LINK It Came From the Heavens New research supports the idea that life can spread from one world to another. Read more at https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/it-came-heavens-180971077/#mJ6Ih1EBrQZ1BlZu.99
FTA: Even if panspermia did not spread life to another habitable planet in the last 550 million years, it could easily have done so in earlier times, when Mars (and possibly Venus) still had oceans on their surface. If, as the work by Nuevo seems to indicate, near-ready building blocks of life are readily produced in space and distributed by meteorites, the origin of life may be quite a bit easier than many of us envision.
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First you need to define what you mean by "life". If you mean amino acid combinations that given the right conditions might recombine and eventually become a simple form of insipient life. If you mean a full formed organic, carbon-based organism. No.
Present thinking holds two ideas regarding life in the universe and the origin of life on earth. First, there are insipient amino acid complexes floating around the universe ( i believe in comets primarily). But that is not the source for our life forms.
Life on this planet more than likely began at the bottom of the ocean around volcanic vents or fumaroles. Thr environment around these vents are warm and hospitible for simple life forms. Similarily, the volcanic activity spews out a plethora of minerals. Many are necesssry for organic life. It was an optimal environments for the formation of amino acid complexes, that over millions of years, combined and recombined until a viable complex amino was realized. These over many more millions of years evolved into a complex cell, and then into complex organisms. Definitely not pansperma.
t1nick
Level 8
Dec 29, 2018
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With all due respect I don't think panspermia can be ruled out so easily. "That life may have orginated at volcanic vents" is certainly not proof that it did. At present, we just don't really know. Volcanic vents are the current best guess but it is only that.
I personally like panspermia because it opens up more complex possible solutions to the problem. While I am educated as a scientist, I am not a biologist and have to defer to them on the complexity of life. My own guess (and it is only that) is that life is far to complex to be described by a "chance" organization of amino acides. Kind of like Dawkin's "God 747 self assembling ..." it just isn't going to happen that way.
@marmot84 I understand your argument. I too am a scientist as well as an educator. I teach college geology, have taught college chemitry, and have taught high schoolnBiology for over 25 years. When I worked for NASA doing atmospheric chemisty the. Oceanic vent was the prevailing hypothesis at NASA. Its not my area of research so to speak, so I can only repeat what was explained to me. But I respect your insistence for alternative potentialities.
@t1nick Cheers, I teach college Astronomy and Calculus Based High School AP Physics. I'm currently leading the strongest class of students I've ever had through an experimental section on Special Rel. They did exceptionally well I have to say - they really grasped the ideas and showed that they could apply them to complex problems. I love teaching bright kids and seeing them excel!
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