Proof That Meteors Could Have Sparked Life on Earth

My mother was a snowy comet,

her trailing hair so long and wet.

My father was a stoney meteor

with a nickel-iron heart and yet

one day they fell upon the Earth

and began their molecular duet.

Who could have knew

that the resulting goo

would someday be me and you!

Drone 601 (and yes, I'm aware my "poetry" stinks.)

The heading is very misleading considering that the article starts with the word "If"!!!

I agree, doing experiments is pointless.

Especially since the Earth is only about 6000 years old and flat.

Why think simple (earthbound origin of life),

if there is a complicated possibility?

Early earth contained anything needed for synthesis of complex molecules.

The step to replication and multiplication remains unexplained.

Different codes existed in early biological life - one different surviving in mitochondria.

RHABE

You could probably find everything in my pantry, but that doesn't mean that I could bake up a gold fish or even an amoeba. There are as many studies that suggest that the earth had a nitrogen/oxygen based atmosphere with more CO2 and without the necessary concentrations methane and ammonia for amino acid self synthesis. Besides, every other process in nature tends toward equilibrium, except life. Given the amount of information contained in a single living cell, life from non-life seems more far fetched to me than creation. And during the day of darwin, it was common to believe in life from non-life, but a few years later, a few simple experiments, from Pasteur and others, proved otherwise. Rotting meat doesn't turn into maggots and stagnating water doesn't spontaneously spawn life.

Merry Christmas

Hi,

there was definitely no oxygen but abundant methane in the very early atmosphere.

There are still existing some algae that can completely switch back to this early situation with its mechanisms of energy use and all the protein synthesis necessary to establish this.

The complete set of instructions is preserved in the genome. This is definitive proof that such an atmosphere existed.!

You cannot look at today living cells to think of a way of self-assembly in a suitable environment and life-starting activity.

Look at bacteria, they feed on a suitable soup of organic material that can be synthesized without difficulty from the early atmosphere.

No cell-nucleus, no sophisticated organelles, but DNA and plasmids. Dividing is a sign of living.

These too are highly evolved, so we have to search for earlier forms of life.

The first steps of evolution of the DNA coding for amino-acids are unknown. But some surviving different than ordinary codes (the mitochondria are the best known example) show to us that there has been an early development stage where different codings were competing and very likely not many surviving.

So it may take some more time to investigate into the secrets of early forms of life.

Only if we know these there is a chance to decide about self establishing life or not (in a suitable environment).

We will know if we find some extraterrestrial life with an equivalent of our DNA but different in coding and protein chemistry.

RHABE

May I interject with a little darwinian theory? we all know its the elephant in the room next to the donkey called creationism. Id like to combine evolution with this "Meteor" theory...

Life as a small organism might not have been native to this planet, perhaps it was manufactured in the depths of space, and lay dormant on a meteor, then upon crashing into a suitable environment with sustainable temperatures, sources of food, and radiation from a nearby star... life was sparked or just awoke and like the virus we all know we truly are, we spread and multiplied, or not we, but our ancestors, worms, monkeys, starfish, algae... the list goes on. oh yeah, talking banannas, then sometime later another meteor or 2, maybe a change in cosmic radiation as well and presto, multi cellular organisms with Ribo Nucleic Acid and dreams of life after death.

I take the view that perhaps life was created TO evolve.

Perhaps life was created simple to match the existing conditions at that time with the intention that as the conditions changed the life would evolve.

The climate of the earth is constantly changing, both on time scales of the same magnitude as our own life spans as well as on scales with the magnitude of the age of the earth it's self. With that in mind, I think it is folly to think that the climate change (warming or cooling, warming in some areas, cooling in others at the same time) is cased by human activity. It's going to happen with or without us - always has, always will.

If human activity is to blame for the current climate changes we are now observing, explain to me what human activity brought the last ice age to an end? If it happened once it can and will happen again.

Travis

I like the tile- PROOF that meteors COULD have sparked life...Like one of my favorite characters in ink would say- what a maroon