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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.
What, you mean concrete evidence of an Intelligent Designer?
Love,
Kansas Board of Education
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Definitive proof that the building blocks of life were purposefully placed here by a space alien :-)
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
aka, God's moneyshot
Ingredients for bleu cheese found in my bathroom... but that doesn't mean it is bleu cheese or that I'd want to eat it even if it were.
Intelligent Design works in mysterious ways...
Bwahahahaha...
Trolling is a art,
"Though it was a little shakier than this observation, we've discussed the possibility of life elsewhere in the galaxy before."
Oh, so you've bourght us another dupe, huh? Well, thanks, Slashdot mods, thanks! FOR NOTHING!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
We are all made of stars?
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Shouldn't it be where water exists on the borderline between gas and solid?
I would think liquid water would be just fine for life. It's always worked for me.
Nothing to see here, Farkers, move along. This story is at least a day old.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'd say this would definitely incresase the probability of the drake equation resulting in a non-zero answer. Complex organic molecule formation is one of the biggies that you need for development of life.
... to Helloween's song that goes "tonight we are staaaaaaaars, staaaaaaars..." :)
Global warming is a cube.
These spectrograms! Artists can infer a lot from them, just look at that fine picture that they extrapolated from the data [for planet forming]
.O.
Since they took care of the latter half of the article, I figure I'll cover for the former.
Here is an ASCII artist's impression of what the organic material might look like, circling that sun-like star!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
I just thought of something while looking at the graphic -- what if RNA and DNA originally assemble in the pre-planetary cloud and hang around, falling into condensing planets and so forth?
I think the current popular theory, IIRC, is that RNA molecules somehow stack up in a tidal pool, where they are gently rocked back and forth. Some correct me please.
So how hard would it be to get DNA to link up in microgravity? Sure, there's more radiation around to blast things apart, but that might be a good thing -- you could get molecules you might not get otherwise without the blowing apart. Also, in microgravity, molecules can float around in 3 dimensions.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Ok, this is OT, but I've heard this several times in the last couple of days, and I need to quash this nasty little piece of christian propaganda.
My christian friends are fond of telling me, especially this time of year, that famed computer scientist Donald Knuth is a christian.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Knuth is NOT a christian; in fact, he is an atheist and has said so on several occasions. So if a christian tries to tell you he is, tell him to cram it.
Knuth is WAAAAY too smart to fall for a crock of shit like christianity.
I find myself strangely hoping that someone gives you some insightful karma for this...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
"""
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.
"""
Wait, so finding organic molecules around a planet supports this how? Can we tell the age of those particles, or that stellar nursery? If we are to believe a lightning strike can create life from amino acids and things of this nature... why would this support that conclusion in particular?
Maybe I'm missing the point. Perhaps someone can explain things to me?
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
I think Carl Sagan preceded Moby in presenting that idea to popular culture. See Cosmos. I just re-watched this series and it's just as good 25 years after it originally aired...
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I'm a staaah, I'm a staaah, I'm a staaah. I'm a big, bright shining staaaah.
You suck ass. Thank you. That is all.
Nah these are not the building blocks of future planet earths. These are the remants of destroyed planet earths. For a while the aliens were recycling the planets they were destroying but then the bottom fell out of the market for the raw materials, so they began dumping the refuse in rings around the suns where the planets once orbitted. THey are hoping that the market picks up.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Ok, this is OT... Knuth is NOT a christian...
I completely agree with you. Yes indeed, your post was off topic.
They don't have Seinfeld.
Just imagine if you saw the actual spectrograph!
oh... you were inspired.
*runs off*
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Right, but the support is so incredibly weak, why even mention it?
... and many other things.
That's like saying that because some unknown substance glows, it supports that it is radioactive, because other radioactive things glow.
It also supports that it is a lightbulb.
And also that it is hot...
*taps the subject*
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
We're several years away from being able to do spectrographic studies of rocky planets orbiting other stars (or rocky moons), but once we reach that point, it will probably be only time until we detect free oxygen and/or other molecules that disappear rapidly in the absence of life.
I think this article would be more credible if it was posted on the Food Network instead of Slashdot. What nerd/geek/techie would be interested in what's laying around the Intelligent Designer's kitchen?
It's Not News, It's Slashdot.org
:)
Couldn't resist
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Life is not the presence of particular molecules. Life is the plan by which the molecules are constructed into a living organism. Molecules without the plan by which they operate are no different than computer hardware without any software installed on it. Finding hydrogen cyanide and acetylene present around another star is more a comment on the improving ability to detect molecules at a distance than it is on the presence of the 'building blocks of life.' It would have been much more remarkable if they had NOT found those substances since they are composed of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen which we would expect to be ubiquitous in the universe, based on our present knowledge. Claiming to have found the 'building blocks of life' around another star is just hype to help pump up the budget for next years work.
