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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."
..the meteorites were intelligently designed!
Boom.
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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.
This is far from panspermia. That is the theory that life itself came from space. This is just saying that Nitrogen is brought to the earth by meteorites.
Really, this should just be one big "duh" to anyone who has read up on theory of planetary formation. Basically, the whole planet is made up of meteorites that crashed together. And maybe a couple times it was large aggregations of meteorites that collided into the growing mass, and even small planetoid bodies such as the event that is theorized to have created the moon. But those planetoid bodies were made by the collisions of numerous meteors, dust particles, etc.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
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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Not quite, complex organic compounds are found throughout our solar system. For example, on Titan it literally rains organic compounds that, when mixed with water, form amino acids. It is a plausible hypothesis that a third party could have brought such compounds to earth but it is also equally likely that earth simply formed them on its own. If Earth could have formed them on its own it doesn't require the third party hypothesis.
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
That's a fertilizer bomb! Thanks a lot, outer space.
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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.
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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Personally, I welcome our meteorite-borne ancestral overlords.
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.
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?
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It's asteroids all the way down
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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.
Table-ized A.I.
Well, if space stretches on all sides of me to infinity, that would mean that ~I~ am the centre of the universe.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
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