Did Life on Earth Come from 'Microlightning' Between Charged Water Droplets? (cnn.com) 59
Some scientists believe life on earth originated in organic matter in earth's bodies of water more than 3.5 billion years ago," reports CNN. "But where did that organic material come from...?"
Maybe electrical energy sparked the beginnings of life on earth — just like in Frankenstein: Researchers decades ago proposed that lightning caused chemical reactions in ancient Earth's oceans and spontaneously produced the organic molecules. Now, new research published March 14 in the journal Science Advances suggests that fizzes of barely visible "microlightning," generated between charged droplets of water mist, could have been potent enough to cook up amino acids from inorganic material.
Amino acids — organic molecules that combine to form proteins — are life's most basic building blocks and would have been the first step toward the evolution of life... For animo acids to form, they need nitrogen atoms that can bond with carbon. Freeing up atoms from nitrogen gas requires severing powerful molecular bonds and takes an enormous amount of energy, according to astrobiologist and geobiologist Dr. Amy J. Williams [an associate professor in the department of geosciences at the University of Florida who was not involved in the research]. "Lightning, or in this case, microlightning, has the energy to break molecular bonds and therefore facilitate the generation of new molecules that are critical to the origin of life on Earth," Williams told CNN in an email...
For the new study, scientists revisited the 1953 experiments but directed their attention toward electrical activity on a smaller scale, said senior study author Dr. Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Natural Science and professor of chemistry at Stanford University in California. Zare and his colleagues looked at electricity exchange between charged water droplets measuring between 1 micron and 20 microns in diameter. (The width of a human hair is 100 microns....) The researchers mixed ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen in a glass bulb, then sprayed the gases with water mist, using a high-speed camera to capture faint flashes of microlightning in the vapor. When they examined the bulb's contents, they found organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds. These included the amino acid glycine and uracil, a nucleotide base in RNA... "What we have done, for the first time, is we have seen that little droplets, when they're formed from water, actually emit light and get this spark," Zare said. "That's new. And that spark causes all types of chemical transformations...."
Even on a volatile Earth billions of years ago, lightning may have been too infrequent to produce amino acids in quantities sufficient for life — a fact that has cast doubt on such theories in the past, Zare said. Water spray, however, would have been more common than lightning. A more likely scenario is that mist-generated microlightning constantly zapped amino acids into existence from pools and puddles, where the molecules could accumulate and form more complex molecules, eventually leading to the evolution of life.
"We propose," Zare told CNN, "that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules that constitute the building blocks of life."
Maybe electrical energy sparked the beginnings of life on earth — just like in Frankenstein: Researchers decades ago proposed that lightning caused chemical reactions in ancient Earth's oceans and spontaneously produced the organic molecules. Now, new research published March 14 in the journal Science Advances suggests that fizzes of barely visible "microlightning," generated between charged droplets of water mist, could have been potent enough to cook up amino acids from inorganic material.
Amino acids — organic molecules that combine to form proteins — are life's most basic building blocks and would have been the first step toward the evolution of life... For animo acids to form, they need nitrogen atoms that can bond with carbon. Freeing up atoms from nitrogen gas requires severing powerful molecular bonds and takes an enormous amount of energy, according to astrobiologist and geobiologist Dr. Amy J. Williams [an associate professor in the department of geosciences at the University of Florida who was not involved in the research]. "Lightning, or in this case, microlightning, has the energy to break molecular bonds and therefore facilitate the generation of new molecules that are critical to the origin of life on Earth," Williams told CNN in an email...
For the new study, scientists revisited the 1953 experiments but directed their attention toward electrical activity on a smaller scale, said senior study author Dr. Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Natural Science and professor of chemistry at Stanford University in California. Zare and his colleagues looked at electricity exchange between charged water droplets measuring between 1 micron and 20 microns in diameter. (The width of a human hair is 100 microns....) The researchers mixed ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen in a glass bulb, then sprayed the gases with water mist, using a high-speed camera to capture faint flashes of microlightning in the vapor. When they examined the bulb's contents, they found organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds. These included the amino acid glycine and uracil, a nucleotide base in RNA... "What we have done, for the first time, is we have seen that little droplets, when they're formed from water, actually emit light and get this spark," Zare said. "That's new. And that spark causes all types of chemical transformations...."
