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Building Blocks of DNA Confirmed In Meteorites
MistrX writes "Researchers announced that the components of DNA have now been confirmed to exist in extraterrestrial meteorites. A different team of scientists also discovered a number of molecules linked with a vital ancient biological process, adding weight to the idea that the earliest forms of life on Earth may have been made up in part from materials delivered to Earth from space. Past research had revealed a range of building blocks of life in meteorites, such as the amino acids that make up proteins. Space rocks just like these may have been a vital source of the organic compounds that gave rise to life on Earth."
"made up in part from materials delivered to Earth the planet by from space". Seriously?
weinersmith
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Maybe the aliens somewhere, were playing spore? :p
Can someone please explain the significance of this finding? I'm reading into a log of big assumptions here. So I have a few basic questions.
A.) Does that mean that life here on Earth most likely have been boot-strapped from meteorites?
B.) Such compounds are so common in the universe that finding them floating in space is trivial? Thus leading to the idea of life being more common than we think.
Life is not for the lazy.
Considering that all planets are composed of material that was once floating about in space, this is kind of obvious. It's just a matter of when it arrived. Being part of a meteor sounds cool and all, but it's not like in the movies where there's a magic meteor that can give super powers (which seems to be the summary's interpretation). It just means this specific matter arrived on earth after the planet was already pretty well formed.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
We already know that our atoms come from supernovae. Carbon, Oxygen and other atoms are formed in stars and scattered around the Universe via supernovae. Every atom in your body was once in the fiery furnace of a star just before it exploded. Now we know that, later on, the precursors to the DNA that makes us who we are were floating around in meteors in space. They crashed to Earth where, over time, it developed into DNA, cells, and life.
Scientific explanations don't make things boring, they make them incredibly cool!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
How, exactly, does this help answer the question of where life came from (possibly)? Is it easier/ more likely for these compounds to form on meteors than simply to originate on Earth? Or does this merely shove the question back to "well, it didn't come from Earth, so it came from a meteor!" "How did it get on the meteor?" "...I don't know, aliens maybe?" I really don't understand why they hypothesized that meteors brought the compounds here. Is it really just that we have no idea how they can form on Earth by themselves?
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Sperm-esque shaped meteor + egg-esque shaped planet = life
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People who argue that we are unique in a very large universe are in essence taking a position which at base is religious, not scientific. Science assumes that once we observe a phenomenon, if we reproduce the initial conditions it will recur. This has worked extremely well up till now, whereas the successive religious claims of uniqueness, beginning with the Earth at the centre of the universe, have all been exploded.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The guy was either out on magic mushrooms, or trying to describe a flying saucer. Or both...though, seriously, given that I have actual evidence for magic mushrooms, and I have no belief in Biblical inerrancy, I'll take the psilocybin explanation.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
we are billion year old carbon...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
But the Bible didn't say nothin' bout no metorites!
There are plenty of descriptions of meteorite type objects in the bible. From Genesis to Book of Revelation. Sure, they're described and fire and brimstone or stars falling from the sky. But it's the best a bunch of stupid goat herders could come up with.
Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen and Oxygen. Surprise!
Now that the god argument has been settled, can we focus on unimportant science like colonizing Mars for the betterment of man kind?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I'm surprised. 62 comments and you're the first angry atheist trying to troll this into a religion flame war.
Oh, and I read the story first on Fox News. Yeah, those bible thumping tea baggers published it before Slashdot!
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
It would be interesting if all life on this planet was nothing more than an elaborate experiment designed by some ancient race who hurled a bunch of their DNA to some random part of space. We may someday (in the distant future) have to resort to the same so that we could (very, very indirectly) travel through intergalactic space, possibly to survive (via proxy) some sort of (self-inflicted?) calamity on Earth.
We have had any number of events which could hurl material from Earth well past escape velocity and into space. Is this material coming back after one of those events? I skimmed the article, but did not see where they eliminated Earth as the source of the material.
I am, however permitted (as, among other things, a one time student of the history of science and religion) to note that arguments to uniqueness normally have a religious foundation, because there is no evidence whatsoever that they are correct whereas there is evidence that life exists in the Universe and that the rocks floating around the bits of the universe which interact with us are similar to our rocks.
