Did Life Arrive via a Meteor?
In 1969, a meteorite landed near Murchison, Australia, containing many complex elements. Could life on earth have started this way millions of years ago?
This arrival, known as the Murchison Meteorite, has sparked considerable interest due to its advanced age and the chemicals it carried. It is said to have brought with it "thousands of organic compounds" including "over 90 different amino acids."
As amino acids are among the building blocks of life, many have speculated that this could have been the mechanism that started life on earth!
This is what we will consider in this article.
Interest in alien life arriving on earth dates back thousands of years. In 1768, some French peasants heard a thunderclap and saw a large stone falling to earth. Reports of this event reached the French Academy of Sciences.
Lavoisier, the chief chemist, "knew" that stones do not fall out of the sky; so he concluded that the witnesses were either telling lies or were mistaken. The academy did not accept the occurrence of meteorites until the following century.
Closer to our day, interest in meteors and their contents has become a specialised branch of cosmology.
In 1986, Lawrence M. Krauss, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, was quoted (Scientific American of December 1986) as saying:
"Of the 10,000 or so meteorites that have been collected and analyzed, eight are particularly unusual. They are so unusual, in fact, that since 1979 some investigators have thought they might have originated not in asteroids, as most meteorites did, but on the surface of Mars."
And so the findings on the Murchison Meteorite, and others like this, have fuelled the idea that "life could have originated in outer space."
And this interest has only increased. For example, the late Cyril Ponnamperuma, a biochemist, exobiologist and researcher on the origins of life on Earth, had this to say:
"Recently, we’ve reported that we have made all five bases [referring to base pairs in DNA], the compounds that spell out the instructions for all life and are a part of the nucleic acids, RNA and DNA. Not only did we make all five bases but we found them in a meteorite! So that these two things coming together really assure us that the molecules necessary for life can be found in the absence of life." — from Space World, 1985.
But what did they really find on that meteorite? How close to "life" are those compounds and elements?
Scientists were particularly interested in the elements such as purine, pyrimidine, and glycine.
These are amino acids. But how far from "building blocks of life" are they?
Pyrimidine consists of just 10 atoms in total. It contains:
- 4 carbon atoms
- 4 hydrogen atoms
- 2 nitrogen atoms
Purine is made of just 13 atoms. It consists of:
- 5 carbon atoms
- 4 hydrogen atoms
- 4 nitrogen atoms
Glycine consists of just 10 atoms in total. It is made up of:
- 2 carbon atoms
- 5 hydrogen atoms
- 1 nitrogen atom
- 2 oxygen atoms
Compare this with one strand of complete DNA:
And that's just one molecule of DNA!
Looking at the tangible reality of these findings, how truly close to "life" are these tiny elements discovered on meteorites?
If you found these isolated pieces of various materials, would you conclude that they came from a large and bustling city, and (without having further information to go on) proceed to describe the numerous complex buildings, roads, bridges, factories, power stations, the water, power and sewage channelling, and every functioning item that makes up a thriving city?
Is it realistic to compare elements consisting of just a few dozen atoms with the complexity of a living cell that consists of over 100 trillion atoms on average? (See the article 'The Living Cell — Nature's Own Metropolis.')
Note also that we are not merely comparing the quantity of the atoms here; these 100 trillion atoms are highly organised as well as meaningfully and elegantly arranged. (For additional information on this, see the article 'Multi-tiered Coordinated Planning.')
Did life originate in the uninviting regions of cold, radiation-filled space?
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