We are made of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus, sodium, iron, etc. Those building blocks are strewn throughout the universe, as far as we know. Now we think we see some complex, life-like compounds. We assume that means those formed where they are.
But it's a common violation of scientific principles to assume that the conditions we see now are those that have always existed. It makes for neater theories, but counterexamples are ubiquitous.
The FA merely suggests that DNA components could form in space. The same evidence suggests that if a planet is destroyed by catastrophic collision, it's hard to find the DNA afterwards.
I hope we never get hit.
sigs, as if you care.
I guess when your theories aren't even remotely provable (since we can't exactly fly around the universe and run tests on the present, much less on the past)... you take what you can get, but it just seems to be rather ridiculous to me.
Practical space technology and findings interest me, but stuff like this... not so much. We'll get there, sure, we'll figure it out... and this kind of almost wild speculation, as it seems to me, might make good science fiction, but I'll stick to what we can test and prove.
Don't get me wrong, I dream as much as the next guy, but there is a clear dividing line that should be erected between hard science and speculation (even educated speculation)...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Keep in mind that while this stuff is in the habitable zone right now, that doesn't mean anything will be there in the future. As we've seen from the 100+ planets already found, many systems apparently develop with Jupter-sized and larger planets in either close orbits or wildly eccentric orbits that will result in smaller planets in the habitable zone being either thrown into their host star or, more likely, expelled from their solar system.
Factor into this that single cell "life" began on this planet almost as soon as the conditions were favorable, but it took another 2.5 billion for it to evolve into multi-cell life. That seems to indicate, to me at least, that multi-cell life is difficult and not necessarily a forgone conclusion when you have single-cell life. I suspect the number of planets with "life" as we know it, to be far fewer than a lot of people believe.
Difficult to prove? If it can't be physically manipulated and observed and tested... it can't be proven. Given the scope of the universe... I'd say you can't prove it.
One (or even ten) cases will still lend only weak support, given this aforementioned 'scope of the universe'...
Do you see what I am saying?
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Mmm ... 52 crumbles of Bleu cheese
To inhabitants of the T'nsha'grlsk galaxy this is hardly surprising. Scattered across their saucier-pan-shaped galaxy are planets containing the ingredients for Fetucinni Alfredo, Pork Tenderloin, Chicken Cacciatore, and in what will most likely result in a lawsuit should humans develop interstellar space travel, the McRib.
When asked about the ingredients for Life, Ss's'krpwjdnq waved his third-dimension-bound tentacles wildly and secreted an information packed protein strand. While there is no English equivalent for his communique, a rough translation would be "Given the chance to eat a human, I would."
The ingredients of Life.
Sure as hell don't have to go that far out to get it - local supermarket has it!
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
The leaded phrase "building blocks of life"
implies some sort of complete set (if there
is such a thing) that are easily snapped together
to create a duck or chicken. To propound such an
implausible violation of entropy is to live in
a statistical wonderland where monkeys regularly
type out Shakespeare and time runs in reverse.
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.
The age of the universe in milliseconds is
on the order of 10^20. Random trial and error
seems our of the question. No explanation
has yet been demonstrated of how the initial
chemical constituents formed to produce a
DNA/RNA based life form. Just a lot of hand
waving about "building blocks". If these
"building blocks" spontaneorsly construct
meaningful strands of DNA, ribosomes, and
other required agents, then reproduce it
in the lab. No, a lightning strike/spark on
an early 1950's high scholl science project
that produces some organic slime is not
the same thing.
In vino veritas!
My! What DO they teach you young Scientologists these days?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Regardless of that, if we can't observe more than a few, the support a find gives to the theory is so miniscule that it seems ridiculous to mention it.
... cheers :)
Anyway, that's all I have to say on the thread (barring any drastically new developments)
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
And all this time I thought the basic building blocks of Life were made by Lego....
A human's entire DNA unwound extend 185 billion kilometers
A simple protien must have at least 100 amino acids bonded together in the correct sequence and there are 20 different amino acids that can be used. The amino acids must be left handed and not right handed. They also must be donded on left hand. The probability of the formation of a simple protien comes out to 1 in 1.28x10^175.
Carbon-14 (the radioactive isotope of carbon used in carbon dating) is continuously generated on Earth at a fairly constant rate, by the interaction of neutrons (from cosmic rays) with nitrogen (and occasionally oxygen and carbon) atoms. So, 'new' carbon-14 atoms are being made all the time.
:)
Because it has a relatively constant abundance in nature, living things should also maintain the same ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-14 in their tissues... until they die, at which point they're no longer taking in new carbon from the environment. Then the carbon-14 starts to decay (with a half-life of ~5700 years), but the carbon-12, which is stable, remains. Measuring this ratio can give an approximation of the length of time since the creature died.