Interestingly, it only really seems to be since the rise of American fundamentalism that anyone with a Western university education has seriously questioned that life exists elsewhere in the Universe. Pope in one of his poems treats it as an obvious given. Catholic theologians have debated (including at Vat II) how salvation would work for people from other planets, and C S Lewis, an Anglican scholar and novelist, actually proposed a theodicy in three novels which was intended to provide a mechanism. Whole genres - science fiction and fantasy - treat it as a given. It seems to be a part of the American retreat from science.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
is made up from materials 'from space'. Stupid article
Good-bye
In fact this result is evidence that supports a wider scope for life. It shows that rocks can act as a shield for relatively fragile molecules which are components of larger organic molecules. This is a key argument; for life to be abundant, if the necessary molecules start to appear from natural causes in the early planet they must last long enough for further synthesis to occur. This research shows that this is possible for larger molecules than hitherto known.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Angry atheist? Not at all. More like malevolent agnostic who finds cafeteria Christians to be hilarious joke fodder.
C) God destroyed Man by throwing rocks at the Earth.
Strong evidence for RNA. Suggestions of hybrid poly-aromic hydrocarbon nucleic acid system before that. DNA is the most stable, accurate, and complex of the three. But when it evolved it would overwhelm the competition over millions of years.
...if the best paid pitchers are supposed to be the best pitchers, and if pitching is intelligent design, then we can deduce that CC Sabathia is, in fact, God.
This makes sense, as we all know Alex Rodriguez is the devil, which confirms all of our suspicions that they're on the same team to begin with.
I8-D
I've read most of the posts here and did not see anyone posting the possibility that meteor have hit the earth over the years (however many billions of years) which launched some "building blocks" or Amino Acids into space in the form of meteorites etc. . .?
Could it be possible that some of those rocks God threw at us bounced off and scattered materials across the galaxy and beyond?
So, by the same logic, if rocks are found in space rocks, then rocks found on earth were created in outer space by meteorites.
It's like comparing Greek Parthenon and lots of small marble pieces.
Um... so... the Parthenon could have occurred naturally?
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
In fact this result is evidence that supports a wider scope for life.
In the scope of our solar system, we could be observing a local phenomena. I'm not advocating, nor hoping, this is the case - just saying we need more evidence with respect to a universal phenomena.
The anthropic principle* basically states that the fact that we can observe the universe necessarily constrains the observations we will see. In other words, if the nuclear strong force was 100x as strong, no life would exist to observe and measure that. It is really focused on the baseline forces and constants that underlie our understanding of physics.
The anthropic principle focuses solely on actual observed evidence: we can observe that we exist, and we can measure the forces and deduce the constants mathematically.
It does not necessarily apply to the question of life elsewhere in the universe, though. We can guess that the same physical conditions that allow us to exist, will also allow other, similar life to exist elsewhere in the universe. HOWEVER, we do not have any direct observation of life anywhere other than Earth. To the contrary, we have observed numerous objects within our own system and found no other life whatsoever. In addition we have failed to create "new" life in the laboratory from non-living materials.
The scientific statement about life is that we don't know how strong the anthropic principle is--how unique we might be within the universe. We don't know whether there is actually IS any other life in the universe, and we certainly don't know how prevalent it might be. That's not a religious statement because it is strictly constrained by observation. The moment we get proof of life elsewhere in the universe, that will change (unlike a religious statement, which would not).
So while it is true that life must arise spontaneously (since we observe life), there is no proof that it must arise spontaneously more than once. Like you I think it's incredibly improbable that it only arose once in the vast universe. But without observations that support that hypothesis, it is only a guess or personal opinion.
* Not anthropormorphic fallacy--that is the fallacy of assigning human traits to nonhuman things, like rocks or dogs.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Big Deal
The building blocks of DNA are found all over the earth. Even with perfect laboratory conditions we can not turn them into life.
Call me when they actually discover something living on some rock in space. Now that would be something.
"For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice" -- God
I've never understood this building blocks from meteorites theory. Wouldn't any organic molecules be destroyed by the thousands of degree temperatures from entry through the atmosphere. Also why are building blocks from meteorites even important. Isn't the primordial earth a much less hostile even more fertile environment for the formation of these molecules?
It could be used as a proof for intelligent design but it would be false since the "heaven" is still throwing the rocks at Earth. Hmmm... this would mean that God still doesn't think she succeeded to create intelligent life on Earth :-)
Daddy? Is that you?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Most? One, possibly two or three (I don't know how many scriptwriters worked on the "flux capacitor" movie (I'm not even sure if I've ever bothered to watch it through ; any of the 3. Or was it 4?)
Michael J.Fox is intelligent? Evidence, please.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Thanks for posting that. I'd nearly run out of shit paper.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"