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Meteorites Brought Ingredients of Life To Earth
Meshach writes "A new analysis of a meteorite found in Antarctica is leading scientists to think that life on Earth may have come from outer space. Chemical analysis of the meteorite shows it to be rich in ammonia and containing the element nitrogen. Nitrogen is found in the proteins and DNA that form the basis of life as we know it. The prevailing theory is that our planet may have been seeded by a comet or asteroid because the formative Earth might not have been able to provide the full inventory of simple molecules needed for the processes which led to primitive life."
Spore was correct then.
..the meteorites were intelligently designed!
Boom.
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Didn't Sir Fred Hoyle say this in, what, 1982?
Welcome to the Theory of Panspermia.
And why did they have to call it something that sounded so perverse?
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
They had to come from somewhere right?
There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe... Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens.
TFS says that the meteorite is "rich in ammonia and contains the element nitrogen." Considering that the chemical formula for ammonia is NH3, it's hard to see how it could possibly not contain nitrogen.
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It is so hard to have some integrity and not deliberately write conclusive sounding titles to scientific (albeit well founded) speculation? Just because you rescind your egregious claims, mere words later, does not excuse you from being considered "part of the problem" when it comes to exaggeration of research for journalistic effect.
So scientists found a rock with elements.
What a breakthrough discovery!
Article says the theory is that metorites brought it required ingredients to Earth.
Summary says might.
Title says did.
In reality, everything on Earth came from space according to current scientific theory, the planet coleased into existence from matter orbiting Sol a few billion years ago.
So, I'm not really sure why you would consider this news, the 'ingredients for life' were more than likely ALREADY HERE by the time the Earth qualified as a planet, and most certainly by the time it cooled enough to not destroy any molecular combinations that would eventually turn to life.
My problem is when people say 'this is what happened 4 billion years ago!' or even 'this is what happened 20 thousand years ago'.
If you want to make absolutely sure I don't believe a word you're saying, tell me you KNOW what happened before recorded history without proving to me that you can travel through time in both directions as well.
We don't KNOW shit, but we have some pretty good theories. When you say 'We know what happened X thousands of years ago' you sound as idiotic as a bible thumper. We've learned time and time again that our methods for doing measurements are flawed. Too many people think we KNOW how things happened before human beings existed ... unless you know every single variable in the equation, you can only assume and theorize. Calling it anything other than a theory means you don't understand how science works at all.
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It possessed Dr. Fred!!
Didn't the entire Earth come from meteorites and other space junk?
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations..." -Winston Churchill
Panspermia is pretty far from being the 'prevailing theory' in the field - not to say that it isn't taken seriously.
OK, it took a few hundred million years, but it did cover the planet.
That's a fertilizer bomb! Thanks a lot, outer space.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Although it makes a certain amount of sense in the case of Charlie Sheen.
Fleeing from the Cylon tyranny, the last Battlestar, Galactica, leads a rag-tag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest -- a shining planet, known as Earth.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Seriously, I find ideas like this to be unsatisfying because they just pass the buck. Why is it any more likely that life would arise in a comet, asteroid, or other planet than it would be for life to arise on earth? Maybe if the earth was wiped clean by some cataclysm, but I don't know of anyone who's proposed that.
seems like a total copout.
Photons bring light to Earth. More proof of Gods non-existence at 11:00.
...been "brought" and "could have brought".
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
A few months ago I was walking with my wife/son back to our home from the library. In the seam of a manhole of an asphault jungle (I.E. downtown) ~175k population city, I saw thriving sprouts. Life will always find a way.
If we were seeded by intelligent life, that is awesome and I can't wait to find out more. If it were completely random that in our universe, which we have no idea even the size of, meteors with just the right contents to start life in the Earth's environment came to us, then awesome as well.
Just don't give me any "I *know* where we came from" cuz you just don't.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
He blowed up the last chance to finally get intelligent life on earth getting rid of that meteorite.
Given the whole accretion disk theory of planet formation - didn't the whole damned planet come from just a bunch of meteorites clumping together and falling to an ever larger body?