The carbon-12 in your body is stable, and could very well pre-date the solar system. Carbon-14 doesn't hang around very long, in astronomical timescales.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
just add water recipes?
Yes, I said it.
I dunno, but that sounds way off to me. I question if lining up all the atoms that make up a single human being would extend to a billion, let alone dna being 185 billion. But then again, I'm sleepy.
Actually the borderline between gas and solid is somewhere around Uranus.
Sounds like a Sci-Fi Original movie presentation. "The Bathroom Bleu Cheese."
I'll point out the criteria to a successful adenine (a component of DNA) creation as I recall from various scientific sources (Intelligent Design not withstanding):
1. Gravity of at least 0.4 G is a requirement (micro-gravity need not apply here as a recent ISS scientific experiement shown with regard to catalyst of acytelene/water/hydrogen under electric sparks/shocks)
2. Swirling motions (tidal pool is nature's best liquid/air agitators)
3. Minimal radiation (asinine will not remain cohesive for long under gamma bombardments)
This means a heavy shielding must be in place, which means dense air and/or planet
4. Lightning... the very most improbable of all aspect of the building block starter. It's gotta strike at the right place and the right time, preferably near the tidal pool.
I'd gotta hand it to mother nature and God, we are one lucky fools on this unqiue planet, Earth.
Wonder how many beakers of premeasured chemicals existed in the pre-biotic soup? Just because you have the basic chemical compounds lying around won't get you DNA. Read Behe's book, don't be afraid! G
They may have found the requirements for life.
please mod parent "-1 analogy sucks".
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why don't you fix the one word error instead of typing 2 paragraphs? "Where water exists in the interval between gas and solid".
BTW, borderline between gas and liquid is 100 C at standard pressure, which would exclude Earth from the habitable zone. That was the point of the grandparent, and it flew 1 mile above your head.
In another billion years Bush will be waiting and poised to abduct the newly formed inhabitants.
So where is everybody?
...welcome our new habitable zone habituating building blocks of life leaders.
The Admin and the Engineer
Ok. So the human genome is ~ 3.2 billion base pairs long.
In helical form every 10 base pairs is 3.32nm long.
so 3.2e9 bp / (10 bp/turn) * 3.32e-9 m = 1.06m
since we have 2 genome copies in us double that number to 2.12m
now there's ~50 TRILLION cells in the human body. This number seemed to vary a lot.
2.12m * 50e12 = 106e12m
=106e9 km
so 106 billion km by my count or approximately 4 light DAYS!
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Complex really means something like DNA or a protein, with tens of thousands of atoms in it, not a molecule as simple as a single nucleotide or one amino acid, with a dozen or so.
It isn't really the step from the simplest of molecules, like water, to slightly more complex molecules, like amino acids, which is the problem. Experiments starting with Stanley Miller's have shown this is an easy step.
Very likely the tricky step is forming an enclosed system in which information is passed back and forth from some information-storage molecule like DNA to some actuator molecules, like proteins. Not only have we never seen such a system, outside of life and deliberately-constructed life analogues, but we have no idea how it could even come about.
It's hard to even imagine a plausible evolutionary sequence that leads from random organic molecules to this kind of system. The problem is that the benefits of being "alive", in particular being able to reproduce yourself are clear, but it's hard to see any benefits to being "halfway alive", e.g. to having half of the necessary molecules for reproducing yourself. That makes it hard to imagine any intermediate steps between non-life and life that would be favored by natural selection. And if there aren't any good intermediate stages, then life has to originate all at once, zap, in some wildly unlikely coming together of an entire living system. This is almost equally hard to swallow (unless you want to invoke the hand of God).
A good analogy is with wings: how do wings evolve? The problem is that on first glance it doesn't seem useful to have only one wing, or wings too short to lift your mass. So how could a wingless creature evolve by small stages towards having wings? It would seem that wings would have to originate all at once, zap, in some wildly-unlikely set of mutations that would give a species wings in one generation.
However, I believe the current belief is that wings started off as cooling fins, or possibly steering vanes for animals that leaped through the air. In which case, of course small fins or vanes are useful, and one can see the intermediate stages that would allow full wings to evolve gradually. What's needed in evolutionary biology is some similar insight into how certain groupings of molecules well short of what we'd call a living system could, nevertheless, have an evolutionary advantage.
What's also needed is some idea of why we don't see this kind of process going on all the time on Earth. Why don't we see things halfway to living all the time in the muds and stagnant ponds of the Earth? One possible answer is that the best conditions for the evolution of life (e.g. no free oxygen) are no longer present.
