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Cometary Impacts May Have Provided Key Elements of Life
trendspotter writes with news of research indicating that impact events might be responsible for seeding the Earth with reactive forms of the precursors to amino acids. From the article: "Early Earth was not very hospitable when it came to jump starting life. In fact, new research shows that life on Earth may have come from out of this world. Lawrence Livermore scientist Nir Goldman and University of Ontario Institute of Technology colleague Isaac Tamblyn (a former LLNL postdoc) found that icy comets that crashed into Earth millions of years ago could have produced life building organic compounds, including the building blocks of proteins and nucleobases pairs of DNA and RNA. Comets contain a variety of simple molecules, such as water, ammonia, methanol and carbon dioxide, and an impact event with a planetary surface would provide an abundant supply of energy to drive chemical reactions."
The paper (PDF).
Panspermia http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/2012/10/15/the-panspermia-paradox/
..that life emerged billions of years ago.
Not that I am finding fault with the underlying theory, but still..
CAPTCHA: creator!
Is this even a new idea?
I've heard this for quite some time now, and I thought this was a prevailing understanding.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
So a comet comes smashing into the earth and generates a scattered smattering of amino acids and nucleic acids. Then what?
How exactly does this arrange itself into life? How much of a critical mass of these varied building blocks are needed for them to somehow self-assemble into a primitive, reproducing set of chemical reactions (aka lifeform)? I mean, this is like saying that if one dude tossed Lego bricks randomly around the world periodically over millions of years, eventually some of them will fall into a little Lego house. It seems unlikely given the size of the planet and the improbability of things falling into place even with high concentrations.
It just seems like the scale is completely off for this to be the origin of life.
Are we kicking the can down the road now ? Where does cometary life come from ? This is a circular argument.
In fact, new research shows that life on Earth may have come from out of this world.
It's more fun to read this as life came up from the center of the Earth to the surface.
I mean, look at our moon and other planets/moons in our solar system. Look at their craters. Look at the craters on our planet. Something hits something else, a peice breaks off and flies toward something else (eventually). Let's say a comet so big hit Earth that gravity from the comet attracts water, bacteria, plantlife, some fish, etc. and then flies off in another direction...carries it somewhere else. If you think about how LONG the universe has been around, this is a scientific certainty that the "building blocks of life" will be carried around and distributed to other planets.
I like to think that the universe has been playing a nonstop game of billiards for billions and billions of years.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The Earth is only 6,000 years old. Or so says this guy
sudo make me a sandwich
According to Hawking, Gravity (capital G) created the Universe: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13013/stephen-hawking-says-universe-can-create-itself-from-nothing-but-how-exactly
According to TFA, Gravity (capital G) created life (via the kinetic energy of the comets obeying laws of Gravity)
According to Genesis, God created the Universe and life.
Therefore, Gravity = God.
Glad we finally solved that! Can we move on now?
The University of South Florida has more about this topic and writes that: "life-producing phosphorus was carried to Earth by meteorites." http://news.usf.edu/article/templates/?a=5477&z=210
Making an educated guess about what probably happened based on available evidence is completely different than 'believing' it to be so. If/when new evidence is uncovered the understanding of life's origin will improve and evolve.
I initially misread the headline as "Cemetery impacts..." and assumed that this was going to be a nice discussion of zombies and/or how to be successful with necromancy.
Unfortunately, once again, it's only a discussion of how to set up abiogenesis.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
Sure it is. Scientific explanations are a priori naturalistic. Supernatural explanations are forbidden. What else can science produce. If God, Buddha, or a certain noodly being is responsible, it is not science.
Scientistics typically believe the science can explain everything, it certainly seems to be the best (most accurate and most useful) explanation for a very large number of observable phenomena.
This does not guarantee that it true for any phenomenon though. God could be actively moving atoms, sending photons, etc. continually just so it appears to follow natural laws. Everything could be a Matrix simulation, etc. This is the realm of philosophy, not science. Science is a useful tool even if God is prime mover of every phenomenon because it allows you to make predictions that actually match observable phenomena. Not so much for something in the non-historical past, but certainly for pretty much everything that is observable today.
