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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.
That's where God lives.
The great anthropologist Dr. Douglas Adams already showed that we did not originate here. In fact, we were passengers on the 'B' Ark that crash-landed here. Our ancestors come from an ancient civilization called Golgafrinchans. It is a shame that Dr. Adams's work is so widely ridiculed as a "humorous" bit of "fiction" in wider scientific circles.
I for one welcome... uh, myself.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
In a manner of speaking, didn't everything start in space?
In an ironic statement, they also claim Protoss life began on Earth...
There was never a better time to tag a story nevertellmetheodds!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This makes me wonder if there are other mobile space entities smaller than planets which harbor our earlier form of life. It seems extremely unlikely it was just once and the random chance it hit Earth seems far far too unlikely. So should we be looking at things smaller than planets for life or keep searching how we are now?
I like muppets.
Soooooo, they used two numbers (mass of clay & # of comets) to generate a 1e24 to 1 odd against life having started here? Seems like they might have left one or two variables out of their equation. Hopefully this is just junk reporting rather than junk science.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
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
Mark
Is there any evidence that comets have such isotopes at such concentrations? This sounds like the sort of thing Lex Luthor would be involved in.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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 probably also worth pointing out that this result has probably increased the chance of life existing elsewhere in the universe by a similar amount. There are far more commets than planet and they are a truly huge number of stars.
Moreover, it is more plausible that a comet could fertilize many star systems if it was knocked out of the orbit of various stars in its life-time. While this sort of event is in itself unlikely it is orders of magnitude more likely than life being liberated from a planet from a violent impact. The life would have to survive the fiery, high G, exit from whatever atmosphere there was surrounding the planet and would still have to have sufficient momentum to escape the star. These properties taken together pretty much eliminate any chance of that happening.
Compare this to the following comet hypothesis. Life gets started on a comet with a highly elliptical orbit billions of years ago. How this happens is open question but for the moment assume it does. As the star uses up its fuel it loses mass and the orbit slowly stretches. Eventually, the comet is able to free itself from the gravity of the parent star. Hundred of millions of years later, the star goes supernova. The blast wave from the supernova gently accelerates the comet into a planetary nebular. It just happens to be the one that our Earth was forged in. As the nebular condenses the life that started inside the comet transfers itself to the billions of water droplets and mineral material. You can guess what happens next.
I've always suspected we are not alone. It's just whether we're all too far away from each other for the knowledge to make any difference.
Simon
I think length of time was factored in somehow, the gist of it being that comets have been around a lot longer than the Earth and therefore more likely to have had the incubating effect.
That stated, it'll take more than a few numbers in a formula to convince me. I'm not going to believe this until a cometary probe comes back contaminated with an alien microbe that destroys all life on the planet. And even then, I'll be a little bit skeptical.
When I was in grad school our group was trying to make a particular type of superconducting circuit. After many attempts we got one that worked, wrote it up, and presented it at a conference.
During the Q&A, someone asked my advisor what our yields were. "On a good day, 100%". The followup question was, "what's your yield on good days?"
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
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.
If I understand their argument correctly, the abundance of clay in certain comets provides the template for RNA formation and eventual RNA-based life (with DNA coming later). There may be other factors which are discussed in the actual paper. As such, consider these thoughts preliminary.
There are several factors that would seem to argue against life starting in comets. First of all, planets have a far greater volume than comets with larger and more diverse areas in which life might form. Comets must not only reach planets but deliver their biologics intact. These biologics must then be suitable for propagation in the environment in which they arrive.
That last point is quite important. If comets did provide a birthplace for life, it is quite likely that their cargo would be unable to survive such an abrupt transition. Far more likely is that the life started on the planet in the first place.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
want to tell us that life was created by random comet falls?
i demand equal time for the godly and righteous theory of intelligent comet placing!
comets did not just fall randomly to earth and create life!
god himself intelligently directed comets to come to the early lifeless earth 6,000 years ago!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Soooooo, they used two numbers (mass of clay & # of comets) to generate a 1e24 to 1 odd against life having started here? Seems like they might have left one or two variables out of their equation. Hopefully this is just junk reporting rather than junk science.
I have a new meta-theory for these sorts of things: if your hypothesis sounds like the Chewbacca Defense, it's almost certainly bogus.
