Compounds Necessary For Life 'All Over Space'

Kupek writes: "The Washington Post is carrying a story about how simple chemicals, when in space, form structures that resemble the membranes found in all life on Earth. "This discovery implies that life could be everywhere in the universe," said Louid Allamandola of NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. Instead of the life process happening entirely on a planet capable of supporting life, it is proposed that some of the process takes place in space."

Comments

Is Evolution the Full Explanation?

[voidzero]

A good starting point for your enquiries.

It seems that a fair few people on sadsloth/dashlots have some acquaintance with Stuart Kauffman's At Home In the Universe - complexity theory and autocatalytic sets:
"It is not necessary that a specific set of 2000 enzymes be assembled... Whenever a collection of chemicals contains enough different kinds of molecules, a metabolism will crystallize from the broth."

Concrete evidence for spontaneous complexity:

Gunter von Kiedrowski, then at U. Freiburg in Germany, several years ago published work on a collectively autocatalytic set of two DNA hexamers that mutually ligated the two pairs of DNA trimers composing the two hexamers. Meanwhile, Reza Ghadiri at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California has made an autocatalytic peptide, Nature August 2 years ago and nearly collectively autocatalytic sets more recently.

Unexpected evidence comes from Lou Allamandola. "The most amazing thing is that we start with something really simple. And then suddenly we're making this enormous range of complex molecules. When I see this kind of complexity forming under these exceedingly extreme conditions, I begin to really believe that life is a cosmic imperative." and from Biliang Zhang and Tom Cech, who isolated RNAs that could efficiently link specific amino acids together. These pseudo-ribosomes were selected from a random pool of 10^15 synthetic RNAs.

So, there is enough evidence to invalidate the claim that complexity theory is 'fact-free science'. Recently Yao et al described a four-component peptide system that is capable of auto- and cross-catalysis and which supports the suggestion that self-replicating peptides may have played a role in the origin of life.

Re:I wonder?

[Legion303]

Random selection seems highly dubious, given our experience with fruit flies -- almost all the mutations are "bad" and should get selected out.

"Random selection" wouldn't get organisms very far. Fortunately for us, there's no such thing in evolution.

Even if we accept selection in this way, we are left to wonder about structures like the retina, which require a staggering number of precise conditions (proteins, cell types, etc.), and according to the one gene one enzyme principle, couldn't be brought about by a single point mutation. However, if any of these chemicals, cells, etc. are missing, the retina doesn't work. That is, we would have to posit millions of years of non-working retinas that still managed to naturally select until they got to the point of a working retina. The fossil record doesn't bear this out.

This is another common misconception of evolution that creationists keep ladling up, even in the face of logic (note that I'm not blaming you for it; it sounds reasonable to many people who read it in books like those of Morris). The retina (an imperfect "design," by the way--why the blind spot where the nerve bundle goes through the retina?) of today is the end result of billions of years of change. Its precursors were light-sensitive receptors that slowly (remember, it took billions of years) changed into what most mammals have today.

-Legion

Re:woah

[lohen]

'Favorable' conditions do allow a certain degree of scope. Among the archeabacteria on this planet, for example, are species which exist perfectly happily at extremes of heat (volcanic vents), cold (antarctica), radioactivity (nuclear waste has proved most suitable), pH (acid or alkali, in different cases) and more. 'Archea' means ancient - ie, these have been around as long as anything we know of. Therefore they must have been started up early, and to extrapolate from this it would not be difficult to imagine at least monocellular life evolving on other planets to suit the conditions there. And under other conditions, who knows what happens next?

Well of course

[flatpack]

This shouldn't really come as a suprise to anybody who has given serious thought into the problem of time scales in the development of life, or who has read about the experiments in which amino acids can form spontaneously from their components in an electrical field, conditions analogous to those found on primordial Earth.

Hopefully we're now coming to the end of the humanocentric period of our history in which we view life on Earth as something unique, rather than the almost-inevitable consequence of the way the Universe has been ordered. There is nothing special about humanity per se, rather it is Life itself that is the miracle, and findings like this serve to drive home just how amazing it is.

The question of whether or not this means we are alone in the Universe has not really changed, but this discovery makes it more likely life will be found elsewhere in some form. And although I doubt it will happen in my lifetime, I envision a future where humanity discovers life in the most unlikely of places, just as it was meant to be.

I wonder?

[ConsumedByTV]

What impact will this have on people that believe in god? This can be proof of the ability to have e.t. life. Not proof per se, but that its possible. Does anyone that reads slashdot even believe in god? And if you do, do you believe in macro evoloution?


Fight censors!

Assumptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it assumed that life always requires the same things (water, air, etc..) to grow and adapt? Isn't it possible that there are other forms of life with entirely different requirements?

