Scientists have proved for the first time that nucleobases found in meteorite are extraterrestrial

reply to post by bramski


YES! It's the theory of Panspermia, fantastic that they actually found something they can use to foward this theory. I always wondered if we, meaning human life, are the product of some extraterestrial Panspermia program. Makes you go HMMMMMMM. Great find!

Well, it's sunday, and although it's the wee hours of the morning i'd quite like to know where i have to be in order to read this report.

Any pointers would be most welcome, and indeed - very suitable to the subject matter at hand.

Our paradigm is shifting and it needs to do so in order for humanity to survive and enter a new age.

The argument about creation vs evolution is simply not worth any further debate since they do not exclude each other, rather they require each other.

It is design for evolution.
For more on this research The Akashic Field

Peace

Originally posted by Cyprus
Only gonna make a quick comment because this subject really is for another thread and has been covered numerous times on this forum, but the young earth has been debunked over and over. There is far more to the subject than just a documentary or two.

Now as for the original topic; Should the nucleobases really have been brought by the meteor, then it merely proves that the smaller particles are not exclusive to earth. It would also prove that some material can reach one planetary body while traversing the harsh enviorments of space and planetary entry. But it's no smoking gun imo. I'm curious of the methods of determining the origin of the nucleobases though. I'll see if i can find the actual publishing on the research later.

Actually, it has'nt, if you believe God created everything in a fully mature state, including the planets and universe, then things are old physically, but not in age. Adam and Eve were created to be around there teens or a little older, the trees were created bearing fruit, the birds created in flight. So why not the universe created billions of years old in a single day?
You say it's been debunked, but by who's standards? The fraction of the tip of the iceburg that the almighty science has scraped, puhleez. Humans don't understand everything, we can image the entire universe, multiverses even, yet we can't even figure out the vast mysteries of our own minds, so technically that makes our own minds more complex and amazing than the whole universe, just one human mind, something to think about. Acience is a way of man trying to understand what he see's what he can measure, ya can't measure God, He's too big (hehe), so I still believe my beliefs are valid. So you are wrong my friend, it has not been debunked.

-Jimmy

This really isn't all that exciting to be honest. It has been known since the 50s that purines and pyrimidines could be synthesized under a number of prebiotic conditions as well as many amino acids (See Miller-Urey experiment among many, many others).

Many purines (adenine, diaminopurine, guanine, xanthine, etc.) can be synthesized by HCN tetramerization (HCN itself produced by spark reactions between gases (N2, H2, CO, CO2) which were almost certainly present in the early atmosphere) and is a remarkably simple and efficient reaction that it would be a surprise if it played no relevance on the early history of life (no need for space nucleobases). Hydrolysis of higher HCN oligomers yield glycine, alanine, aspartate among other amino acids.

Making nucleobases in the lab is relatively easy, the problem arises not in their synthesis, but the difficulty in attaching them to ribose to form nucleotides under prebiotic conditions. Ribose itself can be made under prebiotic conditions, as well as many other sugars, starting from formaldehyde (H2CO) condensation. Formaldehyde itself formed under the same conditions as those for HCN production.

If they had found nucleotides or small RNA molecules on the meteor, then it would be exciting, but they just found nuclebases that have long been known to be made under a number of prebiotic conditions. The only interesting thing from this work is that nucleobases may be more widespread in the universe than we thought (I already figured that life is pretty abundant in the universe, so again not that shocking), but this doesn't imply that aliens seeded earth, and furthermore nucleobases contain no information, only when made into polymer chains is information storage possible.

Reading the abstract of the article, I think they can rule out contamination as the uracil and xanthine discovered had a 13C content of 45% and 37% respectively, while the 13C content of organic matter on earth is roughly 1%. Space-born carbon is continually being irradiated and thus will contain heavier isotopes, but once the meteor arrived it would be protected from cosmic radiation.

This doesn't mean that space-born nucleobases or amino acids played no rule in the origin of life on this planet, just that it really is not that exciting of news to this chemist.

