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Scientists Offer 'Overwhelming' Evidence Terran Life Began in Space
An anonymous reader writes "Using data from recent comet-probing space missions, British scientists are reporting today that the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet are one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against. That is, we're not originally from around here. Radiation in comets could keep water in liquid form for millions of years, they say, which along with the clay and organic molecules found on-board would provide an ideal incubator. 'Professor Wickramasinghe said: "The findings of the comet missions, which surprised many, strengthen the argument for panspermia. We now have a mechanism for how it could have happened. All the necessary elements - clay, organic molecules and water - are there. The longer time scale and the greater mass of comets make it overwhelmingly more likely that life began in space than on earth."'" jamie points out that the author of this paper has many 'fringe' theories. Your mileage may vary.
In a manner of speaking, didn't everything start in space?
So the odds of a combination of clay + radiation was only to be found inside comets and the chances of that surviving a fiery impact at many kilometers per second are _higher_ than the same combination occurring naturally, peacefully, here on earth ? Somehow my bullshit meter goes all bananas.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Please before you mod me troll, listen. The Theory of evolution does not explain the origin of life, just the origin of species. Most folk who believe in things like ID (I= intelligent or idiotic depending on your perspective) confuse the issue and attack science. Let us not make the same mistake on the science side. Even the most ardent supporters of the Theory of evolution, like Dawkins, have only proposed very tentative speculation about the origin of life. They readily admit that right now science does not have any definitive theories about the Origin of Life.
This has nothing to do with evolution. Let us keep the discussions straight.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's much worse than that. Like all panspermia advocates, and like a good many Creationists, they essentially crib the "odds" argument. This looks no different than any other pro-panspermia "study" in that it starts with a strawman of abiogenesis.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's junk science. Wickramasinghe and Hoyle are the same two who concocted the absurd probabilistic "tornado in a junkyard" argument against evolution. Hell, during the SARS outbreak, Wickramasinghe suggested that SARS was an alien virus. Yep, it just happened to have a sequence remarkably similar to other earth-borne viruses, and just happened to fall to earth in a region where similar viruses infected wild animals. Yep, that's the ticket.
Hoyle at least used to be a real scientist. I'm not sure if Wickramasinghe ever was. He said "
"The chances that life just occurred are about as unlikely as a typhoon blowing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747" in 1982, so he's been a crackpot for a long time. This guy's just one step less crazy than Behe and the other 'intelligent design' crackpots. The only difference is that the intelligent designer posited by Wickramasinghe and Hoyle is a natural one, not a supernatural one; all the other problems with their claims are the same.
British scientists are reporting today that the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet are one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against.
That they can even presume to put a number on the probability of life is evidence enough that they have no idea what they're talking about.
Anyway, the odds of life are totally irrelevent to anything. See: anthropic principle.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Hardly. Adams' writings are more consistent, structured, and believable than Hubbard's.
Also, it helps that Douglas Adams wasn't a complete batshit loon.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
I can't believe that they really can begin to propose odds like that on life's origin. What if life didn't begin with clays acting as catalysts for chemical reactions but instead required a reducing atmosphere? (Current thinking is that life originally used hydrogen sulfide as an energy source, possibly from undersea "smokers"). Can the comets provide that kind of environment? What would happen when the few nascent life forms that survive the planetary bombardment that they are part of are dumped from their interplanetary cocoons into the tremendously different environment of the early earth? Don't you think that there is a good idea that the life forms that survived that environment were the ones that evolved there?
Add to that the fact that we really don't have a clue as to how life started here (or anywhere else for that matter) and you really begin to question the judgment of giving odds to this sort of thing.
I'm not saying they're wrong, I like panspermia theories as well. It's just for people to put some sort of numerical values on this kind of thing when we know so little is just well crazy. And what numerical values! Maybe after if we send out some cometary probes and find them teeming with primitive life could you claim such a thing. Even then do they use DNA or RNA? Any evidence of spectral emission lines of this from any of our flyby probes? (It would be even more earth-shaking if there was DIFFERENT life there!)
Still I enjoy reading ScienceDaily.com. (Daily in fact) It's a great site not like some pseudo New-Scien(tist) kind of site.
As a hard core Douglas Adams fan, I prefer to pretend the train wreck that is "Mostly Harmless" was never written, but was instead something I dreamed after a night of poorly made enchiladas and cheap beer. I don't think I'm alone in this.
What nonsense. Adams changed the whole story substantially every few years. The radio told one story, then the record told another, then the books told yet another, and then there was the other version of which we do not speak for horror at the memory of the Babel Fish Puzzle, and then there was the TV series...