Even on a volatile Earth billions of years ago, lightning may have been too infrequent to produce amino acids in quantities sufficient for life — a fact that has cast doubt on such theories in the past, Zare said. Water spray, however, would have been more common than lightning. A more likely scenario is that mist-generated microlightning constantly zapped amino acids into existence from pools and puddles, where the molecules could accumulate and form more complex molecules, eventually leading to the evolution of life.
"We propose," Zare told CNN, "that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules that constitute the building blocks of life."
Betteridge says no (Score:2)
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Okay, theory is that in modern terms, abiogenesis doesn't really happen, but not assuming intelligent design (god or such), life had to start sometime, somehow.
This is exploring how that could happen. How the first bits that could form the first replicating blocks could form.
Re:Betteridge says no (Score:5, Insightful)
TFS discusses a revised version of the Urey-Miller experiment from the 1950s that produces amino acids much more quickly. It also produced uracil, a base-molecule for RNA. These are indeed some of the "first bits" that make up replicating molecules, but the new research did not explore how such replicating molecules could originate. That is explored in the field of abiogenesis.
As for life starting "sometime, somehow" -- I don't think it's clear how you could watch an evolving organic chemical soup and decide when it shows life. That would be like watching a light source gradually shift towards longer wavelengths, and decide at what moment it "looks red."
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If you dissolve thymine (the "T" nucleobase in DNA) in water, at biologically relevant pH and temperature, it naturally hydrolyses to produce uracil. (Or the other way round ; it's an equilibrium, and I'd have to check which way it lays at specific Ts & Ps.) If you have one, you'll have the other.
Note : this does not mean that DNA (or RNA) are inherently unstable. When tied into the molecular structure of DNA bases (or RNA), the sugar-phosphate "backbon
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Okay, theory is that in modern terms, abiogenesis doesn't really happen
I don't think anyone thinks that.
New organic molecules are probably formed abiogenically all the time, and are then subsequently destroyed or integrated into the biosphere.
Adjusting the headline (Score:2)
CNN headline: Scientists redid an experiment that showed how life on Earth could have started. They found a new possibility
Adjusted headline: "Scientists have no real idea what happened 4.5 billion years ago on Earth, but a few of them have this crazy idea"
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Or to put it less tendentiously : in 1953, Miller and Urey had few grounds to choose their pseudo-atmospheric conditions for their original experiment, so used what was convenient. Since then studies of the minerals found in sediments (which were in contact with the atmosphere and liquid water, and close to equilibrium with both the water and the atmosphere) have provided constraints on the chemical properties of th
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Amino acids (Score:2)
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I think amino acids/proteins are useless. Life had to start with RNA, or DNA. Anyway, by living thing, did you mean an evolvable self replicating unit? That is, a molecule that can catalyze its own formation and follow a template while also making and being tolerant to small errors. Something like https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/... [harvard.edu] ? Because once you have one of those, it's fairly easy. The question is how hard is it to make one of those. It looks like that one was 165 RNA bases chained together. A base is o
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It still does.
Are you on a Mac? or a native German keyboard driver? I'm composing using the standard Linux EN_UK keyboard with AltGr to select composable accented characters. So "AltGr,[,a" to compose an a-umlaut.
Hypothesis : use the compose key : Compose,-,a gives me an a-overbar in the comment text box, but an A-umlaut in the mangled text. That is even more annoying. Oh, hey, what renders as two a-umlau
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Re:Amino acids (Score:5, Insightful)
There are simpler building blocks than RNA and DNA. The very first life didn't need to (directly) encode genetics, it only had to make semi-accurate copies of self.
We tend to look at modern examples to guess, but modern life has to compete, the first life didn't, it could be slow, sloppy, and fragile.
