Hacker News Reader

Comment by schappim | Hacker News Reader

This has gotta add weight to the Panspermia hypothesis.

Panspermia is a hypothesis that suggests life on Earth may have originated from microorganisms or organic matter that traveled through space, potentially from other planets or moons in our solar system or even from other star systems.

View on HN

The opposite. If such compounds are common in asteroids absent life, then the rise of RNA/DNA on different planets is more likely to be happening spontaneously, without anything traveling between planets. This finding suggests that some building blocks of life may be very common, increasing the chances of life arising locally without need of panspermia.

Is that the opposite?

It's an alternative explanation, but I'm not sure if this is evidence against panspermia either.

Its isn't evidence against, but it is evidence that panspermia is less necessary than previously thought. Should we detect life out there somewhere, the fact that these compounds are more universal decreased the likelihood that that detected life is related to us through panspermia. The fact that life in two places uses RNA no longer means that it must be directly related to the RNA/DNA-based life on earth.

Way too early in the science needed to characterize as evidence for or against panspermia or much else. We need much much more work like this.

> too early in the science needed to characterize as evidence for or against panspermia or much else

Every organic compound that spontaneously develops under natural conditions is an argument against the necessity of panspermia.

Just to complete the circle:

The opposite would be Earth was hit by other objects in the distant past, and the collision blew large chunks of Earth into space. Complete with B3 and RNA. (Especially credible as the body in question is a near Earth asteroid.)

All the posited explanations are reasonable hypotheses in my opinion.

I don't think it gives more weight to panspermia.

Rather, IMHO, it gives us more information on how the conditions on Earth might have been when life emerged. We're getting more and more clues that a lot of the basic blocks of life are present in asteroids and thus might have been present on the primordial Earth as well in some watery soup where life emerged.

> Panspermia is a hypothesis that suggests life on Earth may have originated from microorganisms

But where did the microorganisms on the asteroid come from?

home

Space Balls

If the creation (natural synthesis) of an organic molecule requires extraordinary conditions (some cosmic very rare & special place), AND, such stupendously rare precursors are catalysts of generation of more complex organic molecules (like RNA) in more common conditions (rare but equally distributed planets like Earth), then an ancient chance event somewhere out there is possibly the source of all potential DNA based life-forms via astroid seeding. The entire issue with DNA/RNA is how did these complex molecules naturally arise.

That’s a cope, not an explanation. It’s like saying “God made the world”. It doesn’t answer the question because then the question is who made God.

If your theory relies on external creation on another planet or whatever, then it’s meaningless because how did life start there. If life could start there then it could have started here so why do we need your theory at all?

pseudo-panspermia, the blocks of life comes from space, but life emerges in a planet.

> the blocks of life comes from space, but life emerges in a planet.

This is the theory of panspermia. No pseudo prefix required.

Not quite. Panspermia says that life exists on other planets and then somehow is distributed through space to other planets. The OP was just saying that the "building blocks" exist throughout space but life develops on planets.

Edit: The wikipedia article breaks it down sufficiently, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

Reply on news.ycombinator.com