Life began after meteorites splashed into warm ponds of water, say astronomers Life began on Earth only a few hundred million years after the planet’s surface was cool enough for pools of liquid water to form, according to a new study published today. Astronomers from McMaster University, Canada and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Germany have calculated the probability of meteorites carrying …
The article mentions 2000kg containing carbon compounds, therefore somewhat less than 2000 depending on the percentage content. The meteoric contribution pales into total insignificance when compared with dust providing 60000000kg of carbon compounds annually.
Either the quoted figures are wrong or the seeding of life should be credited to interstellar dust rather than the headline's splashing meteorites.
You might say that it is science, and science needs to quantify everything. As such, they are basically highlighting the fact that meteorites are, in their scenario, an almost insignificant factor in the accumulation of carbon compounds on Earth. They just don't say so explicitly.
"Life began after meteorites splashed into warm ponds"...
That is not science, but biased clickbait. The headline screams the role of "scary", sensational, meteorites rather than cosmic dust. Science is impartial, unbiased, fact and evidence based and not sensationalist... until science manages to clone dinosaurs!
The meteorites and large asteroids of the early solar system were probably important for delivering water to ancient earth, with dust delivering carbon compounds. Any delicate carbon compound in a meteorite would probably be vapourised by the impact.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2149168-life-may-have-begun-millions-of-years-earlier-than-we-thought/
"Any delicate carbon compound in a meteorite would probably be vapourised by the impact."You've not heard of the Murchison meteorite then?
"The meteorites and large asteroids of the early solar system were probably important for delivering water to ancient earth"
Why suppose that meteorites and large asteroids would have had water and the early Earth wouldn't? They might have added water but if was around in the early solar system for them to incorporate it was also available for the early Earth.
Not necessarily. If the Earth was formed in its current orbit it would be fairly warm, possibly too warm to collect and retain water vapour from its surrounding space. Meanwhile, asteroids and meteors in elliptical orbits would be much colder and so more capable of retaining any water molecules they encountered.
From behind the paywall:
"One solution is that the nucleobases were delivered by interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) and meteorites. During these early times, these bodies delivered ∼6× 10(to the power)7 and ∼2× 10(to the power)3 kg⋅y of intact carbon, respectively"
Those figures are taken from a 1992 paper co-authored by Carl Sagan so that's billions and billions of kgs of carbon.
“Once upon a time there was a prebiotic pool full of β-D-nucleotides. . . .”
Orgel and Joyce have published extensively on the RNA World hypothesis.
" We have provided plausible physical and chemical information about the conditions under which life could have originated. Now it’s the experimentalists turn to find out how life could indeed have emerged under these very specific early conditions.”
Translation: We've done the easy bit. Can someone put it together?
In reality we don't have separate DNA, protein and energy handling chemistries. They form an interactive whole. Once the thing is up and working it's easy to see how advantageous chance changes can be preserved. Discovering how a sufficient collection of apparently unlikely changes came together it assemble a self-reproducing system is a different matter.
Well said, Dr Syntax.
For over 60 years, since the famous experiment by Miller, people have been trying to "put it together".
Frankly, they have got nowhere. In the book "Genetic Takeover" (Cairns-Smith, 1982) he, as an experienced chemist, points out that an uncontrolled reaction between organic chemicals just yields a filthy tarry mess. None of the experimental work has shown how precisely constructed long molecular chains can be assembled, or how to produce the pure stereochemical L or D isomers needed as a starting point.
Cairns-Smith proposed that things began with clay, which would answer the L/D question and others, and then organic molecules became associated and eventually took over. This suggestion is not accepted these days - I assume there are good reasons but I am not familiar with them.
There are other suggestions that life began as sea water, with organic contaminants, penetrated cracks in the earth's crust and interacted with hot silicate minerals.
Yes, there are experiments that should be done; but I suggest they need to be looking for the kind of two-stage origins of life mentioned above.
You can see how a lot of people get freaked out by the huge knowledge gap and fill it with religious explanations.
We are still missing a LOT of the basics about how life began.
Life seems to me to be almost like some kind of fundamentals natural phenomenon that is linked to how matter and energy tends towards being organised.
If it's so random that it only occurs when some little clump of carbon based molecules start to behave somewhat logically, then it could be extremely rare or extremely common.
It's also possible that some of the carbon that's scattered throughout the universe is organised and has those building blocks.
I'm not sure that we'll arrive at an explanation until we encounter *very* primitive life somewhere else
"Why oh why does the religious tosh persist, are they that insecure/weak that they need to think that there is someone "up there" looking after them? The planet would be a far better place if religion DIDN'T exist."
Religion and belief that some deity exists need not be one and the same. Anything that asks and answers "What is wrong with us" and "What do we do about it" is essentially a religion. Yes, I am defining religion as an innate human behavior. Your post asks and answers those two questions which indicates that you have some personal demons to exorcise if you truly wish to be free of this dread disease.
For the dazed and confused, all three of my kids managed to get this down before the age of 10. It isn't perfect, but it covers stuff rather well for a cartoon. I strongly recommend it for youngsters to get the idea of evolution.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9142875-evolution
Yes, there's stuff in there that there is still open debate over in the biophysics department, but it does well.
We've managed to test the idea of what the *minimum* requirements were to build the components of RNA, and we've seen that genetic evolution has a HUGE dependence on "Luck/Chance/random solar flare". What is missing are the concrete details - personally I'm satisfied that we're here based on an incredible string of random chances over an insanely long period of time. It is also what has me convinced that there are very likely many many many other planets out there with their own variation of chemical soup that has acquired self awareness. I just hope that its not the assholes of the universe that get the FTL bit down first.
As for the concrete details of what happened back then, we'll need the physicists to figure out how to use those gravity waves to bend time so we can look back there.
(Its stuff like this my mother, uncle and I end up booting around late in the evening over an open fire and makes life *really* interesting)
"I'm satisfied that we're here based on an incredible string of random chances over an insanely long period of time"90 million years is only an insanely long period of time if you haven't studied geology. It's less than 2% of the lifespan of Earth and only half as long as the Mesozoic Era.
That sound you hear is Chandra Wickramasinghe quoting Arthur C. Clarke:
"Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases:
(1) It's completely impossible.
(2) It's possible, but it's not worth doing.
(3) I said it was a good idea all along".
@ Archtech
I was amused some years ago when some of Wikramsinghe's students sent a balloon into the stratosphere. It brought back samples of bacteria that couldn't possibly have originated on Earth because no plausible mechanism for them getting there. Atmosphere too thin apparently.
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