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Well, it didn't (by definition) have to compete against other life forms. It did have to compete against, for lack of a better catch-all, "entropy" in the form of mechanical disruption (if, as seems plausible to me, one response to the "dilution problem" was to take place on the relatively impermeable surfaces of, say, clay minerals), thermal disruption (the pressure-temperature conditions in hydrothermal flows varies a lot, on small scales ; notoriously, on
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That the DNA replication machinery includes substantial functional blocks composed of RNA is generally considered highly suggestive (an
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DNA replication machinery includes substantial functional blocks composed of RNA is generally considered highly suggestive
Substantial yes, but not many. Ribosomes, and what else?
Re:Amino acids (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand the point you want to make, and it has a certain "rear view mirror" validity when looking at the life that now populates the planet. But what we have now is probably far from the early and intermediate steps needed to get to the complex DNA-RNA-peptide system that we now see "everywhere".
Life had to start with RNA, or DNA.
Not true. To be fair, we have no clear definition of where life starts. Eukaryotes? Yes. Prokaryotes? Yes. Viruses? Yes for most people, but still debated and with asterisks and footnotes. Prions? No for most people, but debated. It is wrong to overthink that there is a clear spectrum or hard-divide between yes and no. It is an evolutionary spectrum in a non-linear chaotic mapping of chemical reactions and organizations where, like the transcendental edge of the Mandelbrot set, it exists, but you can never know with certainty if you are standing on it. But, as a more tangible matter, there are self replicating proteins. More primitive molecules can associate-dissociate-reassociate, or aggregate-disaggregate, etc. leading to periodic cycling and reformation of chemical species, e.g. Belushov-Zhabotinsky reaction which is a form of cyclical self-replication.
That is, a molecule that can catalyze its own formation and follow a template while also making and being tolerant to small errors.
Who says that a pre-biotic or biotic system has to follow a template? You are thinking of DNA-RNA genetics as the only system of replication. If there is enough early chemistry going on, some [chemical] species will naturally want to associate. Hard covalent bonds are dead ends. Salts, gases, and easily dissociate compounds are non-starters. But compounds that are stable at "room temperature" (whatever that might have meant back when), but can disaggregate, cross-react, reaggregate as temperature, acid-base, etc. fluctuate enough, then the same molecules or complex aggregations of molecules can form repeatedly. And as a template for morphology, remember that crystals provide their own template for self-similar or self-same organization, and many organics, either isolated species or clusters of high-affinity molecules can do the same. Also, don't forget that even in eukaryotes, once a protein is transcripted, it has to do its own self-organization to fit into the aggregate structure of the cell or its product, and that many non-protein chemicals are passively self-organizing once they form, much of which is by organic pathways independent of enzymatic catalysis.
The mistake many people make is to think about this linearly. It's not, and it certainly wasn't back when. If the system starts with chemical primitives - O2, N2, SO2, HCl, CH4, NH3, etc., then energy via thermal, UV, sun-photo, and electrostatic can start to create thousands of new compounds that can all play around together in the big swimming pool. Then, small molecules may meet friends and get together to make bigger molecules with a greater range of possible reactions, and the system amps up. It is a giant SELF-ORGANIZING system. The system will have countless dead ends, but when it lands in a "low energy" basin, where the chemistry is in a state of minimum entropy and chemical stability, and the surrounding soup wants to keep organizing into that attractor, then you have certain structures (in this case chemical compounds), that can accumulate and became preferred or stronger. And, if the system in its semi-stable attractor can be pushed above an activation energy to do something, like self-organizing duplicate structures, but then slide back to its stable attractor, that is what life is. This is how all complex systems operate, the physics of non-linear dynamics. Straight evolutionary build up from compound A to compound B to C to D, etc, then eventually you climb the ladder to RNA, according to some freshman lab manual plan - that's simply not how nature works. The system goes off in a bazillion different directions, and there is a ton of trial and error and dead ends before finding Waldo.
Also, remember that life as we know it is not as simple as you imply about replicating RNA. RNA does not automatically replicate itself. A test tube of only RNA in aqueous solution does not multiply. It depends on a complex environment of countless chemicals that supply the substrate and milieu for those chemical reactions to occur, which in turn need the RNA to create the milieu. That is the essence of a complex non-linear multi-control system, and the more complex, the more evolutionary time needed for it to become complex enough to be totally self-sustaining and self-replicating.