Also in the news this week is the opposite result: that life cannot exist in comets because of the radiation. So... it's not obvious (to me) that there is any scientific consensus on this topic.
Bear in mind that this self-validating conclusion comes from Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe who is intimately tied to the theory of panspermia. Let's wait for science to do it's thing and see if everyone else agrees with his conclusions and math (yeah, right)...
Gotta say that last time I checked the water is liquid right here on planet earth also.
Panspermia: When God masturbates.
If the Religious Right takes issue with Evolution, just wait they find out that little Bobby is going to be taught about Panspermia! In school! Next thing you know Health class will be teaching kids the proper way to masticate.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
What is an "old" comet? No comet we're going to encounter is going to be any older than the solar system itself. Most of these comets would, in fact, only be a few hundreds of millions of years older than the Earth itself, and quite likely would have spent a great deal of their time on the outer bounds of the solar system.
We know that life was here between 3.5 and 3.9 billion years ago, with some iffy evidence suggesting it was even older. That gives us a net time advantage for any given comet of no more than about 500 million years. That sounds like a lot, but in reality it really isn't that big a span. Beyond that, considering that our knowledge of cometary history is still rather sketchy, and that our sample size is exceedingly small, this is nothing more than a pretty substantial "what-if", itself based upon one particular abiogenesis theory, which has been somewhat supplanted in recent years.
If we're going to start talking about interstellar comets, to add more time to the equation, someone is going to have to a) provide evidence of such bodies and b) provide evidence that radioactive decay is going to produce heat long enough for liquid water within the body to act as an incubator for the VERRRY long stretches of time that some organisms or proto-organisms are going to survive.
Now, weight all of this against the fact that the early Earth had all the ingredients for life to develop; *plentiful* amounts of liquid water and lots and lots of energy (in the forms of solar radiation, atmospheric conditions like lightning and geothermal energy from oceanic vents and vulcanism). Can someone kindly explain to me how a comet, even with clays or clay-like crystaline minerals and some sort of low-level radioactive decay (it has to be pretty low-level too, because anything too energetic or in too high a quantity is more likely going to be delerious than helpful) is going to provide this more wonderful environment.
As with every generation of panspermia advocates, the underlying argument is essentially "We don't think there was enough time for life to develop on the early earth, so we've got to find a way to add more time." Even if we give them this part of the argument (and I frankly think even that is FAR too generous), they still have to explain how conditions elsewhere (comets, other planets orbiting other stars) are somehow more environmentally-friendly to abiogenesis than Earth was.
This is not to slight the largely unrelated idea that comets could have been the source of organic molecules that could have been some sort of organic "seeds" for early self-replicators to develop and to use as raw materials and energy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The strawman lies in the claim that current abiogenesis theories don't give enough time for the kind of organic chemical evolution that would lead to the earliest metabolizing self-replicating molecules.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
we-are-all-made-of-stardust dept... close, but Sagan's line ended with 'star stuff', which is actually more appropriate here.
As to the relative plausibility of comet-seeded or locally-formed progenitors to life, given that reactions propagate, commonly leading to repeating and self-feeding cycles of reactions, the only argument for extra-solar is the added timescale and potential additional area for productive area for pre-life to evolve in.
Given that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and life on the earth is nearly that old, and that the universe has only been cool enough to support planets or life for much of that time, I don't believe panspermia buys us that many more orders of magnitude of time to work with.
So, it doesn't buy us time, how about area? Again, I can only guess using very rough psuedo-numbers here, but the matter we could get from previously existing worlds or small super-fertile comets has to come from somewhere previous. Given the expanding nature of the universe, we're generally only going to be getting a pie-slice of potential sources for any life-by-projectile, and each of these sources has to have been fed by enough nuclear sources to make the building blocks of simple pre-life. I can imagine a multiplication of potential sources this way, and even though it would only take one source to seed the whole set... just imagining the mass that actually makes it into out solar system, and then actually hits our earth... that likelihood doesn't seem much stronger than the numbers we think of with abiogenesis via selective pressures here on earth.
Ryan Fenton
No, our universe will not end. We are the embryonic stem cells of the earth embryo. However, we will soon be harvested by the universe entity to be used to find a cure for galactic cancer. Unless the multi-verse government can pass the cosmos-bill banning earth-embryonic stem cell research, we are all doomed.
