Slashdot Mirror
Boost to Chances of Life on Europa?
Gavinsblog writes "New Scientist is reporting that scientists have found that electricity
is produced when aluminium bullets are fired into a block of ice. This raises
the chances of finding life on Europa, as eletrical shocks of this kind could
cause complex molecules to form. An electrifying discovery? :-)"
This result is certainly interesting, but I don't think it really pushes the case of organics on Europa much farther than it already was. I'm a little skeptical that electric sparks in an ice matrix will do a lot to generate organic molecules, for starters. (With compounds in the ice, there is very limited mobility, so that chemical reactions just don't occur very often. My guess is that you can spark it all you like, but in most case, nothing will happen.) Research needs to be done on that problem before they have much of a case.
Even then, this is hardly ground-breaking. Electric sparks are not the only way to generate organics. Urey and Miller also showed that UV light can do the same thing. All you really need is a high-energy source to break up some bounds and allow new ones to form. Heck, even the particle radition in Jupiter's magnetosphere can probably do some of that. The UV flux is down by a factor of 27 from that at Earth (top of the atmosphere, now at the surface where ozone and other molecules have attenuated it), but I'd bet you can provide more activation energy that way than with little electric shocks from impacts.
That said, it's a damn cool result without all the "Life on Europa" hype.
Wow you're full of shit. Let's deconstruct this piece by piece.
Such as the atmosphere being C02, CH4, H20, NH3 with no free 02. At our distance from the sun, this atmosphere is absurd. Why? Because the hard UV that would be coming in without any ozone layer (no O2 in the atmosphere, no ozone layer) would dissociate the NH3 rapidly into N2 and H2, as it would CH4 into more complex oils.
Yeah, except that H2O, CH4, and NH3 block UV light. CH4 is a very stable element. It's methane. It is in the atmopheres of several planets. Ammonia is also stable. It can only be cracked into H2 and N2 with very high temperature furnaces, typically.
And the sludge they did produce was mostly tar (a term used by organic chemists to mean the sludge left behind when you can't extract anything useful from it). In fact it was 85% tar, 13.0% carboxylic acids (many of which would destroy life before it could get started), 1.05% glycine (the simplest amino acid) and 0.85% alanine (the second simplest amino acid). There were also trace amounts of glutamic, aspartic, valine, leucine, serine, proline, and treonine.
Laboratory simulations of primitive earth have produced all 20 amino acids used by life, as well as ATP and the 4 dna bases. If you have those 20 amino acids, you can form any protein in existence.
Of course you need to be able form something with all of those chemicals. Have you heard of protocells? These are structures that can be formed very easily with a few amino acids. In fact, if you have a few chemicals, you can make them quite easily at home. Anyway, they don't have DNA, but are capable of budding, metabolizing, using ATP, and non-darwinian chemical evolution.
As for your link to to Cremesti. That's a well known very biased creationist site. And that essay took quotes by many scientists way out of context. The classic creationist tactic of making debate about the specifics of a theory sound like the scientist is attacking the entire general theory.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.