Human reproduction, generation to generation, is measured in decades. For many lower organisms, year by year. For single cells and for prokaryotes, generational reproduction occurs in hours, sometimes minutes. For chemical reactions, generation-regeneration time can be milliseconds or microseconds. The point is, that in those early eons and small timescales, literally billions if not trillions or more of generations of chemistry occurred, and with highly parallel bandwidth at countless simultaneous places in the ocean, enough to trial-and-error a whole lot of possibilities before hitting on a stable persistent system. Purines and pyrimidines are early easy compounds in the primordial solar system, but the bootstrap loader, building from there to complex RNA and DNA with their saccharide backbones and ability to replicate and transcript amino acids - that took a whole lot longer, so uracil is early, but RNA is a late comer.
And that's all that the authors wanted to demonstrate, that electrostatic energy in water particles, like a Kelvin water dropper, pack enough energy to convert inorganic chemical primitives into pre-biotic chemical primitives, a way to spice the soup with the ingredients that would eventually organize into life.
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You got me thinking even more about this.
A few days ago, there was this article on Slashdot:
NASA's Curiosity Rover Detects Largest Organic Molecules Yet Found on Mars
https://science.slashdot.org/s [slashdot.org]... [slashdot.org]
So, fatty acids, polymers of simple aliphatic acids, are also biochemical primitives that are naturally stable compounds likely to form "in the soup", before actual life, just like amino acids and short peptides. In fact, that is known to occur, for example see:
Amphiphiles – A Major Photopro
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Not really. The general meaning of "polymer" is a material composed by the reaction of identical units (monomers) which combine one with another, frequently with the elimination of a small molecule (e,g, an alcohol group reacting with a hydrogen on the carbon "backbone" to eliminate a water molecule and form a new C-C bond between the two monomer units). That's not h
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Thanks for the very nice reply.
I was using terms in a casual way. For example, when I said "fatty acids, polymers of simple aliphatic acids", I was referring to their binding to glycerol, not end-to-end chaining of alkyl acids, nor to the formation of -(CH2)- chains.
Also, it is common to refer to DNA-RNA, proteins, starches as polymers - biopolymers. Their monomers are are not identical, but they are in the same class - bases, amino acids, sugars. Even in synthetic and industrial chemistry, there are hom
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Amino acids are the easiest things things to create.
Indeed. Space is literally littered with them. In the molecular clouds, all over the asteroids- amino acids are everywhere.
Forming it into a living thing is harder by several orders of magnitude.
Not sure that's entirely clear. I suppose that's what we're trying to find out. Also, how are we quantifying this difficulty so that we can judge how many orders of magnitude the difference is?
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We can build amino acids, we can't build life.
That it's hard for us, very large animals, to construct life with our technology, does not mean whatsoever that it's difficult for abiogenesis to move from amino acids to life. That simply does not follow.
Exactly how much harder it is of course uncertain, but the answer is much harder, no matter how you look at the question.
The answer is "harder", for sure. The much is your opinion.
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I don't know what you are trying to argue, this is not a controversial part. Something is wrong with you.
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It's not just hard for humans, it has only happened once as far as we know. Whereas amino acids are all over. Ergo much harder.
Harder yes, the much is your opinion.
For all you know, it may be quite trivial, but the solar system only has one area where it's likely to happen- the Earth.
I don't know what you are trying to argue, this is not a controversial part. Something is wrong with you.
I'm arguing that you are overselling the facts of the case.
Life may be virtually guaranteed to exist anywhere high energy amino acid chemistry can occur. You can't judge difficulty of producing life based on its scarcity within some arbitrarily defined area (you're using "the solar system"), when we can find it on every cubic millimeter of this plane
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For certain values of "easiest" which result in "littered" being in the order of parts per million or parts per billion. In contrast, metallic iron is order of parts per 100 (percent) of the mass of the Solar system ; "ices" (water, CO2, CO, ammonia") being comparable ; magnesium-iron-aluminium silicates (olivines, pyroxenes) around several parts per 1000, and clay minerals similar.