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
It seems that Battlestar Galactica's authors have been right all along.
...man.
Meh, some of the ingredients of life are also spread by me
So the Earth's atmosphere contains about 4*10^19 kg of Nitrogen (surface of the earth * 100 kPa/g * 80%). That's a *lot* of mass. A 10 km asteroid (like the one that could have wiped the dinosaurs) is maybe 10^12 kg. So it would take more than 10 *millions* of those to provide the Earth with its current atmosphere -- assuming these asteroids were pure frozen nitrogen.
Another thing I don't quite understand is why the nitrogen would have to come from somewhere else. As far as I know, stars produce plenty of it (CNO cycle and all), so if we have carbon and Oxygen, why not nitrogen as well. Am I missing anything?
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I hate to carp, but shouldn't the lead read, ...life on Earth may have come... ??
Their they're doing there hair.
Christ on a bicycle, WTF is happening to peoples' ability to write a simple English sentence with the correct form of the verb? Clueless, careless twit.
Harrummph!
Get off my lawn!
Personally, I welcome our meteorite-borne ancestral overlords.
So meteorites brought the life-critical element Nitrogen(!) to Earth... that truly is an astounding finding... no way that life could have evolved here without that contribution from space...
oh wait... doesn't the Earth already have "some" nitrogen? And ammonia? is that hard to make? (no don't think it is...)
Then scientists and creationists would at least *sound* like they agreed.
Of course, it would make life tough for Muslim cartoonists... not being able to draw rocks anymore. But hey, even if they did and we're sentenced to stoning - as soon as someone picked up a rock to throw they could just point and yell "Forbidden Idol!!!", and nonchalantly amble away in the ensuing confusion.
Random Creation!!!
That's VERY insightful
life I thought you were going to say it brought beer.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Earth is in outer space. We are all from outer space. Depends on your perspective. Earth is not the center of the universe.
So many theories as to how this meteor could have changed into life as we know it. Theories about how long the time was before life on earth began. How come it has to be so confusing? At least the creationists seem to like to agree that:
God created the universe
He/She/It did it in less than a million years
God created life as we know it
I'd rather focus on the future than try to figure out the past though...
Mumble mumble mum....
Stop dragging facts and logic into this.
The Earth was formed in outer space...yes?
And then life formed on the Earth as it continued to orbit the Sun in outer space.
So.....life formed in outer space.
I really don't see what the big deal is.
Perhaps the great author Arthur C. Clarke was not far off in his hypothesis.
Being descendants of... alien poo... is a humbling thought.
Neither the BBC article nor the abstract* of the original paper mention 'life on Earth may have come from outer space'. They say that the nitrogen may have come from outer space. From the abstract "we speculate that [ammonia rich comets] delivery to the early Earth could have fostered prebiotic molecular evolution" (emphasis mine).
* Alas, my institution only has free access to PNAS articles older than 6 months, so I haven't seen the paper. I could probably get up and read it in the library, but reading a paper off paper just seems morally wrong. Won't somebody please think of the trees?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
So does this mean that other planets, elsewhere in the universe, may have been seeded in a similar fashion... and therefore have *similar* flora / fauna to our own?
It's asteroids all the way down
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...upon their arrival into its atmosphere, through the use of low-flying shuttles, open bay doors and copious amounts of beer, the crewmembers embarked on their ultimate goal for the planet: spreading life.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Meteorites are like women: they bring life and love; and then smash it all to hell in a jealous fit such that you have to start all over again in another town.
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Seriously, what the fuck? The religious-relativist banter gets modded +4 INTERESTING and some of the best rational rebuttals get modded down to ONE? I hate to repeat myself, but what the fuck is going on?
He probably meant "contains elemental nitrogen", but it's a crapdot summary so what do you expect.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yeah because one thing the Earth is short of is Nitrogen.
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Welcome our Intelligently designed meteorite overlords.
wait wait wait wait... damn Scientologists will be loving this to prove Xenu!
Just because a meteorite contained some common elements and molecules, doesn't meant they weren't already present on Earth. Oh, and primordial-soul conditions have been successfully reproduced under laboratory conditions. So no external seeding is necessary.