Unless -- science discovers something in "the natural world" that is indisputably "unnatural" -- thus breaking the scientific presumption of natural causes. What would be proof?, say a sequence of bits in pi that contains perfect unicode copies of the Bible in the 100 most popular translations followed by of the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek text (and clearly labeled as such) guarded by a billion zeroes on each side beginning exactly at 2**666 bits should suffice for any honest scientist. A far more likely "unnatural sequence" was "accepted as proof" by Carl Sagan in his novel, Contact - but I don't recall the details of his example. BTW, if the Bible is to be believed, no such proof will ever be provided by God as that which is proven is not a faith and faith will not become knowledge before the 2nd coming of Christ (Romans 13, somewhat long explanation though).
Interestingly, with infinite bits of pi this sequence is certain to exist an infinite number of times (since pi in transcendental). Infinity is not just a really big number, it is so much more.
That idea is a hard sell to dinosaurs.
Table-ized A.I.
Atheism has always been based on faith.
Do you think it is faith to not believe in invisible pink elephants that live in your refrigerator?
Otherwise they would state that they can't prove or disprove existence of ... Not even sure I know what they are certain doesn't exist. Omnipotent intelligence? Jesus Chris? Buddha? Aliens designing Earth-life with advanced bioengineering?
You must not pay attention to any of them since any reputable person will state that you cannot disprove the existence of anything. Atheism is the acknowledgement that there is not evidence for these beliefs.
Anyway, atheists are absolutely certain these things don't exist and humans are "meat computers" and you never existed (from your point of view) when you die (all memories of your life gone as well as your conscious).
Many people are certain of many stupid things. Atheism itself does not assert that certainty. There is a difference between someone saying there is a gap in our knowledge and someone saying that gap is either god or isn't god.
I'm praying to the aliens!
Of no real consequence.
One might ask, when did FSM create gold. It was not (as far as we can deduce) in existence at the moment of the big bang, yet inexorably through the progress of inviolable physical processes and events, there came a moment when the first gold atom appeared. The timing of its first appearance, however, does not conflict with the notion that it was, in fact, created at the moment of the big bang, but existed (at that moment) only potentially.
By extension, life can be said to have been likewise created at the instant of the big bang, but appeared only later as a consequence of the operation of "natural" processes, all following the laws governing the matrix of energy and matter brought into existence at that instant.. Whether life's first appearance was on a comet or on earth is not a particularly interesting question IMHO.
Of more interest is the question that, given that the simplest known organism has something like 500,000 base pairs in its genome, how could any organism self-assemble randomly in a chance-governed universe, and having assembled, find itself in an environment where it would survive and propagate. The import of this question is this: does FSM actively direct the sequencing of events in the universe (in which case He is very much alive), or did FSM set the initial conditions of the big bang so carefully that the appearance of life was inevitable (in which case prayer to Him may be in vain).
Whence, of God, is the description: "The most manifest of the manifest and the most hidden of the hidden."
Capcha: Convoke
More likely it arose in micro gravity forming bubbles in gas/water clouds, nebula, Oort clouds, etc. flash frozen and then spread throughout the galaxy like dandelion seeds.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Sure my thought processes engage many acts of faith every day.
I will have faith that my life, your life, the universe around us and all of history weren't created by an omnipotent being at the end of the very post I'm typing now. But I won't be able to disprove it to you after the fact.
I have faith enough in the documentation of biologic processes to dismiss the idea that one can live only on water and meditation. I believe organs will fail and I will die when my body runs out of fuel.
I have faith that the process of scientific thought, where evidence builds on evidence and where doubt due to conflicting evidence challenges the existing models, is preferable a process of religious thought that prefers to discard evidence in order to preserve the existing model.
Anyways a supreme being is telling me that it wants to create the universe now...
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
That's not what is being presented. The idea is that the comet has a high concentration of the chemicals needed to create the more complex chemical building blocks of life when combined with the plentiful chemicals on earth at that time and a lot of heat and pressure. It's collision with the earth would provide that heat and pressure.
There is no supposition of life being transferred from one planet to another here. The resulting chemicals wouldn't be alive, they'd just exist in high concentration allowing "life" to happen more easily.
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So your answer is that you insist on a naturalistic explanation no matter what the evidence and no matter how unreasonable the evidence makes all possible naturalistic explanations look. That's not science. At least it's not good reasoning. You know what that is? It's religion. It's faith. It's a predetermined outcome irrespective of evidence.
Eric von Daniken