Originally posted by Drewdatt
Our paradigm is shifting and it needs to do so in order for humanity to survive and enter a new age.

The argument about creation vs evolution is simply not worth any further debate since they do not exclude each other, rather they require each other.

It is design for evolution.
For more on this research The Akashic Field

Peace

Nice post!


Starred!

I found the information you referenced

reply to post by Anonymous ATS


Yep, Like you said. It was a forgone conclusion that we would discover this.


Those who didn't recognize this are like those Amazon primitives discovered the other day.

Originally posted by Badge01
reply to post by jamie83

 

There's more to it than the Yahoo article suggests, but there is a general consensus that heavy carbon molecules occur more frequently in Space than on Earth where the percentages are quite low for Carbon-13 Typically you find about 1% of Earth carbon is that isotope.

It is quite odd to find nucleotide bases in a meteor and I'd suspect that it was contamination, but they claim to have ruled out that possibility.

So it's no proven by any means, but it is a strong suggestion that their premise has some merit. In the past it was too difficult and expensive to analyze.

Here's a PubMed link for you. Link

Thanks!

I appreciate the explanation!

reply to post by Badge01


Sorry, but I'll have to straighten this out... First of all, it is the components of nucleotides that can be synthesized through prebiotic chemistry but not complete nucleotides themselves. Remember, they only found the bases-- not full nucleotides (that would also require linked triphosphates and sugars to constitute a nucleotide). How nucleotides formed initially is one of the greatest obstacles in studying abiogenesis (how life originate on Earth). So far, no one has been able to show how this was done. Furthermore, the sugars that would have been required (i.e., ribose for RNA) only come in very small yields as products of the Formose reaction (mixed in with all sorts of other organic compounds to boot). While it's neat to think of organics like nucleobases falling to Earth, it's a long way from "seeding" life as some believe in supporting Panspermia. The authors take more than a few liberties in this regard.

[edit on 14-6-2008 by X-tal_Phusion]

[edit on 14-6-2008 by X-tal_Phusion]

What I don't understand is that even if these are nucleobases, how are we supposed to be certain they are "extraterrestrial" and not from material blasted away from earth during one of the asteroid impacts? How can we possibly know what is from earth and what isn't? Opinion? That's not even a valid scientific argument!

-ChriS

I'm a bit confused about the carbon-13 thing. The scientists say that carbon-13 can only come from space, but it's my understanding that about 1% of the natural carbon on Earth is carbon-13. I haven't been able to find any info suggesting that carbon-13 cannot form on Earth.

While I find it likely that meteors played a role in 'fertilizing' the Earth with some of the building blocks of life, the whole carbon-13 thing stands out a little for me.

Hopefully, someone can point out what I'm missing. Thanks

Originally posted by jamie83
I'm not on either side of the creationist/evolution debate. However, I do get annoyed at examples of junk science and people jumping on a "scientific" discovery because it supports their side.

That said, look at this statement from the article:

A team of European and US scientists showed that the two types of molecules in the Australian meteorite contained a heavy form of carbon -- carbon 13 -- which could only have been formed in space.

Does anybody here honestly understand the basis for the claim that carbon 13 could only be formed in space? Or even more to the point, does anybody here understand at all the procedures these scientists used to arrive at their conclusions?

So then why all the celebration at this "find"? Isn't it just a case of being happy that there's a story that supports your position, so you really don't care about the validity of the conclusion?

It seems to be contrary to the "Deny Ignorance" spirit of this site.

It's evidence that supports a possibility, other than a magical, or mystical occurance that brought about life on earth...

reply to post by Anonymous ATS


You said it. But the important part here is the fact that the story is reported, interpreted and incorporated. Most agree. The processes aren't isolated or unique.
"They've" known for a long time. What may be of interest is the accumulation of data that's indicating a potentially common mechanism.
I've feared that we may be observing data encoding and transmission and not recognized it's nature. What I'm getting at is, as results accumulate, it seems we can continue to look for earth-like life elsewhere.

