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Panspermia- Your opinions?


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This could have been a possibility - until one scientist worked out the molecular elements to create life from DNA - ordered all the necessary ingredients mixed them together and created living DNA (life)

This then demonstrated that life can be created with the right ingredients artificially - therefore can happen naturally given the right elements, the right conditions and enough time. This then translate that life can occur more frequently than thought throughout the universe.

Oh and another thing Skynet isn't that far away :)

Chris

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If you do the research you will find a couple acey - I wouldn't bother opening up my self to ridicule by saying something I knew wasn't true - if you do even more research you will find I am right about some other stuff I have said :)

Playing God: the man who would create artificial life - Science, News - The Independent

First DNA molecule made almost entirely of artificial parts

Note: I will try and remember the chap I am originally thinking of they nicknamed him Dr Frankenstein

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hmmm - the famous "controversial American scientific entrepreneur" as reported by the Independent - my sceptical cells are twitching.

I don't really get the panspermia thing - isn't it a theory that life on earth was "seeded" by life from somewhere else? If so, so what? How did it start somewhere else?

imho, if something can happen once, it can probably happen lots and lots of times whether or not we can re-create it in a lab. no?

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Sounds like he is on the verge of it in the way that in the 1960s we were on the verge of nuclear fusion generators that would power the family car :)

Besides he hasnt actually created anything - he has just placed all the bits that occur naturally into their DNA chain. Its like saying you are creating a Van Gogh because your doing a1000 piece jigsaw of 'The Starry Night'

Sorry but I'll stay sceptical on that one.

Panspermia - I think Hoyle covered that ages ago in 'Lifecloud' though wikipedia doesnt mention it. Hoyle speculated in Lifecloud that the basic building blocks of life may have arrived vie meteor impacts. Personally I think (having ploughed through Lifecloud - which is no mean feat by the way :( ) its as tenable as any other theory but it really only displaces the question back a bit.

Just goes to show though that there really is nothing new under the sun.

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This could have been a possibility - until one scientist worked out the molecular elements to create life from DNA - ordered all the necessary ingredients mixed them together and created living DNA (life)

This then demonstrated that life can be created with the right ingredients artificially - therefore can happen naturally given the right elements, the right conditions and enough time. This then translate that life can occur more frequently than thought throughout the universe.

Oh and another thing Skynet isn't that far away :)

Chris

What nonsense! If anyone had created "living" DNA that would be huge news. A self replicating organism be it a virus or bacteria/whatever. They can only just get amino acids to form from within very controlled conditions. Certainly far too controlled to be anything like those which may have occurred on an early Earth. And then there is also the problem of chirality - the preponderance of the L form of amino acid molecule over the D form when in nature it is a 50-50 split between the two. Scientists have tried all that "chemical soup" stuff experiments in the 50's and none of them produce anything beyond a few amino acids (simple chemicals) which don't survive more than a few minutes in the reactor and which have to be removed to another environment for their continued survival.

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If you do the research you will find a couple acey - I wouldn't bother opening up my self to ridicule by saying something I knew wasn't true - if you do even more research you will find I am right about some other stuff I have said :)

Playing God: the man who would create artificial life - Science, News - The Independent

First DNA molecule made almost entirely of artificial parts

Note: I will try and remember the chap I am originally thinking of they nicknamed him Dr Frankenstein

First DNA molecule made almost entirely of artificial parts

Their experiment neither proves nor does anything. It's like taking a human

arm and grafting a mushroom on to it. Wait and see how it does nothing but die.

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I didn't state 'Living' or a life form - a fair bit to go I think before that claim is made.

The point of whether you can label some of the research into artificial created RNA/DNA molecules or chromosome/enzyme as life is a moot point I would agree with you, so perhaps I am in error to make the statement as to report life being created, is misleading to those that would see it as life as they know it - rather than the fundermental blocks that attribute to life.

But for every publically funded - part goverment funded project into such sensitive area's such as replication of life - there is always the path for the covert/stealth national security type of funded projects that tend to be 5-10 years ahead of the game.

So apologies if my statement was misleading.

Chris

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Er, just to get back on-topic, I'm presently reading Paul Davies's new book The Eerie Silence and he doesn't rule out life having arrived from space. Some work by Brandon Carter a while back suggested on statistical grounds that it was more likely than having arisen on Earth, though Davies expresses doubt about the reasoning.

Panspermia was proposed in 1903 by Svante Arrhenius, who was also the first physicist to think of the greenhouse effect - so you never know.

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My suspicion is that as far the emergence of life goes there may be some imperative, some impulse for it to happen, that we are missing. Lee Smolin made this idea the starting point of his theory (or you might prefer hypothesis) that universes which are good at producing stars seed universes that are sometimes even better at producing stars, so turning starry universes from a startling improbability into something you would predict as probable.

Suppose that such a feedback loop existed with respect to life. I have no idea what it might be but it might turn the improbable-seeming into the probable as happened with Darwinian theory (which was Smolin's starting point.)

I shrink from the anthropecntricity implicit in the idea of life being unthinkably improbable. Maybe some mechanism (I do mean one entirely scientific in character) encourages it against odds which only seem grotesquely unfavourable because we have missed the mechanism.

Olly

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  • 4 weeks later...

Both Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe have collaborated on the idea of Panspermia.

They found that there was a correlation between flu like illnesses on Earth and the passing of nearby comets a few months beforehand.

Likewise the Indian Space Agency (not quite sure of its real name) have flown high-altitude balloon missions to obtain organic molecular compounds found high in Earth's atmosphere.

It is believed by some that life on Earth may have come from Mars, a la ALH84001

or

that cometary bodies, rather than being the harbingers of doom are infact the stellar equivalent of lifeboats transporting organic material between planets or even close solar systems.

None of this is wholly proven, but nor is it solely science fiction.

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We will never know for certain how life originated, though there's a good chance it would habe been based around RNA with DNA and protein coming later. Could it have come from space? - very hard to disprove but complex biological molecules could certainly have formed in early earth conditions and its seems as likely that life evolved here rather than arrived from out there. Its hard to conceive of active viruses like influenza being present in comets though unless they came from us - the viruses that infect us are adapted to life in our cells and use the same genetic code we use.

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