Slashdot Mirror
Ingredients of Life Found Around Sun-Like Star
smooth wombat writes "NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope has detected the basic organic building blocks of life in a ring orbiting in the 'habitable zone', that area where Earth orbits the Sun and where water exists on the borderline between gas and liquid, in a nearby stellar nursery. When acetylene and hydrogen cyanide combine with water they form adenine, one of the four bases of DNA. The detection supports the widely held theory that many of the molecular building blocks of life were present in the solar system even before planets formed, thus assisting the initial formation of complex organic molecules and the start of life itself." Though it was a little shakier than this observation, we've discussed the possibility of life elsewhere in the galaxy before.
There is no such thing as "ludacrously improbable" when it comes to cosmology - real world probabilities are tried in parallel not in serial.
They worked out the probabilities for life as we know it occuring randomly - they were small per trial however you must apply the Law of Extremely Large Numbers - ie a huge ammount of trials. Turns out the number of stars likely to have planets in the habital zone overwhelmed the probability by about 10,000 planets likely to have life of some form.
Don't try to fathom real world probabilities in terms of serial trials of flipping a coin.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Funny thing is, whenever I ask a "why" question, regarding the origins of life, God's intentions, etc, to one who professes that religion contains all the answers, the answer I typically get when my questions get deep enough is always along the lines of "we cannot profess to know or understand the motive of God and His infinite wisdom; for to do so would be to place ourselves on His level. We must only have faith in His divine plan." Doesn't seem to answer much of anything, in my opinion.
42 purple monkey dishwashers!
The smallest human chromosome is a chain of 50 million base pairs (over an alphabet of 4: ACGT). 4^1,000,000 is roughly 10^608,000.
No one has ever suggested that a fully formed human chromosome could just pop into existance out of constituant elements. Your example is a straw man.
No explanation has yet been demonstrated of how the initial
chemical constituents formed to produce a DNA/RNA based life form.....No, a lightning strike/spark on an early 1950's high scholl science project that produces some organic slime is not the same thing.
Yes it danm well is, sunshine. That experiment proved that these elements, amino acids etc, were almost guaranteed to have existed in abundance in the early earth. These elements ARE the building blocks of life.
Take a look a a model where a soup of these elements exists, add in factors, look at the probabilites, then multiply by the collasal timescales and particle counts involved and you'll quickly realise that not only was it likely that life evolved out of slime or pools around geysters, it was practically inevitable.
Go back to Kansas and take last years flu vaccine, and go pray to whatever straw man is up there in the sky. We'll be over here in the Age of the Enlightenment if you'd care to join us.
May the Maths Be with you!
There are two points to this discovery. On the one hand, it demonstrates that organic precursor molecules can form in environments we simply thought impossible, or hadn't even thought of. Second, it means that such molecules could hitch a ride to a proto-Earth on comets and meteors, and thus be the source of the organic stew. What it really tells us is that the building blocks of life, if not life itself, are probably quite common, which raises the possibility that life itself may be relatively common. Even if it isn't life as complex as that which we find on Earth, one can probably safely assume that there are any number of planets out there where some pretty complex organic interactions are occuring.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Why presume that there are things that science not only doesn't know, but can't? Who's to say that in the future it will always be impossible for us to figure out what was before the Big Bang? As we know it now, no, we don't know what may have been before, but that's why we continue on attempting to discover and learn. We may end up discovering some as-of-yet unknown fundamental principle of reality that illuminates the very questions that we think are unanswerable. Or that quantum mechanics only appears random and probablistic because we currently lack the ability to probe where we need to be able to figure it out, but in the future we may discover how to do it. Making up an answer of "God did it and that's all we need to know so stop asking" helps exactly nothing.
Live long and prosper.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Not particularly directed at the parent post..
I think what some of the posters here fail to understand is the entire thing with :
infinite time
infinite space
infinite possibilities
given those variables, I think it is entirely possible that we might be more "normal" than one would think considering we are made up of the this stuff and the fact that these things have a tendency to fall into place in certain ways naturally.
I actually think it is an thought-cop-out to just declare a "designer" did something instead of coming to grips with the idea of trillions and trillions of stars and infinity.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
> Billions of years ago, some alien creature was reading a news story about organic molecules discovered in the dust of our solar system. They've been watching us ever since...
Actually, since they are billions of light-years away, they just noticed last week.
Nothing is "wrong" with this arguement. The argmuement is falls outside the boundries of science (unscientific), however, because the exist of supernatural entities us unfalsifable.
The possibility of gods existing is not concidered by science since the question is one of religeon or philosohpy, not science.