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For certain values of "easiest" which result in "littered" being in the order of parts per million or parts per billion. In contrast, metallic iron is order of parts per 100 (percent) of the mass of the Solar system ; "ices" (water, CO2, CO, ammonia") being comparable ; magnesium-iron-aluminium silicates (olivines, pyroxenes) around several parts per 1000, and clay minerals similar.
I don't think anyone was trying to argue that space had more organic molecules floating around than silicate and iron rocks, but rather that they seem to be pretty profuse, and distributed in many places.
;)
I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone describe litter as not problematic until it outmasses the road it's on
Asimov (Score:2)
Isaac Asimov wrote an essay about the first amino acids many years ago. It was included in a collection of essays (Why does ice float?, Why is the night sky black?and more...) titled, "The Left Handed Universe". So old the info may be long out of date, but an interesting read if you can find it.
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Fucking moron.
Re: More Fairy Tales (Score:1)
It is a scientific fact that by giving a zillion of monkeys a zillion of typing machines, they will eventually produce all of the works of Shakespeare.
Re: More Fairy Tales (Score:5, Informative)
It is a scientific fact that by giving a zillion of monkeys a zillion of typing machines, they will eventually produce all of the works of Shakespeare.
Actually it is not. Even if you have as many monkeys as atoms in the universe, and you let them type for a period of time equal to the age of the universe, the probability of creating a single page of Shakespeare is so spectacularly small you can dismiss it as effectively impossible. Read more about it here. [wikipedia.org]
That said, the probability of life appearing somewhere in the universe is nowhere near as daunting. Molecules -- even small ones -- that find a self-replicating arrangement can reproduce and gradually create larger ones, building on tiny initial successes. Natural selection can result in the "fittest" of these molecules surviving. Mutation allows for changes to occur, some of which may be beneficial to survival. Other such mutations may be harmful, and cause extinction. But as the sizes of the self-replicating molecules grows, most mutations are likely to be neutral, giving neither an advantage nor a disadvantage.
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and you let them type for a period of time equal to the age of the universe
That's where you went wrong. You applied a constraint to the theorem that the parent did not.
Parent is correct- it is a fact.
The probability may be so remote that the universe will die long before it happens, but mathematically, it is certain.
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vbdasc was appealing to the wrong example. If you want to talk about the probability of life appearing in the universe, you can't compare it to something that would take a ludicrously huge number of times the age of the universe in order to have a decent chance of occurring. So no, vbdasc was wrong. Life is simply not that improbable.
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vbdasc was appealing to the wrong example.
Oh, I agree entirely.
If you want to talk about the probability of life appearing in the universe, you can't compare it to something that would take a ludicrously huge number of times the age of the universe in order to have a decent chance of occurring. So
Entirely correct.
So no, vbdasc was wrong.
No, he wasn't wrong. He just used an argument that didn't follow.
You were wrong when you said: "Actually it is not.".
Because actually, it is, and proving it is elementary.
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vbdasc said it was a scientific fact that a zillion monkeys typing on a zillion typewriters would produce all the works of Shakespeare. Not a mathematical fact.
Given an unending amount of time to wait, eventually one could expect to see the complete works of Shakespeare produced by such monkeys, simply because there is a spectacularly tiny but nevertheless nonzero probability of it happening, and you have time to wait for it. But a scientific fact (if one could use that term) must be demonstrable in the uni
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vbdasc said it was a scientific fact that a zillion monkeys typing on a zillion typewriters would produce all the works of Shakespeare.
I'd love to see where you think that distinction exists.
What mathematical fact could be non-scientific?
Are you trying to tell me that axioms for math aren't axioms for science? I mean, some would argue that's the case in current particle physics- but that's not a good thing, lol.
Given an unending amount of time to wait, eventually one could expect to see the complete works of Shakespeare produced by such monkeys, simply because there is a spectacularly tiny but nevertheless nonzero probability of it happening, and you have time to wait for it.