I had Prof. Wickramasinghe was one of my Pure Maths lecturers during my first year at Cardiff. He was dreadfully hard to understand.
t icity
My flatmate, who was a paleobotany postgrad at the time, had some very disparaging things to say about him. He had co-authored a few papers claiming the Archaeopteryx was a hoax, based on his poor understanding of the subject matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx#Authen
Whoops, formatting problems! Better repost.
From the overly brief article, it appears that the "overwhelming" probability is largely an artifact of the greater mass of clay on comments than on a young Earth. This is overly simplistic, and more bluntly, wrong, for four reasons.
1) Ultraviolet light; surface area to volume. While the mass of clay on comets may exceed that on a young Earth, since Earth is one giant sphere and not a bunch of clumps of dirt flying through space, more ultraviolet light will strike Earth-based than comet-borne clay. The surface area exposed to space will be greater on Earth. Furthermore, given the lesser gravity on a comet, liquid water will likely be on the interior of a comet, vs. the exterior of Earth, another factor reducing the UV rays striking the clay and water on comets.
2) Consistency of conditions. Earth's orbit is much less elliptical than the orbits' of most comets. This is vital to life. Even if (and this is a big if) liquid water can exist on a comet throughout its orbit, extreme variations in radiation or temperature would still significantly hinder the formation of life.
3) Weather. Earth has weather, and comets don't. Weather, and lightning in particular, is pivotal in most theories regarding the origin of life. The Urey-Miller experiment, for example, proved that dynamic weather conditions can be extremely conducive to the formation of the complex molecules, such as amino acids, necessary for life to exist.
4) Most importantly, life is on Earth. We need to consider not the mass of all comets in the Solar System, or even all those harboring liquid water, but rather, all those harboring liquid water which collided with Earth at the time that life first originated. Since life is on Earth, we know that only a comet which collided with Earth could have been responsible for life on Earth. The mass of these comets which collided with Earth is clearly much less than that of the Earth itself.
Considering all of these factors, I think it is safe to say that in light of this research, life still likely originated on good old planet Earth.
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.
For those interested in why the tornado in a junkyard assembling a 747 is a useless analogy for the process of evolution, the simple explanation is that evolution works by a ratcheting effect: improvements are made one tiny step at a time, in sequence, for a cumulative effect of complexity. The selection process by which those steps are made - i.e. mutations that constitute an improvement in fitness survive and others die out - is simple and nonrandom. The tornado analogy implies instant emergence of full complexity, which is nothing at all like what actually happens.
A-Bomb
Hoyle's failure was an example of the classic trap that experts fall into. That is that as long as they stay in their own field of knowledge, they tend to be reliable, but the moment they move into another field where their knowledge is, at best, that of a layman, they get themselves into trouble. Unfortunately, scientists like Hoyle can get a lot of mileage by the mere fact that they are experts in some field of inquiry. He was a famous scientist, and when a famous scientist speaks, even when he's right out of his league, people tend to listen.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'll believe in these Uranium-heated liquid comets when I see them. Anything that could keep a comet core liquid would have to be hot (radioactively), so then we're dealing with microbes that...
1. Can survive being frozen for indefinite periods of time,
2. Can survive excessive radiation and heavy metal contamination,
3. Can survive without sunlight (remember, it's in the center of the comet),
4. Lives off unknown chemical reactions (organic chemicals mean squat without an energy source)
5. Exists in near equilibrium with its environment over millions of years, with trivial gains in material,
6. Has to then survive on Earth after
a) melting off a comet
b) drifting unprotected in the vacuum of space
c) floating down through Earth's atmosphere
or
d) evaporating in an impact event
And this theory (he says) is more plausible than life developing on Earth. I guess we need to consider ourselves very, very lucky to be here.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Except that when life first evolved on Earth, there was no free oxygen in the atmosphere. In fact, the introduction of oxygen from cyanobacteria lead to the so-called oxygen catastrophe.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This looks like an exercise in finding data and pulling out numbers to support conclusions that were already reached. If you look at the pattern of papers by NC Wickramasinghe, since the 1980's he's been publishing stuff that appears to be conclusion-oriented, rather than data-oriented, all with the conclusion that fully-formed life rained down upon the earth, embedded in comets.