Great.
Now that it becomes more and more scientifically impractical that spontaneous generation happened over millions of years, lets all write scifi novel and call it science.
If you're going to cite Occam's Razor, you need to understand what it actually says. It's not just "the simplest solution is usually the correct one". There is one particular way that Occam's Razor can identify which arguments are objectively simpler than others. There is a very narrow range of arguments that can be compared with Occam's Razor. What it actually states is that if you have two comprehensive explanations for something that have the following form:
Explanation 1:
Explanation 2:
Since both explanations fully explain the same subject, Occam's Razor states that explanation 2 is less likely to be true as it is objectively more complex, since it is a superset of explanation 1, sharing parameters a,b and c, with parameter d simply introducing more opportunities for the explanation to be incorrect.
What you are trying to compare with Occam's Razor are apples and oranges.
Explanation 1:
Explanation 2:
Neither of these arguements is a superset of the other, so they can't be compared using Occam's Razor.
Although there are more parameters to the first explanation, there is no way to objectively measure or even define the "complexity" of each individual parameter to check that even if you add them all together, if they are more "complex" than explanation 2
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Everything on the planet came from outer space.
I knew it! When life reaches a sufficient level of "intelligence", it naturally wonders about its place in the universe, and builds bigger and bigger machines in order to find the origin of everything. Errare humanum est: The thing sooner or later blows up in the face of the creator, and he/she/it travels far far away on a meteorite ... the pattern obviously repeats itself (cf. CERN LHC). Aaargh, we're doomed! Corollary: Could it be that supernovae are a sign of intelligent life?
Well obviously they were looking in the foothills of the mountains of madness. Did they find the Elder Sign anywhere?
The simplest answer is that life formed from indigenous materials on the planet. Personally I think that anywhere life is possible, life appears.
Maybe The Sumerian Gods Enki, and Enlil actually made us like they said, this sounds far more credible the the hokum, hooey and speculation the current theoreticians would have us believe. Hell, if we aren't going to listen to our ancestors why would we listen to our peers. Is there anything out there beyond idle speculation? Otherwise hot air not unlike helium is destined to rise eventually drifting to the stars we so adamantly try to set ourselves apart from...
I'm no scientist but imagine a giant ice ball orbiting on the same trajectory as our early earth and over time colliding into it... could have been a slow, low impact collision and that gave us all these water plus the ingredients needed for life to begin.? And also formed the moon in the process.? Possible?
So I like to think of it as Space Cum. I know this sound disgusting, sorry. But if the planet is the egg and meteorite is the seed, wouldn't that basically imply that this planet and all living creatures come from some Space funk?
Planet X meets Planet Y, they bang into each other and had a Big Bang. Their seeds now free to float in space land here and there and Wham life as we know it.... 900 million years later.
It could happen.....
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
...upon their arrival into its atmosphere, through the use of low-flying shuttles, open bay doors and copious amounts of beer, the crewmembers embarked on their ultimate goal for the planet: spreading life.
And their settlement was wiped out when the B-Ark crashed into the planet and ruined it for everyone.
Yeah, because plenty of asteroids land on earth without being heated to temperatures that would cook any form of life existant on earth!
But don't take my word for it! Dummer says that anytime amonia exist on an asteroid it invariably points to DNA because everybody knows that if you have a bottle of bleach long enough the amonia turns into your nextdoor neighbour.
Whatever happened to the real scientists - you know, the ones that made it through highschool? I've read a few of their books and apparently the chances of life (a small virus) accidently being created on earth in 1 billion years is 10e2000000:1 against. [Paul Davies: The Cosmic Blueprint, 1987; p 118]
But these "scientists" would have you believe that life forming on an asteroid in the vacuum of space is bound to happen, and not just happen, but produce a virus that can survive entry into earth's atmosphere. Then, against Darwin's theory (because Darwin, of course wouldn't come up with it for billions more years, and besides - the virus can't read), it decides that surviving such high temperatures is really not good for survival on earth, so as it multiplies and evolves it become more fragile to temperature until we have life as we know it today. Simple!