Correct.
Or, simply put, random actions for infinite time produce infinite combinations.
But a scientific fact (if one could use that term) must be demonstrable in the universe as we know it,
Let me stop you right there- no, you can't use that term. Particularly in the way you're using it.
not in some imaginary mathematical world.
You've just hand-waved away an impressively
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Mathematics and science certainly work together in a synergistic way. But they're not the same, because science determines the truth of claims by making observations and mathematics determines truth by logical reasoning from axioms. (Yes axioms, I have heard of them. I'm not sure you know what they are.)
I take exception to your charge that I do a "disservice" by pointing out incorrect statements. I do that out of a desire to serve mathematics and science by improving public understanding. FYI I have deep tr
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I do know what an axiom is, and if you don't consider Shakespeare's monkeys as axiomatic, then what can I say- you probably don't know any axioms.
If the monkeys aren't self-evident to you, what other logical outcome do you think could happen?
Let's put it this way.
At what point in the lifetime of a white dwarf do we move from discussing scientific facts, to mathematical ones?
If you have evidence that the universe is not infinite, then I'll argue that your made-up definition of "scientific fact
Re: More Fairy Tales (Score:2)
How long does it take for ChatGPT to recreate the works of Shakespeare?
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Why so nakedly emotional about pseudoscience? What is the tangible harm to you if someone believes in crankery like Electric Universe theory? How can you be 100% sure that you are not caught in the trap of dismissing everything that doesn't affiliate with your mood, like epicyclists or the doctors who dismissed hand-washing as a waste of time, because you paint with an overbroad brush when you seek to eliminate that greatest of all evils, pseudoscience?
Is it just coincidental that I'm thinking of how blogge
Re: More Fairy Tales (Score:2)
This method (or a variation of it) of treating homosexuality is still present in current medical science. In Iran, for example, they make homosexuals undergo a sex change.
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Abiogensis would have been a spectrum. I'm not sure there would have been a clear marker where we could say "aha- now that's life!"
Natural selection would have functioned even for the pre-life self-replicating molecules.
Yes! (Score:1)
I feel almost righteous now that my beliefs have been confirmed.
Yes! Life came from micro-lightning! I'm positive, and I have proof too!
As I walk around, Its obvious that the majority of the people I meet and talk to each day were puddles of goo and zapped with some micro-lightning not less than 30 minutes before I interacted with them.
--
Like all vain men, he had moments of unreasonable confidence. - Warren Eyster, The Goblins of Eros
Re: Yes! (Score:2)
Did you just say you adjusted your priors based on new information about micro-lightning that you never knew about before reading this article?
Indeed, (Score:5, Insightful)
as Dr. Williams said, nitrogen gas doesn't easily participate in chemical reactions. But the researchers... mixed ammonia with the other ingredients of the soup. It could be the source of nitrogen for the organic matter on Earth. And the nitrogen gas... is still with us billions of years later, forming the majority of the atmosphere, possibly largely untouched by lightings and other things.
I personally believe that the greater obstacle for the forming of organic molecules in the presence of ammonia would be lack of reactive oxygen atoms, rather than lack of reactive nitrogen. Oxygen is present in CO2, but getting CO2 to react also requires lots of energy.
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Nitrogen gas doesn't like to participate in reactions. That nasty triple bond in molecular nitrogen makes it really stable because it takes so much energy to break it. That said, it isn't impossible to break, and there are bacteria that do it in the soil, usually as part of symbiosis with a plant's roots. The plant provides the energy, the bacteria uses that energy to help break the triple bond and provides it to the plant.
But I wouldn't call it the start of life. I'd say it happened through evolution - a b
Pure idiocy (Score:2)
These fools do not even know what life IS, but they think they can create it.
Sure, like anybody else, they can tell you things they look for to identify that something is alive... but that's VERY different from knowing what life IS. Observing and knowing the requirements for life to be sustained, the things life DOES, the byproducts of life, etc is an entirely different thing from knowing what life is. Confusing these ideas or ignoring them does not make the problem go away. Anybody playing in this field ne