Meteorites May Have Seeded Life On Earth

i guess i don't understand why people seem to want life to come from elsewhere

i mean elsewhere is somewhere too, right?

 

I wouldn't doubt if we came from rocks and dirt.

 

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.

 

God hurled those meteorites to earth with his BARE HANDS!

 

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.

 

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.

 

Gets ya to wonder how many new species may come via meteorites.

 

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.

 

You know something we don't?

 

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

 

Evidently I do. And I'd say the "we" is more likely just "you" .. lol

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhj45BFK5dw"]YouTube - Richard Dawkins & Neil deGrasse Tyson on Life in the Universe