There's no doubt that comets rain down on the earth. There is considerable controversy regarding the frequency, size, and origin of comets raining down upon the earth.
Wickramasinghe's conclusions appear to be speculation masquerading as science. What he's proposing doesn't appear to be testable. As Wolfgang Pauli said of other proposals that were untestable, "not even wrong."
Coming up with such a precise number seems particularly brilliant, considering that we have no
idea how life really originated.
Isn't the Earth in space?
It's my opinion that we don't know nearly enough about abiogenesis to go making claims like this. We simply don't know how life/replicators/whatever originated to go assigning goofy probabilities. But it makes for a snappy headline.
Whatever.
There have been zero proofs of anything regarding abiogenesis. Lots of speculation. Nothing is satisfactorily answered. In what way is life evolving from "outside" more probable than life evolving from a "giant organic soup"? I'm not saying it is or isn't - I'm saying we don't know jack about it. And not that "giant organic soup" is the only earth-bound model.
It seems to me that life originated right here on Terra, but I sure as hell can't prove it. But I see no reason to look to comets or panspermia or whatever. Occam's Razor, and all that. The early days of Terra provided some pretty exotic environments that could probably get the job done. Or, IMO, evidently got the job done.
Whatever.
No, there's nothing in ID that argues for instantaneous creation, or against creation by evolution.
That makes a big difference, though. It's a question of probability. If life cannot spread through space, then it must have begun here of its own accord, and so we're looking for a theory that allows good odds that life will start on any planet chemically and environmentally favourable for it to do so. If life, once started somewhere in the Universe, can spread through space by natural means (i.e. without first needing to evolve intelligence and build starships), then we're allowed much longer odds, because of the far wider range of space and time. If you have a million worlds all rolling the dice on abiogenesis, you have far better chances than with only one.
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.
The tornado analogy is not meant to be an analogy for evolution; it's meant to be an analogy for the origin of life. Evolution may work as a gradual ratcheting up, but it only works amongst reproducing organisms. The simplest thing we have that is theorized to be capable of evolving is a bacterium, which is orders of magnitude more complex than a 747. While it is hypothesized that in the past there may have been simpler forms capable of reproduction and evolution, we would need to have a full-blown theory -- a workable model -- of such, to see whether such a thing would be more or less complex than a 747.
"Either is happens, or it doesn't"
And there was a 50/50 chance that I'd get the punchline right, and I got it wrong thanks to a spelling mistake.
Either it happens, or it doesn't.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I like your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsleter!
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
The simplest thing we have that is theorized to be capable of evolving is a bacterium
Nonsense. Any replicator subjected to differential survival pressure is capable of evolving, and there are simpler replicators than bacteria.
They were in a canister, but worms managed to survive the space shuttle Columbia explosion & subsequent crash to earth at high speeds:2 19.shtml
http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/01/04/0334
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-6016657-7.html
Spore delayed to add pre-cell comet level
This is just a restating of a theory that has been around since the 1960's. The author of this is one of the origional authors. The problem it has always had is that there is no real proof. There can't be until we have the ability to go out and survey a large number of comets. Not going to happen real soon.
The origional authors were Sir Fred Hoyle, an astronomer, and Mr. Wickramasinge, a mathematician. Both were major level scholars in thier respective fields. Mr. Hoyle also did not believe in the Big Bang or universal exspansion. The evidence was not all in at that time. It seems to be now.
The panspemia theory was that comets or large meteorites could harbor some forms of primitive life, and that the life forms carried could survive intact in some impact events. Life then would be 'seeded' in new planets by debris from other star systems. In this view, most of the planets that could harbor life forms, will have (or have had) at least simple bacteria. Everything more complex was explained by evolution.
It was origionally a way to get from non-life to life, by effectivly doubling the time available. At the time (and to a large extent even today), the jump from non-life to bacteria is larger than the jump from bacteria to us.
The theory was rejected in the 1960's by most scientists because they knew that no life form could survive in space. They also knew that while collision events can expel tons of surface debris into space, that no life form could survive being blasted off the earth, and even if it did, that it couldn't survive the impact of landing on a planet.
