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.

Comments

Re:DNA in space?

[LordKazan]

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.

Re:Ingredients of Life Found Around Sun-Like Star

[ozydingo]

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!

Re:Ingredients of Life Found Around Sun-Like Star

[kurzweilfreak]

Religion provides a made-up "why" by assuming an anthromorphic made-up "person whose will is why". I believe the open source analogy is actually the other way around: religion is the closed-source "here's how it is and this is the answer and be a good sheeple and don't ask questions" M$ organization where science is in principle the peer-reviewed, open source, verify results for yourself.

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.