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).

Comments

Comets are nothing but Intergalactic Spermatazoa

[christopher240240]

Panspermia http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/2012/10/15/the-panspermia-paradox/

Except..

[Anonymous Coward]

..that life emerged billions of years ago.

Not that I am finding fault with the underlying theory, but still..

CAPTCHA: creator!

Re:Except..

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that reading TFA is not in fashion on /. but can you at least read the summary? It says, "..that icy comets that crashed into Earth millions of years ago could have produced life building organic compounds." That's what I was pointing out. Sheesh.

Re:Except..

[Samantha Wright]

Well, I for one am extremely unfashionable and actually RTFA:

"The flux of organic matter to Earth via comets and asteroids during periods of heavy bombardment may have been as high as 10 trillion kilograms per year, delivering up to several orders of magnitude greater mass of organics than what likely pre-existed on the planet," Goldman said.

The words "heavy bombardment" have particular meaning in the context of solar system history; the most well-known being the (not quite ubiquitously accepted) Late Heavy Bombardment, on the moon, 4.1–3.8 billion years ago. The bit about "millions of years ago" was probably added by the public relations science writer and should have been "billions." They get this stuff wrong all the time.

Re:Except..

[coinreturn]

And billions of years is still millions of years (just more of them).

Wait, what?

[gstoddart]

Is this even a new idea?

I've heard this for quite some time now, and I thought this was a prevailing understanding.

Re:Wait, what?

[telchine]

Is this even a new idea?

I've heard this for quite some time now, and I thought this was a prevailing understanding.

It's like that news story that comes up every few months... Scientist Discover Signs of Water on Mars!

Re:Wait, what?

[Sockatume]

The idea that comets might be the source of early prebiotic components is old, but this specific research demonstrating that the high pressures and temperatures involved in impacts is capable of converting the simple, common molecules found on comets into more complex prebiotic structures is new.

Re:Wait, what?

[Nerdfest]

They bring it up every now and then just to stir up the "Creationists".

Re:Wait, what?

[cellocgw]

You would prefer "scientists now pretty sure water was on Mars, not even going to bother any more"?

That's rather like what The Onion might write. Except that it would probably be a good idea to stop going all ThePriceIsRight over every piece of info that comes back from the Mars rovers in the first place.

Re:Wait, what?

[camperdave]

1492...

Guy finds previously unknown land and peoples. No need to follow up.

Guy with terrific PR connections finds "previously unknown land", if you don't count the Vikings, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Polynesians, etc.

Re:Wait, what?

[gstoddart]

"We came here from another world" sounds more like an episode from Enterprise:TNG than a valid scientific theory.

It really depends on what you mean by 'we' and your stance on how life forms in the universe.

If by 'we came from another world' you mean the basic chemical precursors for life came to planet Earth through things like comets, and somewhere along the way something happened through chemical processes... sure. Because the elements in your body all came from burned up stars, so it's not like the selenium in your brain came from Earth. It ended up here from a bunch of other stuff floating around in space.

If you mean humans were transplanted here from another planet, then, yes, I'd say that sounds absurd.

and no possible way to test it until we can get to other planets and find some samples that haven't been corrupted by being on this planet

Actually, no. From TFS:

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

You can factually say that comets contain these things. We know that there's big clouds of alcohol floating around in space, for instance.

So, if you think life is simply a combination of chemical processes, a lot of time, and a lot of luck ... given that the precursors are floating around in space, life (of some form) is pretty much inevitable over large enough scales if the right conditions present themselves.

At which point, saying that 'life came from stuff in space' isn't exactly a stretch.

Re:Wait, what?

[moeinvt]

Actually, I don't know what's new about this.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16215-meteor-impacts-may-have-sparked-life-on-earth.html

"Yoshihiro Furukawa... used a high-velocity propellant gun to simulate the impacts of ordinary carbon-containing chondrite meteorites .... recovered a variety of organic molecules, including fatty acids, amines, and an amino acid."

There was a multi-part Nova episode called "Origins" where they also demonstrated this. I can't remember the scientist or laboratory, but they put some simple organic compounds inside a metal plug and then fired a high speed projectile into it (or maybe they fired the plug into a target?). When they opened the container, they found that they had created more complex compounds like amino acids. It looked like a translucent liquid at first, and came out looking like dark slime.