Re:Go read "Religion and Rocketry"

[Zach Frey]

Yet again, the tired old "conflict" between Christianity and (capitalized) Science(tm). A little reality checking is in order here:

1st science: Ether was believed to be the all incorporating substance between people & things as late as the nineteenth century. Science later debunked that as incorrect and now we know that air is the material we live and breathe. Maybe someday that will be debunked when a scientist becomes interested enough. This kind of questioning is accepted and tolerated.

Air was understood as being a distinct thing from "ether" for a long time before the Michaelson-Morley experiment showed that the ether theory to be untenable.

You really need to look into the history of scientific inquiry a bit more. The idea of ether was a holdover from Aristotle, who held that the Universe needed an absolute frame of reference. For a long, long time, Aristotle's viewpoints were held sacred and unchallengeable. Eventually, along came Thomas Aquinas who said that instead of holding to the tradition of Aristotle's teaching, we ought to simply look at reality and accept that what we observe is the way it is, regardless of whether it contradicts Aristotle or not.

It is not irrelevant to note that Aristotle was a pagan and Aquinas was a Christian

Go read "Religion and Rocketry"

[Zach Frey]

C. S. Lewis covered this quite well back in the '50's with his essay "Religion and Rocketry," where he discussed the (non-)implications of extraterrestrial life on Christian belief. (You didn't specify Christian, but I'm hardly qualified to comment on the implications of ET life on other religions.)

A few points to keep in mind about Christian doctrine on the subject:

• Christianity does insist that humans are a special creation, and the only "souled" or "spiritual" creatures native to this planet.
• Christianity does, however, also insist on the existance of ET intelligences, and of their presense on this planet and elsewhere. We call them "angels" (or "demons" if they are fallen). We don't know much about these creatures, although two data points are that they are non-material, and they seem to have a different "economy of salvation" than we do.
• Christianity is silent on the possiblity of extraterrestrial, material life. Therefore, our finding or not finding it is irrelevant to the truth and teaching of Christianity.

The critics of Christianity for decades now (this is documented by Lewis, and it hasn't let up since) have been enjoying the hobby of taking whatever the latest discoveries and theories on ET life and using them as a stick to beat Christianity with. "The Universe is cold and lifeless! Therefore God is dead!" "The Universe is teeming with life! Therefore God is dead!" While this may be fun for the critics, it's not terribly logical and it ignores the actual teachings of Christianity on the subject. Ecclessia delanda est, I suppose.

So, the bottom line should be "no effect, really." It's really quite a straw man that gets set up, and I've never understood why people seem to think that the possiblity of ET life sets up some sort of religious crisis.

Re:Go read "Religion and Rocketry"

[Zach Frey]

I wonder what would happen to your faith if humanity encountered a material life which said: "your Christian doctrine is bull-pucky".

No need to run the experiment; it happens all the time. Oh, you meant if an ET said it vs. some Slashdotter saying it?

Would that change the relevance of the truth and teaching of Christianity?

Not really. While contact with ETs would certainly raise some ... interesting issues of practical theology, their very existance wouldn't undermine Christianity in the slightest. As for this hypothetical religious challenge, give me a break. You and I both have no idea what religious situation any ETs would have, because we've never encountered any. For all you know, they're as likely to bolster the Faith as to challenge it. And if I'm capable of believing even though less than 100% of my fellow homo sapiens agree with me, why should it be a problem if a creature from some other world also happens to disagree?

I guess you would then just shift to the "these material beings are God's test of my faith".

You guess wrong.

Doesn't prove anything except...

[Masem]

I don't think we are necessarily any closer to proving that life exists elsewhere. All the discovery indicated was the presence of benzene in some other place besides earth.

Benzene is a rather difficult molecule to make, but once made, is extremely stable. A common chemical engineering problem is to try to make benzene from cyclohexane (C6H6 from C6H12); it's not too hard to extract 4 hydrogen atoms to leave cyclohexadiene (C6H8), but that last pair of atoms to convert to C6H8 to C6H6 is impossible to extract under the same conditions used for the first two steps; fortunately, elevating temperature and other factors gets the job done. Similarly, trying to add two hydrogen atoms back to 'saturate' the benzene is very tricky to get going, but once it's no longer benzene, it rapidly converts all the way back to cyclohexane.

In addition, we're talking about the formation of carbon-carbon bonds, nearly the most difficult and most stable bond that you can make. There is research that is trying to take carbon {mono|di}oxides and hydrogen and convert these to pure organics, thus requiring some C-C bond formation, but it is very slow even under intense conditions.

This all boils down to the fact that if the results that the astromers observed is true, then all we are seeing is that there a area in space that was sufficient in carbon content, temperature, and the like, for benzene to be formed, which is a very difficult reaction, but one necessary that would eventually lead to amino acids, and the possibility of life. All I think this would do is help to quality the possibility of life term in that one equation, the name which I forget, but goes something like "Number of stars in the universe, x fraction of stars with planets..." etc.