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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? :-)"
Well I have to agree with it being a little over the top in hype, but if you want to get ahead in science not only do you have to do good work you also gotta have a little PT Barnum in you. However, the sparks don't have to produce many new organic molecules in order for things to get interesting. They just have to produce enough to outweigh their degredation so you have a net buildup. Over a long period of time things might get very interesting and Europa's no spring chicken.
Take this example of mine: I work on an enzyme that I have to store some samples of at -80 C for later experiments. I found that if it had been stored at -80 C for a long time (1-2 years) the enzyme is inactivated, but this is not due to the freezing process itself so some chemical change is occuring in ice at -80 C over a months to years timeframe. Pretty "cool" eh?
Controversial? Certainly. Pointless? Hardly.
First of all, your criticism of M-U's experimental conditions is straw-man logic - you damn them for not using free O2, then promptly turn around and demonstrate the unlikeliness of free O2 in the primordial atmosphere - as you point out, it would have oxidized practically everything in reach. Despite recent evidence that the early Earth's atmosphere wasn't completly reductant after all, there's still little reason to think that free O2 in significant amounts was present before life came along. Also, please note that a typical electric discharge emits more than a little ultraviolet. Not nearly as much as solar UV flux, but let's be reasonable - their apparatus didn't simulate asteroid impacts, lava flows, or full-scale lightning strikes either.
Second: Okay, fine - a week-long experiment intended to loosely approximate conditions on Earth over the first billion-odd years of its existence didn't end with lizards crawling out of the flask. The significance of M-U isn't that it generated every chemical necessary for life, but that it managed to generate any at all. (Even if you factor in the amino acids found in meteorites, etc., those amino acids came into being somehow.) Tell you what - I'll start up an M-U-like experiment, let it run for a few million years, and let you know what happens.
Third: I rather hope Cremesti didn't pull better than a C-minus on that paper. It continually amazes me how creationists (one of which I am not necessarily assuming Cremesti is) continue to hammer away at the random-chance argument of life's origin / evolution, when I don't think there's a single evolutionary biologist out there who accepts it. Darwin didn't accept it. (It's rather a tickle to read about how this theory, such as it is, was demolished by computer analysis; with what was essentially a primordial ecological simulator. Run on "high-speed computers". In 1966. Project headed by Dr. Forbin, I assume.)
The rest of the paper is crap, full of bandwagon assertions ("Many authors believe..."...so it's obviously true. Would've been nice if he'd cited some of them.) and silliness like invoking the Second Law of Thermodynamics to show that "...[chemical evolution] will not occur in isolated or closed systems near equilibrium" when it's arguable that none of these conditions obtain even on a planetary scale, and glaringly obvious that they don't on a local scale. (Fun experiment: Hold up a tall metal pole in the middle of a thunderstorm, and determine how long your local environment remains in equilibrium.)
When we research things that occur on a time/space scale as grand as this, imho one of the biggest obstacles is the limits of human imagination. Can you picture - really grasp emotionally - intervals longer than your own lifetime? Or distances further than those you've actually traveled? I disagree with Cremesti in that I do not believe that chemical evolution is not falsifiable. I'm not so sure that it can be done by human beings, at least not for a very long time to come. Given a problem with thousands of variables, many unknown, whose domain is an entire planet (or many planets, if you accept panspermia) and hundreds of millions of years, can even the most knowledgable scientist state with confidence that any plausible event did or did not happen? No matter how fast the computer or how sophisticated the methods, is it possible to analyze such a problem and get results better than a coin flip? Again, not now, and imho not for a long time to come. The value of M-U is not that it showed the mechanism by which life originated on Earth, but that it showed a part of a plausible mechanism.
The first step is always important, even if it turns out to be in the wrong direction.
DDB (having a slow day at work)
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.