For anyone that has access to online journals or want the resource info for the journal entry it is:

"Extraterrestrial nucleobases in the Murchison meteorite" Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 270 Issuses 1-2 pages 130-136

Originally posted by BlasteR
What I don't understand is that even if these are nucleobases, how are we supposed to be certain they are "extraterrestrial" and not from material blasted away from earth during one of the asteroid impacts? How can we possibly know what is from earth and what isn't? Opinion? That's not even a valid scientific argument!

-ChriS

There is always the remote possiblity of it occuring, however, doing isotope analysis gives us the most accurate estimate of where the material orginated. As far as i can tell from the article, the isotope ratios aren't very close to the surrounding soils (which makes contamination from impact highly unlikely) and is in a range that is expected to be from space rather than earth. At least thats what how I understood the journal article when i read it. I have no prior experience with C13 vs C12 ratios or the methods used in the experiment so I'm not 100% sure.

reply to post by Cyprus


But we have no idea what the effect of long-term space exposure would do to such material. Perhaps the only reason we see this unlikely biological result within this meteorite is due to long-term exposure to the solar wind (or other factors). How can we know for sure?

-ChriS

See, this is a big find. However, the nucleobases to which they refer could have developed on Earth as well. So, it's really cool they found those molecules in a meteor, and it's possible (if not likely) that panspermia is real, but we should keep things objective. It's still a maybe.

I think the upshot, as one poster suggested, is that now we can theorize and explore the idea of the seeding of Earth with the building blocks of life which came from space is now not just a woo-hoo idea, but actually has some scientific basis and backing. The theory, as I understand it, is that they were created in another planet and then got embedded in rock, as organic compounds, which, when exposed on Earth could be incorporated as building blocks for organic synthesis.

I don't think it's necessary that they show this incorporation of C-13 into the sugars is proof of non-terrestrial origin, just that it shows a strong possibility that it was created off planet.

As far as the idea that bombarding the already incorporated carbon with energetic photons or radiation -after- it was already in space causing the Carbon-12 to morph into C-13 is not feasible.

Once the carbon is incorporated it is not changed. This is the whole basis of the theories surrounding carbon dating and anaysis of isotopes. They are incorporated from the pool of available carbon during formation and remains fixed after death. Good thought, though, but it's not how we understand the process. If anything a cosmic ray would have only a point effect and could not cause a wide-scale change in the isotope form by stray bombardment.

Originally posted by jamie83

Does anybody here honestly understand the basis for the claim that carbon 13 could only be formed in space? Or even more to the point, does anybody here understand at all the procedures these scientists used to arrive at their conclusions?

So then why all the celebration at this "find"? Isn't it just a case of being happy that there's a story that supports your position, so you really don't care about the validity of the conclusion?

It seems to be contrary to the "Deny Ignorance" spirit of this site.

I totaly agree!

This is not undeniable proof, this is simply a form of evidence to back their theory.

I am not convinced, but I am indeed intrigued.

Nice find anyway.

Originally posted by Damocles
this is simply amazing.

i think its kind of arrogant for anyone to think that if these "building blocks" are present in the galaxy/universe on a widespread scale that earth is the only planet life COULD have evolved on.

fantastic find

It is really arrogant to think that in the last 5 thousand years since man has been "civilized", that in that time our existance we will overlap with a super intelligent space fareing being that happens to be passing by. Our existance is a millisecond in the big picture of the universe, so it's unlikely.

If (big IF) they did use the same building blocks, they could have (and probably did) if all the conditions were right, evolve 1 million years sooner or later than us which will completely miss our puny existence. Humans only have 1oo years left on this planet before a pandemic, hunger or war wipes out all civilized life.

We are still rather primitive and todays technology advances have stripped our soul and are complete mismatches to human progression. It will lead to our undoing. We have already reached our pinnacle in the 90's. We are now on the downward slide and it would take a Messiah (alien or home grown??) to turn us around.

[edit on 16-6-2008 by eagledriver]

[edit on 16-6-2008 by eagledriver]