Oh wait, hang on. That only qualifies the saga all the more for religious status :-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
It's a main argument that might have made more sense half a century ago when our best data was limited and our experimental evidence was largely Urey-Miller. The growing body of evidence, while still woefully small, suggests that the kinds of chemical reactions that might be needed to go from prebiotic organic matter to some sort of proto-life may not require all that much time at all. What seems to take a lot of time is moving from more primitive prokaryotic organisms to eukaryotes, and on to the more complex plant, animal and fungal forms that we see today.
I think the most basic problem with panspermia is that it seeks to solve a problem that we don't even know exists yet. It seems to violate Occam's Razor by adding a good many entities to the abiogenesis argument, and still doesn't really answer the origins issue, merely pushing it back.
If, and I'll admit at this moment that it is an if (big or little), life requires water (or some liquid capable of dissolving and suspending molecules for more complex organic chemical processes to occur), along with energy, it would seem that the early Earth had both of these in abundance. There are problems with modern abiogenesis theories, there is no doubt about it, but the problem with panspermia models is that they do no better job of answering the real dilemnas than other abiogenesis theories, save perhaps that it adds more time, though in an environment that is extremely hostile to life, particularly over long periods of time.
Panspermia seems to commit essentially the same error as Intelligent Design, by insisting, with really no evidence at all, that there is something so inherently complex in life that the time between the formation of our planet and the cooling stabilization of the surface was insufficient to produce life. The problem here is largely in what these arguments tend to think of as life and what abiogenesis researchers are referring to. There seems to be this attitude that life must have, under terrestial abiogenesis theories, sprung up pretty close to being recognizably modern, when in fact, it seems far more likely that there was a progression from some sort of primitive self-replicating molecule through a number of evolutionary stages until we end up with the first primitive cells (which might not, other than being bags to isolate internal chemistry for the external environment) necessarily resemble modern life at all.
We do know that there was plentiful amounts of energy on the Earth at that time, and if energy is ultimately the major engine driving the evolution of life from organic molecules into forms we could confidently call living organisms, then time may not be that much of an issue at all. We're still talking about about a hundred million years or more here, and if life couldn't form in a hundred million years, how does increasing that by a factor of five make it that much more likely.
I won't even get into the really goofy trans-stellar or trans-galactic versions of panspermia, which are even harder to defend.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Canadian comedy taught me that there's a 50/50 chance to everything. Either is happens, or it doesn't ;-)
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I never got why panspermia was such a compelling theory. It just pushes the real question, "how did life begin", back a little. Maybe life on earth started from genetic material on a comet. That genetic material had to come from somewhere, so that just means that abiogenesis occurred on a planet other than earth. Why is abiogenesis elsewhere more likely than abiogenesis here?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's the 'separation from god' that really scares the suckers. I'm sure if 'hell' were a bottomless pit of fluffy pillows, there would be just as many believers.
Blar.
The thing to keep in mind here is what Creationists do when they come up with this "bazillion to one against x happening" claim is that they're usually trying to argue for the occurence of an entire novel feature out of some base system (ie. bacteria from an organic soup). Well of course, that's so unlikely as to be impossible (though I still think one should demand to see the work behind even this kind of claim). But that is nothing more than pushing over a strawman of what abiogenesis theories state. No modern theory claims that anything like a modern cell popped out of the first abiogenesis event. Quite the opposite, the basic notion is that the first products of such an event probably wouldn't even be considered life. They were replicating organic molecules. Abiogenesis wasn't one giant leap, but a series of intermediate steps that ended with something approaching what we would view as a cell.
In short, these great big statistical arguments against abiogenesis aren't even arguments against any hypothesis that scientists are putting forth.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The conditions of early Earth can be determined to some degree, and the time between Earth forming and the earliest known signs of life can also be determined. Any theory which states that life began on Earth has to explain how said conditions lead to life in said timeframe. This far none has.
Panspermia, on the other hand, claims that life was born somewhere else at some point after the Big Bang and earliest signs of life on Earth. "Somewhere else" doesn't constrain the possible set of circumstances nearly as much as "on Earth", and the timeframe is far longer too. It is also impossible to prove false.
Given the choice between lots of time-consuming chemistry reasearch and a hypothesis which is impossible to falsify or really even research but allows a lot of poetic pseudo-philosophical nonsense in the vein of "we are children of the stars", "cosmic bortherhood", and "the thrut is out there", which do you think people will choose ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
That would be why the moon is perfectly smooth and fully dent free then yes?