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:God vs. ...that. (Score:3, Interesting)
In econometrics, I learned this to be "Sample Selection Bias". The odds that we'd all have left-handed amino acids might be nill. However, the odds that we'd all have left-handed amino acids GIVEN that we've become conscious beings able to analyze such a thing?
I mean, maybe there WERE a lot of failures. But somewhere in the universe, ONE worked. And BECAUSE we worked, we're able to wonder about it.
Re:What the... (Score:3, Interesting)
But, moving along, the carboxy and amino terminuses are perfectly capable of linking up via chemical reactions. It wouldn't be a stretch, taking into account the conditions of ancient Earth, that amino acids in the "primordial soup" just kept linking up and polymerized under favorable conditions, generating complex proteins.
Personally, this is why the evolution of early life is so interesting to me. The modular structure of DNA, RNA, and proteins, coupled with phospholipids (which spontaneously form cell like compartments in water), if all these are thrown into early earth conditions, spontaneous creation of life seems very, very possible.
Re:Discussed Organic Material in Meteor (Score:4, Interesting)
What if the "seeds" of life require foreign interference to mutate into life. I don't understand how we can evaluate a missing link if we don't know where all the components came from. The Earth could have been an unfertilized egg waiting to be inseminated. For that reason how they came to be is just as interesting as where they came from especially if they are intertwined.
Imagine the odds that would have to be overcome if it takes a specific type of meteor to react with a specific type of dead planet to make life. If that is true the odds of the right elements being present in both cases could be so high that they could be conceivably called divine. It would be pretty funny as well if the chain reaction took 7 days.
Re:God vs. ...that. (Score:2, Interesting)
Anything that can happen as a consequence of circumstance, chance etc, can be deliberately engineered in the lab.
Example: If a stone takes on a particular shape because of constant flow of water over it over thousands of years, it should be possible to create a stone with the same shape by taking another stone and just grinding it into shape without requiring thousands of years to do it.
To know how evolution works, one will necessarily need to arrive at how it works in the following two stages:
Stage 1 - Create a unicellular organism in the lab using deliberate steps (that is, the scientists need not replicate the conditions that existed on the earth, there is no need to mimic the different stages of evolution etc). They can directly manipulate the creation of the amino acids, the cellular structure etc. They can form the different chemicals, proteins etc using whatever methods.
Stage 2 - Once stage 1 is complete and we know the exact set of steps required to deliberately create a unicellular organism, determine how this could have come about by evolution. Stage 2 will be difficult to prove because any experiment could take millions of years to complete.
However, if we cannot successfully complete stage 1, that is, if we don't know the exact set of steps required to create a unicellular life form in the lab from ground up, then we cannot really know what steps are required in stage 2.
This doesn't seem to have prevented the scientific community from vociferously claiming that they have a good understanding of stage 2 despite not coming anywhere near completing stage 1.
People like Dawkins need not spend so much time and energy trying to prove creationist wrong. All they have to do is complete stage 1 - that is, they need only come up with a way of creating a unicellular life form in the lab using deliberate methods and then start work on stage 2.
Re:God vs. ...that. (Score:2, Interesting)
I view the the creation story in Genesis as a literary fable, but believe that the creation and evolution of life is the result of an "intelligent design". Yes, parts of it appear to behave randomly, but all life is "derived" (using a software design metaphore) from abstract "foundation classes" i.e. sets of universal templates and behavioral principles, that permit life to be instantianted and elaborated with form to match needed functionality.
So, for example, I would not be surprised to travel to another planet and find creatures with teeth, arms, legs and brains similar to those found in terrestial creatures. I would not be surprised to find creatures swimming in extra-terrestial oceans with fins and shaped like our fish. etc.
Also, I don't think this idea conflicts with the teachings of Jesus at all. It is well-known that the "genetic code" is a kind of language where triplets of nucleotides ("codons" => words) denote individual amino acids and sequences of codons (=> sentences) are interpreted by RNA to produce proteins. It seems to me that you could interpret these "sentences" as the very Word of God.
In fact, that's exactly how one could interpret Jesus' Parable of the Seed (Luke 8:5-8:16)
Re:Thought it had already been explained (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately the linked paper costs $35 so i didn't get to read it, but I'd be somewhat surprised if they claim it has any solid role in the startup of life. On the other hand this meteor story shows far more potential. If a meteor can create a crater-pool with 45%-right amino acids and 55% left amino acids, and the 45% rights can pair up with 45% lefts to crystallize out, then you can end up with only the last 10% lefts still in a rather substantial all-lefts solution.
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Re:God vs. ...that. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Discussed Organic Material in Meteor (Score:2, Interesting)