Re:Wait, what?

[gstoddart]

if you don't count the Vikings, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Polynesians, etc

Which, oddly enough, they never do.

Much of history boils down to "the world was invented by white Europeans because we wrote the history books".

People tend to downplay just how much stuff we actually knew even 2000 years ago and act like it wasn't there.

Re:Wait, what?

[Sperbels]

Is this even a new idea?

BTW, did you hear Voyager has left the solar system?

Re:Wait, what?

[chill]

You don't count the Vikings, Chinese, etc. because they didn't do anything with the discovery. Their "knowledge" of the Americas didn't translate to anything that noticeably impacted history or civilization either there (Norway, China, etc.) or here (North America).

The occasional potsherd or remnants of an abandoned village don't amount to anything. All of them left the equivalent of "Kilroy was here" marks and nothing more.

Columbus' "discovery" shook the world.

Re:Wait, what?

[cusco]

No, they said, "There are already people and powerful kingdoms here. There are too many of them to conquer." The Europeans came and said, "There is gold here. People are dieing like flies, maybe we can use the chaos to steal it all." If the Vikings had been as filthy as the Western Europeans and introduced influenza, smallpox and tuberculosis to Labrador then they wouldn't have had trouble with the 'Skraelings' and their colonies would probably succeeded.

commetary life

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we kicking the can down the road now ? Where does cometary life come from ? This is a circular argument.

Re:commetary life

[wonkey_monkey]

No-one's saying there was life on the comets - just some very useful chemicals.

So 'Gravity is God'...

[starglider29a]

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?

Re:So 'Gravity is God'...

[dywolf]

hmmm...God is unknowable...and we're having trouble tying Gravity into the universal Theory of Stuff...

My Gravity, he's right!

Re:So 'Gravity is God'...

[coinreturn]

Glad we finally solved that! Can we move on now?

Sure, now that we've solved the easy bits, we can try to figure out what women are really thinking.

Women don't even know what women are really thinking.

Zombies

[VorpalRodent]

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.

Re:In laymans terms (since I'm a layman)

[ColdWetDog]

You're jumping ahead of the game. You're describing Panspermia (I always thought that term a tad chauvinistic). This is just splattering pre biotic chemicals around. Then the really interesting part occurs - somehow these precursor chemicals assemble / get transformed / major hand waving into life as we know it.

Re:In laymans terms (since I'm a layman)

[Samantha Wright]

You'll have to narrow your scope a little: we're pretty sure that all of the interesting bits of evolution (the distinction between bacteria and archaea, the rise of animals, plants, protists, and fungi, multicellularity, and everything since) happened right here. To use a surprisingly good computing analogy, not only do we have the fossil records, but we can compare the source code and see where the forks happened. A lot of the most interesting adaptations are serendipitous re-uses of really old code.

The possibility that living cells might have arrived on Earth is considered something of a toss-up. There have been quite a lot of difficult-to-test proposals about how they could've arisen from fairly basic building blocks here, and they all seem pretty plausible. We're pretty sure about the RNA world hypothesis (the idea that life only started using proteins for enzymes and DNA for storage later, and started off using just what we think of as a makeshift intermediary for everything) but we don't have much of a clue about what happened before that, and we can't say for certain it happened here or not. We also don't know how life went from being a single self-replicating molecule into a membrane-protected cell, nor if there was some storage molecule before RNA that was even simpler to operate on.

However, this article is almost certainly wrong because RNA's inherent stability causes it to evolve at a much faster rate. So at the very least, it's still possible that there was enough time for life to evolve here from pure abiogenesis.

Re:And then what?

[Samantha Wright]

No, not all of them. Some of them would be as poorly off as us, or worse. We have no particular reason to believe we're at the bottom end of development, or that evolution into sentient life takes the same amount of time everywhere, or even that it's favourable everywhere. And given enough alien civilizations, anything can happen, including thugs looking for slaves.

Re:An act of faith

[gewalker]

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.

Re:And then what?

[NatasRevol]

How does it arrange itself into life? Or at least the precursors?

If only we had science for an answer.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/10/simple-reaction-makes-the-building-blocks-of-a-nucleic-acid/

"all the reaction required was copper ions and some UV light."