Superhot meteorites from asteroids may have brought critical amino acids to Earth. Scientists have discovered amino acids in asteroid fragments that fell to Earth in 2008. Despite having heated to 2,000 F on their descent to Earth, the amino acids were found to still be viable. This is a revelation to scientists who didn't think that any organic material could survive such temps. Amino acids are the building blocks of life. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/12/101220-asteroid-meteorite-life-space-science/
i guess i don't understand why people seem to want life to come from elsewhere i mean elsewhere is somewhere too, right?
I think what scientists will discover is that life is universal. It exists everywhere where conditions will support it, and where the proper "building blocks" have been introduced. How are these precursors to life introduced? Well now we know meteorites is one way, comets may be another, spontaneous growth in situ may also be responsible for life. What is so mind blowing about it is that it means that life probably didn't originate on Earth as every creationist would have you believe, but was indeed brought here by CHANCE. And the other thing to remember is that if it happened once on Earth, it probably happened many, many times over billions of years. So life on Earth today may have originated from chunks of other planets that are long gone or still around. If life evolved elsewhere first, and came to Earth in primitive form then evolved again here, there are likely to be more evolved forms on other planets than just amino acids. And it means that we likely have multiple life origin points, most likely from within our own solar system. Some of the originating places may be gone now, perhaps floating in the asteroid belt, where the meteorite in this story likely came from. And so when each new precursor to life, or life itself found its way to Earth, it may have had to compete with other lifeforms already here that came from elsewhere. So to view our planet as "God's Creation", like its something created all at once and thereafter static, is completely wrong. Life has come and gone on this planet from elsewhere, and more life or precursors to life are arriving here, probably on a DAILY BASIS! We don't notice it because these forms of life are already here in early migrations. This leads one to another mind blowing thought... It means that the Earth is a MELTING POT for extraterrestrial life! No need to look for extraterrestrials, as they are all around you!
I don't think they necessarily want it too (though I'm sure some do). But things like this means that there could be other life out there, other livable planets out there, or that we are closer to finding out our true origins. The only part of this that is really new information, though, is the astounding temperatures that these acids were able to survive in. We have found similar things on cooler meteorites =P
i like the idea that there is life elsewhere, don't get me wrong but in so many of these stories the interest seems to be that life came from elsewhere which to me in some ways is not much different than creationism earth's chemistry isn't good enough for ya? [though it truly cannot explain cats]
Exactly! The amino acids must have come from another planet that had life on it. Was that life seeded from space too? It's an interesting theory, but I still tend to go with theories of cosmogenesis and autopoietic cell formation.
Autopoiesis. I recommend reading The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra. It offers a very interesting theory as to how life originated and what it is exactly, ie. an organism is a closed system with a flow of energy through it that the life harnesses to sustain itself. The most fundamental exampleof that are cells, which I think scientists have shown can be produced in the lab under the right conditions. The largest example of such a thing is Gaia, if you view the biosphere as a large organism with the sun as the life energy flowing through it and inside creating the right chemistry for life (as we know it) to originate. All life is, from the simple cell to Gaia is modeled upon the same principles. I am more taken by Prigogine's boiling pot model in terms of how it can be used to model life.
By that definition, our Sun would be the biggest lifeform in our solar system. IMO, it's time we started worshipping our sun again. It is the creator and sustainer of life on Earth (well most of it anyway).
It may well be the case that everything in the entire universe is a form of life. But if you want to model the sun as an organism you could think of it as a closed system in multi-dimensional space-time where the flow of energy through is generated via nuclear fusion. All life forms, according to this theory, are modeled on the same principle, and consciousness in advanced life forms, or life forms as we know them like our self, are emergent properties of the unimaginable complexity of the self-generating chaotic systems that transpire as a result of them harnessing the energy from the sun. Life exists on the edge between chaos and order, to put it simply.
That's one way of looking at it, yes. At the end of the day though I don't think that any words can really fully explain it. It is just life, and as part of that phenomenon we are intrinsically bound to fail when trying to explain to ourselves what we are. The more you look into it the more paradoxical it becomes, just like the buddhists have been telling us for thousands of years. On the face of it though it is a nice theory that does certainly accommodate the notion that life may have evolved on the earth of it's own accord through the chemistry of the primordial soup, fueled by the energy of the sun, or the fire of the cosmic dance of Shiva however which way you like to think about it.
Probably none. Amino acids are not species, hell they're not even life, but they're a critical building block of life. Earth was just the ideal real estate in this solar system to crash into.
I think most knowledgeable people would be astonished if there wasn't life elsewhere in the universe.
Currently the universe is estimated at being around 14 billion years old, every atom in your body was formed shortly after the universes creation. Our Solar System is only about 5 billion years. So ten billion years ago not a single atom in your body was part of earth or this solar system The concept of life is an abstract concept, just the end result of the rules of the universe how all those little particles react, that carbon the most versatile atom that can form all these long complex chains, chains that then go on to form more and more complex structures The concept of our universe is also an abstraction, we dont know its bounds and its only really the way it looks to us a certain place in space (amongst the 26 or so dimensions we are up to) and a certain place in time ( our succesion of universes we go through before they split off into multiverses) The more important question probably is "Why does everything in the universe seem to tend toward a higher level of complexity?" Find microbes on another planet, and so what?, we still have to wait another couple billion years before they evolve into something we can play poker with
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhj45BFK5dw"]YouTube - Richard Dawkins & Neil deGrasse Tyson on Life in the Universe