We now know that all of the objections were wrong. Fungus has survuved for a decade or more in space with vacuum, radiation and extreems of heat and cold. Some bacteria is millions of times more resistant than we are to radiation, and frozen/dried out bacteria are known to have survived for many millions of years entomed in amber, only to come 'back to life' when the conditions are right. Bacteria have also survived earth re-entry on space junk. So, all of the conditions for panspermia CAN be met.
At this point it is near certain that earth and Mars had at least the potential to exchange life forms early in thier history, probably both ways several times. There should have been bacteria ladened rocks hitting some of the moons of the outer planets too. A few rocks would have been exchanged with passing stars, so even if we weren't origionally seeded from elsewhere, we have probably seeded some other stars.
Still that's a lot of if's. All of that doesn't really prove anything, and it would take visiting and analyzing DNA on site to determine if there is any relationship between any earth life and any life (present or past) on another planet.
As an Idea, panspermia will not die, but it also can not be accepted as true by main stream science. It's just not able to be proven. I don't expect to live long enough to see that change. I don't think you will either.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Or perhaps it depends on how you look at it. But the problem is easier to understand as a False Dilemma, not a Straw Man. Since we don't know exactly how long life takes to evolve, because it's a random process that we've never watched happen, it could be that it evolved independently on Earth, in comets, and all over the place. It could also have come solely from the planet Krypton. Even finding actual life in a comet would not show that it evolved there, rather evolving or being created by God on Krypton. That's a metaphor.
The good professors should embrace, as they say, the healing power of 'and'.
sigs, as if you care.
In other words, it's still a strawman.
The laws dictating how different elements and ions react and combine with one another are not random. Chemistry is not random, it's stochastic. You don't combust hydrogen and oxygen on different days and get water on Monday and aluminum file cabinets on Wednesday. Nobody, but nobody other than creationists and other folks engaged in trying to misrepresent the position they're arguing against holds that DNA or anything else "randomly" assembled itself from a preexisting mix of chemicals.
It was this same month that at the northpole scientist looking for ancient frozen cells, concluded that after 1.5 milion years the DNA helix doesnt survive, the reason for it. At the poles more radiation enters earth.
For panspermia to work and to seed a galaxy much more then a milion years are required.
And more radiation will aply in space destroying complex moleculair life bounds.
If you would say but the comet could include the right kind of clay.
Well we allready had lots of it here
So its more likely its te opposite chance
How much did it cost who sponsored them and what was their budget idea... tahts the main question.
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
If you think that your own innate sense of decency is superior guide to goodness than what can be achieved by humility before God, and instruction from Him, you might want to reflect on the fact that you have sectioned off vast parts of humanity as deserving to be mocked, apparently without any objections from your lofty sense of decency. If you are looking for the source of evil in this world, I suggest that it is precisely this lust for a sense of superiority over our fellow man, and the actions that proceed from it. Though this lust can infect the religious as well as the non-religious, humility before God leads also to humility before one's fellow man, and wisdom from God commands love of one's fellow man. Your stated positions imply that your innate decency has somehow failed to bestow these lessons upon you.
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!
There's nothing in ID that argues very much of anything, other than the essential concept that "somehow somewhere something is wrong with evolution". It's Creationism so rendered down that it makes no meaningful claims at all. Oh sure, there's this nonsense about IC and bacterial flagellum and the vertebrate immune system, which researchers have happily debunked by providing theoretical pathways (and let's remember, all that is require to debunk an IC claim is to demonstrate a possible means for such a pathway to evolve).
ID is yesterday's news. The latest scam is Teach the Controversy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
You're right back to the 747 in the junkyard. The problem with scientists - and biologists in general - is that we usually don't realize how difficult it is for some people to understand DNA didn't spring into existence in one single instant any more than people, lizards, sponges or bacteria did. Many simpler replicating mechanisms exist - viruses, RNA, protein (prions), and so on. The backwards path of evolution follows smooth curve all the way down to zero complexity - it doesn't end at bacteria, as some foolish poster already suggested, nor does it end at DNA. It goes all the way back to the very first replicating molecule, which was undoubtedly extremely simple, and which only had to occur one single time in history to explain everything we see today. It's utterly explicable. As a result, chances are that life is very, very common throughout the universe.
