Scientists identify substance that may have sparked life on earth
rutgers.edu
rutgers.edu
Being a Rutgers grad, this 100% sounds like a troll that would come out of a New Jersey based institution of higher learning.
Science is not the pursuit of the ultimate truth.
The goal is to insert the ultimate juvenile prank into the historical record.
Big Science should really advertise that up front. It would be good for recruitment.
Reminds me of how people say German has a word for everything, yeah cos they just remove the spaces in a phrase or sentence.
It's a smoosh, how Satan would do a smoosh https://youtu.be/5PWQB_jGDkg
Very doubtful this has anything to do with origins of life.
The complex catalyzes the production of dihydrogen from hydrogen cation. It's a cool reaction, but to say this may have "sparked life on earth" is way off.
Small peptide catalysts like this one have been known for some time and can even be designed for a wide range of reactions. A Nobel prize was awarded for this very field a few years back.
The models also are available at the 'Model archive' - eg https://modelarchive.org/doi/10.5452/ma-iyjyy
Anyone believe the Panspermia[0] theory?
> Panspermia proposes that organisms such as bacteria, complete with their DNA, could be transported by means such as comets through space to planets including Earth.
For all we know there could have been an Earth-like planet that had life in the early solar system, and they got destroyed by large impacts, and some of that life rained down on Earth (in a simple form).
There is also the theory that life propagated from distant star systems that harbored life (or still do) and had enough time to spread to Earth.
Then there's the fact that life appeared on earth almost as soon as it was possible for it to exist. Either it was easy and formed really quickly on Earth, or space is/was so full of it that earth got contaminated almost immediately... which still implies life is common and easy. Panspermia just doesn't help.
It helps exploring other options, since we are still unable to create artificial life. No one is saying to stop those experiments. But maybe they cannot succed, in the same way the alchimists could not create gold in the middle ages - because some fundamental understanding or ingredient is missing. (today we can create gold, but it is not worth it with our current technology)
"Either it was easy and formed really quickly on Earth, or space is/was so full of it that earth got contaminated almost immediately"
Or it was just random chance, that a "contaminated" comet hit earth at the right time, or an alien vessel passed by and planted life seeds. We simply don't know. So we cannot rule those options out at this moment. And "almost immediately" is still in the timespan of millions of years, so plenty of time for many asteroids to hit the earth and possibly bring life.
“For all we know” isn’t that convincing of an argument given that we know so little about life’s origin.
The important part to the question is not about where, but how.
I would imagine us doing it ourselves in the future.
We might have already done it in an interplanetary way with mars.
EDIT: reading the wikipedia entry, I found this funny:
... fragment of the Orgueil meteorite ... Despite great initial excitement, the seed was found to be that of a European Juncaceae or Rush plant that had been glued into the fragment and camouflaged using coal dust. The outer "fusion layer" was in fact glue.
It shows how life evolved from Nickelback.
"After sequences of experiments, researchers concluded the best candidate was Nickelback. The peptide is made of 13 amino acids and binds two nickel ions.
Nickel, they reasoned, was an abundant metal in early oceans. When bound to the peptide, the nickel atoms become potent catalysts, attracting additional protons and electrons and producing hydrogen gas. Hydrogen, the researchers reasoned, was also more abundant on early Earth and would have been a critical source of energy to power metabolism."