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NASA Discovers Life's Building Block In Comet
xp65 writes "NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA's Stardust spacecraft. 'Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet,' said Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. 'Our discovery supports the theory that some of life's ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts.'"
Are we sure it is not an alien spaceship ?
Strange, we think that a comet wiped out the dinosaurs, and yet another comet like this one could sustain the glycine-deficient dinosaurs at Jurassic Park!
Or "space spooge" as the kids call it these days. So where'd that life come from?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It also supports the theory that some other planet full of life went *KA-BOOOM*
Aliens of said planet are now patrolling the galaxy looking for the next M class planet to colonize.
I can say [REDACTED] anytime I want!
Don't they make a claim like this every other week? It isn't getting any more interesting. Elements of life found in an old pile of pancakes left behind in an abandoned nuclear power plant, now that would be interesting.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
So now we know
Obviously, the discovery of sentient life "abroad" is going to be anticlimactic now.
Way to ruin it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycine formula is NH2-CH2-CO-OH
It's not that complicated. Shouldn't we be waiting to get excited about something more complex?
Adama: "Life here began out there." These are the first words of the Sacred Scrolls...
That only works on intelligent falling theorists.
but the prime constituent of the soya bean got their 1st. Just one small fart for man one giant harumph for mankind
/. /.?
What's all this I must wait & try again stuff about did someone
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Um... it didn't. "Building blocks for life" does not equal "life". But once the 'building blocks' formed, life could get started... almost certainly on Earth. See, e.g., here.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
"What caused the life to form way out there?"
As far as we can tell life didn't form way out there. Just an amino acid fundamental to life. Life as we know it requires liquid water, a certain atmosphere, gravity, and a bunch of other requirements.
"It's fine and dandy to push the building blocks of life off-planet, but how can those blocks then be explained?"
The building blocks for life have to come from somewhere, they don't just appear out of nowhere (or do they?). After all, isn't life really just the combination of left over heavier elements created through exploded stars and other space junk that just happened to end up on earth through meteorites, comets, and the accretion process...
Glycine is the only thing they are willing to admit. NASA believes the world is not in a position to digest, (ha, ha) the more significant finding in the comet: High Fructose Corn Syrup.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Glycine is the simplest amino acid, and it the only one that lacks a chiral center on the alpha carbon. Of the four groups attached in a tetrahedral arrangement to the alpha carbon, two are hydrogen atoms. In all other amino acids, one of the two hydrogens of glycines is replaced by a distinct functional group. The really interesting thing about biologically used amino acids is that it is always the same hydrogen of the two that is replaced -- all the 19 non-glycine amino acids are so-called "L-stereoisomers." Discovery of any one of the 19 amino acids other than glycine in a comet would be quite a story, and it would be even more surprising if there were a mixture of "L" and "D" stereoisomers other than 50/50. My bet is that if another amino acid is found in cometary debris, it is asparagine, since it can form by the reaction 2*glycine - water.
Apparently they can't be bothered to pick up a textbook and learn that Redi and Pasteur proved it doesn't work like that a couple hundred years ago.
It's call the law of biogenesis.
Stop spending tax dollars trying to prove your Theory when there is already a scientific law disproving it.
If you want to spend your own money on it fine, just stop spending mine on your junk 'science.'
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1531
Apparently they can't be bothered to pick up a textbook and learn that Redi and Pasteur proved it doesn't work like that a couple hundred years ago.
It's call the law of biogenesis.
Stop spending tax dollars trying to prove your Theory when there is already a scientific law disproving it.
Because, you know, a scientific "law" is the absolute truth........
Wikipedia happens to say that the law of biogenesis is "that modern organisms do not spontaneously arise in nature from non-life." Really, what makes you think that we are talking about modern organisms? This "law" is just meant to codify that the common wisdom of the day, that flies will comes from rotten meat, was incorrect.
Aside from a creationist perspective, you need some kind of abiogenic beginning, and this research helps us understand how this might take place.
"Our discovery supports the theory that some of life's ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts."
Instead it only supports what Dr. Pilcher says in the article:
"The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the universe may be common rather than rare."
In other words, it's just saying that amino acids are not that rare. If they're not that rare, why can't Earth have made them on it's own?
After all the Miller/Urey experiment in 1953 showed that amino acids can be produced fairly easily if a few simple conditions are met.
Miller took molecules which were believed to represent the major components of the early Earth's atmosphere and put them into a closed system
The gases they used were methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), hydrogen (H2), and water (H2O). Next, he ran a continuous electric current through the system, to simulate lightning storms believed to be common on the early earth. Analysis of the experiment was done by chromotography. At the end of one week, Miller observed that as much as 10-15% of the carbon was now in the form of organic compounds. Two percent of the carbon had formed some of the amino acids which are used to make proteins.
Maybe comets and meteors with amino acids were hitting earth as well. But finding them all over space also strengthens the idea that they're not uncommon to produce, and therefore also strengthens the theory that Earth could have produced them by itself. Either way seems like a guess to me.
Fun fact for the day: The Murchison meteorite which fell in Australia in 1969 also contained common amino acids such as glycine, alanine and glutamic acid as well as unusual ones like isovaline and pseudoleucine.
1) it was scooped from earth or another planet with life by the comet: dubious
2) a planet with life somewhere got crushed and the ejected material that formed the comet got some amino acids in it. weakly possible.
3) Given it's been shown that freezing primordial materials found in space actually promotes the formation of nucleic acids, it might not be much of a reach to suppose that there are natural processes in cold space that will form amino acids.
4) there are life forms that live on comets. presumably then panspermia is ubiquitous.
5) the gel got contaminated on earth. or the mass spec is not definitive about the molecule in question.
I lean towards 5, and then 3 as a close second. Of course 4 would be interesting, as it's direct panspermia. But if indeed the building blocks of life as we know it pervade the universe and occur naturally it also suggests there probably are a lot of similar nucloetide/peptide base life forms out there.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
he said "Hive Mind".
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When I first read the headline, I saw "NASA Discovers Life's Building Blocks in Cement". I figured they had found Jimmy Hoffa.
'Our discovery supports the theory that some of life's ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts.'"
Again guys, you are filling in gaps with information that fits your ideal world and to support other theories but there is no direct evidence that events happened this way. There is no direct evidence that glycine can survive the impact or that it actually was transferred from space-borne objects. Example: A 30 year old brown-haired person lives in San Francisco and another one who is 50 years old lives in New York. Does that mean the one in San Francisco is the offspring (and therefore related) of the one in New York either because the person in New York traveled to San Francisco then had a child or had a child then the child moved to and grew up in San Francisco? Yeah it can mean that but without asking the people involved or seeing it happen first-hand you can't just fill in the blanks and assume you are correct. We obviously can't ask glycine where it came from so we have to see it first-hand be transferred from a comet/meteorite to Earth and remain intact and viable before we can really say for sure that supports the theory that life's ingredients came from out of this world. Something generic like 2 samples of glycine or 2 brown-haired people are too generic to conclude they are related, but feel free to make that gross assumption anyway to fit theories of evolution.
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