I knew someone would bring up ID. Ultimately, your opinion of the universe's origins boils down to the acceptance of one of two opinions:
God has always existed.
Matter has always existed (in some form or another).
I am sure that someone will try to debate the following point, but the fact is you can no more "prove" that matter has always existed than you can prove the existence of God. You can make that assumption and accept it as truth, but that is the best you can do. At some point, both atheism and creationism boil down to a matter of faith. Faith in God vs. faith in science.
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Unbelievable that the parent's post got modded "flamebait". Where? Pick the parts from it and show us where. You can't without shining the light on yourself...
/., it's careless application of suppresion controls like this which illustrate an even greater influence at work amongst the /. faithful - their own religion; a religion even more suppresive of free thought and the pursuit of honest understanding than the very deistic religions they claim partake in such behaviour. Oh, the hypocrisy...
As an inpartial observer to
WalMart has announced plans to open a supercenter in the vicinity of the store in 2100.
It's not a dupe, it's a replicating meme, like:
In Soviet Russia, dupes post slashdot editors
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
http://accelerating.org/articles/answeringfermipar adox.html
Jump-Starting a Cellular World: Investigating the Origin of Life, from Soup to Networks gives a quick overview and update on the most recent research.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
if there is the possibility of life there, we must supernova their sun before they try to crush man-kind. let's face it, it's us or them... THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Since when did 375 light years away classify as "nearby"?
Okay, so that's not big in galactic terms, let alone in universal terms, but "nearby" suggests that we actually have a chance in hell of visiting it. We do not. 375 light years away is well beyond any reasonable trip distance using any well-researched technology for the next few hundred years, at least. Even then, it's not doable in a person's single lifetime. You'd have to have a multi-generational expedition.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
So, they detected a galaxy swirl in the cauldron of life. Now where is the ladle and the god stirring it?
Oh well, what the hell...
What was before the big bang. How about before that. And before that?
Basically they're saying that there are some things that are beyond/too-big-for human understanding. Certainly most people I know tend to get headaches thinking deep into the concept above, and the concept of ultimate original and infinity tend to how we define our lives and the passing thereof.
Personally I think you're free to think as you wish, so long as it doesn't involve blowing somebody else up to be with 15 virgins or whatever in the afterlife, but given that the scope of human intelligence and unstanding probably has limits it's not really fair to get angry with somebody for expressing that an answer is beyond theirs in understanding.
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so does that mean our body has 14% cyanide ? O_o /me is scared
I believe Zephram Cochrane will be born well within your "next few hundred years".
Or look back a few hundred years and compare what was "well-researched technology" then with what we have now. Or go back 60-70 years and compare what we know about nuclear pysics now and then. Do you know where quantum research is or will be by the end of even 2006?
Am I the only one reminded of the Smoke Ring from Niven's "The Integral Trees"?
I filter at 4, so forgive me if soomeone already said this. Is the only thing this makes anyone think of is maybe there's life there? If this planet has hostpitable conditions for life as we know it, then it's probably a safe bet that we could attempt to live there without too much trouble. (Well, besides getting there in the first place.)
Nothing lasts forever, even Earth. We've probably got LOTS (and LOTS) of time, but for us to survive we're going to have to get on some other planets eventually. I like the idea.
Think of someone with average intelligence. Now think 1/2 the world is dumber than that guy.
Of course. I'm not doubting the forces of evolution at all, and I don't know any other way in which life can get started.
What I'm saying is that, until we have a good idea how a chemical system can evolve from non-life to life, we will not have a good idea about (1) what the good conditions for the origin of life are, and (2) what the "signposts" are that suggest the existence of life, and (3) what alternative forms of life there might be, other than the carbon-based DNA/protein stuff we know.
It's like this: because we know what a computer is in the abstract sense, e.g. a Turing machine, we can imagine many different instantiations or realizations of a computer. Analog, digital, based on tubes, transistors, steam valves and pipes, with this or that logic, et cetera and so forth.
But we don't know what life is like in the abstract. This is reflected in the fact that we don't know how life can be constructed, deliberately or through evolution, from non-life. We really only know what life is like in its Earthly manisfestation. We have only the fuzziest of notions what a different implementation of life would be like. So we are severely handicapped when it comes to looking for life elsewhere. Basically, we don't really know what we're looking for, aside from life that looks like our own.
You might say, to continue the geeky analogy, that life is so far a mostly "closed-source" application. We have many compiled applications to examine, but no source code, and only the vaguest idea how the "compiler" might work. (By the way, in this context I don't mean that we don't know how to "write the program" for making a cell from another cell, or for making a cell function properly. I mean we don't know how to "write the program" that makes a cell from scratch.)
Like finding a tree is evidence that houses build themselves.
"Villains, I say to you now: Knock off all that evil!" -- The Tick