Stormy Alien Atmospheres May Spark Seeds of Life 44
astroengine writes "In research presented at the Meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in London on Friday, astronomers discussed the dusty, stormy atmospheres of exoplanets and brown dwarfs and how they could be hothouses for the formation of prebiotic molecules. These are organic molecules that are known to form the building blocks for life as we know it. 'The atmospheres around exoplanets and brown dwarfs form exotic clouds that, instead of being composed of water droplets, are made of dust particles made of minerals,' said astronomer Craig Stark, of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. The idea is that lightning storms generate copious amounts of highly charged ions and electrons, which then get stuck to dust particles, using them as miniature prebiotic chemistry factories. Of particular interest is the formation of formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide and the amino acid glycine, all of which underpin Earth's biosphere."
The universe is self-organizing, ... (Score:2, Interesting)
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how you think Politicians came in to being?..
oh yeah.. that's the reverse process..
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Try to get a Republican to understand how formaldehyde and ammonia are essential to the creation of life. Go ahead, I'll stand over here and watch.
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Well I believe the idea would be that Shannon and his basic work on information theory made inroads to the study of complexity. And the common and flawed argument that the anti-science crowd throws about is that various parts of biology, or in this case the most basic forms of life, are irreducibly complex. And that it's SOOOOO rare of a chance that these amino acids and whatnot would randomly bump into each other to form a self-reproducing molecule that's it's an absurd theory.
So it's important to understa
Gautama Buddha said... (Score:2)
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Reply to self: Yep. /code ate the a href=blah blah... good to know.
After all, it happened here... (Score:2)
> Stormy Alien Atmospheres May Spark Seeds of Life
Life started at least once here, why not elsewhere?
With any luck we'll achieve intelligent life before them too, but I'm not holding my breath.
Re:After all, it happened here... (Score:4, Insightful)
Our planet is a data point of one, from which useful questions can be raised like: Why not elsewhere? The fact that Venus and Mars aren't teeming with life tells us things about where life cannot arise. (Or at least hasn't in the past few billion years)
They have to keep releasing these type of wildly speculative stories to keep interest up in science and technology. Because children have the right to dream fantastic dreams of the future and giving them meaningful goals and quests to set them upon is a duty of the current generation. Plus it's fantastically more productive than building hype about what the latest pop-star wore and whose baby she's carrying.
And yeah, reminding people about how cool science is really does help focus them on what's important and keep the research grant taps from shriveling up into nothing.
Nothing more, nothing less.
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Our planet is a data point of one, from which useful questions can be raised like: Why not elsewhere? The fact that Venus and Mars aren't teeming with life tells us things about where life cannot arise. (Or at least hasn't in the past few billion years)
They have to keep releasing these type of wildly speculative stories to keep interest up in science and technology. Because children have the right to dream fantastic dreams of the future and giving them meaningful goals and quests to set them upon is a duty of the current generation. Plus it's fantastically more productive than building hype about what the latest pop-star wore and whose baby she's carrying.
And yeah, reminding people about how cool science is really does help focus them on what's important and keep the research grant taps from shriveling up into nothing.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Before you can answer "Why not elsewhere?" You need to figure out how it began here. Explaining the creation of organic molecules in an early earth atmosphere is one thing. Even getting to the point of self-replicating molecules is not too terribly difficult. Getting from self-replicating molecules to even the simplest life -- that's the hard part and until we can figure that out (and no, it doesn't require a deity), anything we say about alien planet atmosphere sparking life is pure conjecture.
As for thes
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Before you can answer "Why not elsewhere?" You need to figure out how it began here.
No you don't.
Explaining the creation of organic molecules in an early earth atmosphere is one thing. Even getting to the point of self-replicating molecules is not too terribly difficult. Getting from self-replicating molecules to even the simplest life
Self-replicating molecules IS the definition of life. At least, you know, it's good enough for me. If you start down the path of arguing what is and isn't alive, you just end up in a philosophical dead end.
anything we say about alien planet atmosphere sparking life is pure conjecture.
It's conjecture, but it's not pure conjecture. It's an informed and rational estimation given a small but not insignificant amount of data on the subject. The probability that the conjecture is true is low, but not zero. It takes a mountain of effort to raise that probability, and it never ge
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That's "Fronkensteen".
All I have to say to that is...
Blücher!
Ob. Trek reference (Score:2)
Be right with you, trying to calibrate this dynoscanner...
Self Awareness (Score:2)
Re:Self Awareness (Score:4, Informative)
My question though is at what point those molecules become alive?
Abiogenisis is just chemistry [youtube.com], the point where it becomes alive depends on your definition of "alive".
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Except that most people consider plants, fungus, and bacteria to be alive. I think the term you're looking for is "sentient", which means something else.
Re:Self Awareness (Score:4, Interesting)
My question though is at what point those molecules become alive?
When they bump into each other and form something that reproduces itself. Abiogenesis. [wikipedia.org] After that happens evolution kicks in and they're on the course towards launching rockets towards Earth and killing us all.
When do they start reproducing
Good question. Once you get the primordial soup, they bump around randomly until they form things of interest. Cell membranes are easy. Lipids naturally cling to each other and make little bubbles. There's a tough call about which part of the next process came first and how they made the other half: Proteins or nucleic acids? They kind of make each other. Like I said, this is a good question.
or even get the will/understanding the need to reproduce/split to survive?
I don't think that bacteria particularly have/need any amount of willpower or understanding to reproduce, split, and/or survive. They just need to do it. We personify these things a lot as a teaching aide, like saying the river water WANTS to flow to the sea, but they're just dumb cells.
How does that transformation occur that takes this energy from lightning or whatever and converts it to life?
Oh, that's easy: the energy from lightning converts some common chemicals into some other chemicals. Specifically, methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), water (H2O), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), carbon dioxide (CO2) or carbon monoxide (CO), and phosphate (PO43-) get electrocuted and can turn into, among other things, amino acids. These chemicals are the basic building blocks of life and the idea is that if you bump them together enough that they'll form into something that reproduces. That's the definition of life.
Inevitability (Score:2)
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Well yes, but the frequency at which life arises in the universe may well make the duration that life sustains itself look like a tiny and temporary blip.
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the universe can host life
Funny how our everyday language separates life from the rest of the universe, when all evidence points to it being inseparable. Perhaps that would change if we all took Sagan's POV and thought of life as the mechanism by which the universe that observes itself.
Also from the Earth's history we might assume liquid water is required for single-celled critters while O2 is required to make the cologene (sic) to bind them into multicellular critters. It's said that Europa has an ocean and volcanic vents, it's
Alien (Score:3)
Ash: Well, as I said, I'm still... collating, actually, but uh, I have confirmed that he's got an outer layer of protein polysaccharides. Has a funny habit of shedding his cells and replacing them with polarized silicon, which gives him a prolonged resistance to adverse environmental conditions. Is that enough?
I'll give you an stormy alien atmosphere... (Score:2)
Very old news (Score:1)
Not possible (Score:3)
Stormy climates have to be caused by humans. Driving around in SUVs. Otherwise the atmosphere would be calm and stable and nothing would ever change.
Brown Dwarfs have lightning? (Score:2)
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Forming a hypothesis could be considered the first step of science.
Did they crank-up a Bunsen burner and cook some chemicals?
That's been done. [wikipedia.org]
Why does #1 have to come before #2?