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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?
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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 :-)
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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.
"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
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.
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
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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.
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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?
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" Shouldn't it be where water exists on the borderline between gas and solid?"
No. Liquid water doesn't exist at the temp and pressure where there is a borderline between gas and solid, you get direct sublimation from solid to gas under those conditions -- unless you happen to be at exactly the triple point.
Conversion between gas and liquid would help in the formation of life precursors, since the phase changes could help concentrate compounds in acqueous solution, resulting in greater rates of reaction. I'm sure there are other reasons why acqueous phase changes would help formation of complex organic molecules.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
Actually, even the bible tells us this is so. "Ashes to ashes... dust to dust...".
Could interpret this literally and say that we (the Sun, Earth and life on it) are made from interstellar dust initially, and that's where we end up when the solar system ends its life and turns back to ashes and dust when the sun explodes.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
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.
I suggest you look into two of his books, "3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated" and "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About".
He gave some lectures about how he wrote "3:16", his motivations for doing so, and various thoughts about God. These lectures were the basis for "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About"
I may twist orthodoxy to partly justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.
Carbon dating measures the ratio of C14 to C12. C14 is radioactive and decays over time. When an organism is alive it is constantly ingesting outside sources of carbon and so the C12-C14 ratio is the same as that of the environment. The environment gets C14 when cosmic rays interact with C12 in the upper atmosphere. When the organism dies, it stops ingesting carbon, the C14 decays and the ratio changes. The change in this ratio can tell you how long ago something stopped ingesting C14 (when it died).
You are not really measuring the age of the carbon atoms, just the ratio of a certian short-lived version of Carbon.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
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!
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!
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.
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.
My! What DO they teach you young Scientologists these days?
Where to send the checks?
Or our detection methods simply slant the results to systems like that.
Our detection methods slant towards larger planets, definitely. But the fact that most of those large planets are in highly eccentric orbits or close to their stars has nothing to do with the detection method. It appears to be the predominate result of solar system formation. Ours appears to be the exception, not the rule.
Our detection methods could find Jupiter like planets in Jupiter like orbits, and they do. They're just few and far between.
Your post implies the simplest viable life form is DNA based with highly specialized structures like ribosomes when, in fact, they are not required to form from the primordial soup.
Life can start simple. A single molecule that reacts with other molecules around it and makes imperfect copies of itself is enough. Given time, all suitable molecules will be used and live, even if primitive, will be everywhere.
Since the copies are not perfect, mutation does happen and you will have a lot of different "copiers" in your soup, some better that the others, some building more complex structures that can, in turn, copy themselves.
I agree with you. Expecting cell based lifeforms in the first week of a biosphere is ludicrous, but you are wrong. Cells, nuclei and DNA are only one way of life to express itself. It happens to be the way we know because once a certain kind of life dominates, there is little space left for other forms. It happened here.
There are sure other forms of organization that happened all over the place. Remember: billions of places over billions of years make a lot of attemps on life.
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