A-Bomb
We can start with the fact that macro-evolution (as defined by biologists, and not creationists) has been observed (that is to say, evolution beyond the species level).
There is a fairly (and far beyond me to explain) statistical aspect to evolutionary biology, but the main thing to keep in mind is that modern evolutionary theory predicts that all life, extant or extinct, will fit into a nested hieararchy. The bonus of the Modern Synthesis and of the last thirty or forty years of genetic research has given us a twin-nested hiearchy; not only do the fossils give us a pretty good notion of the faunal succession, but the genetic data, by and large, confirms and extends those observations.
This is the root of why evolution is a well-supported scientific theory. It's nice to have a single line of data, but when you get to evidentiary lines that fit together as well as the fossil and genetic data does, I don't think it's any great leap of any kind to state "Here is evidence for common descent".
Let's remember the flip side of all of this, and that's falsification. For common descent to be falsified, one need only provide some examples of organisms that fall outside of the twin-nested hieararchy, or of fossils that violate the faunal succession. So, if you can produce some bacteria that uses an entirely different genetic scheme that is not related in any way to the way life as we know it does, then common descent has been falsified (though, you'll note, evolution has not). As to the faunal succession, if you pull a rabbit fossil out of strata, say, 3 billion years ago, where bacterial colonies represented the most complex organisms around, then we have a very serious problem.
Now, how do we falsify a common Creationist retort; that God (or the Designer(s) or whatever) used a common toolkit, and that's why all life uses the same basic nucleotide system, or genetic language if you will. On the face of it, it seems a reasonable retort, until your factor in that said Designer likely could use any genetic he/she/it/they pleased, and there's every reason to expect that there might be a half a dozen, or a hundred or any number you like (and can expect to be likely to be useful for inheritance) such systems as there is just one. In short, any and all observations are essentially compatible with the claim "God did it" (or whatever formulation of God/designer/alien scientist/etc. you want to invoke).
The reason Creationists are picked on for their "million to one, 747 out of a scrapyard" arguments is because those arguments do not in fact address anything that modern evolutionary theory or Common Descent states, but rather knock down oversimplified and rather silly strawmen of what those theories claim happened. There's nothing positive in their claims, simply just fallaciously-formulated arguments against everything from the Big Bang to the formation of the first cell.
If one observers that all extant organisms fit into a hieararchy, then I don't think it's an inference too far to state that that relationship is more than just happenstance. If that observation fits within the predictive nature of a specific theory, then is it unreasonable to state that that observation is in fact a piece of evidence for that theory?
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.
Panspermia: (n) the theory which states that sperm gets all over everything.
In the absence of pre-existing organic life, none of those things are self-replicating. Ideas evolve as well, even simple ones, but that is again not helpful in determining the simplest thing which can (without help from another organism) replicate. To my knowledge, bacteria, or the bacteria-like organisms thought to precede them, are the simplest such things currently known, or in any meaningful way theorized. It's been speculated that maybe there was an RNA-based life form that was simpler, but I don't believe any actual model for such has ever been suggested.
That's the trick though - you don't actually need good odds at all. All you need is for the event to not be impossible even though it may be improbable.
Keep in mind - when you have the entire surface of the Earth (with all it's wildly varying conditions) to work with, you have a giant MIMD chemical paralell processor. Even if the event is improbable (per try), the odds of it happening at all go sharply up when you are trying millions (billions? googol?) of times per minute across millions of years. How this seems to generate (in the minds of some people) impossible odds - while accepting that it was a) not only possible somewhere else, and b) transferred to Earth by an even more unlikely event, escapes me.
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.
Except that it doesn't really. If the timeframe Earth has been around is 1/1000th of the average time you'd expect the abiogenetic process to yeild life on average, well that's ok. There are likely to be 1000s of Earth-like planets in the galaxy. All those stochastic molecular events are not only taking place on the surface of primative earth, but every other primative earthlike planet in the universe. It only has to happen once for us to be here and puzzle at how rare we are. I mean, the chances of winning the lottery are extremely low, but someone usually wins.
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 ?
You are right there. No doubt about it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I guess it's more appropriate to speak of the Earth as the final frontier, now. Poor trekkies.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.