Found: first amino acid on a comet

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17628

by JohnIdol • 17 years ago

46 42 17 years ago

kwamenum86• 17 years ago

I wonder what the repercussions are for religion? Does news like this threaten to derail believers' faith in God (or higher being(s))?

[EDIT] Also what does this say about the possibility of life outside of earth?

TallGuyShort3• 17 years ago

>> I wonder what the repercussions are for religion?

Very minimal. Most people who are serious about religion don't base their faith on science in the first place. So when scientific understanding changes, it doesn't shake their faith a whole lot. Me for example - I believe in God for reasons independent of science. Any scientific discovery that seems to contradict what I believe doesn't make stop believing in him. It just makes me reevaluate what I believed and why, and if I still have reason to believe that.

For instance, I've always believed that if God's creations are infinite, and he put his children here on Earth, I'm sure there're planets elsewhere that he's created and made as beautiful as this one. And if one day someone found an asteroid with amino acids on it - that doesn't diminish my belief. It just makes me think things like, "I wonder if that's how God put life here". Nobody said God did it all by hand - maybe he just did it through natural laws.

I'm very religious and I follow science, and it's extremely rare that I feel conflicted.

kevindication2• 17 years ago

What have you found that suggests that there is a god in the first place?

MikeCapone3• 17 years ago

"I'm very religious and I follow science, and it's extremely rare that I feel conflicted."

How? Please elaborate.

steiger2• 17 years ago

I'm sorry, but I think religious thinking and scientific thinking are _almost_ incompatible. One is based on faith and dogma, other on testable evidence.

There are areas that they shock directly: religion says something about our reality, and scientific investigation finds out that that thing is just wrong.

IMHO, beliefs about our reality that _are testable_ should never be based on religion. Science does a better job at this. Now, beliefs about things that is out of science scopes can rely on religion (it can't really rely on much else.)

biohacker42• 17 years ago

I don't think it does anything for religions, they are by definition faith based.

As to your other question. We have known that amino acids exist out there for a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite

And there's a reasonable theory that these compounds form naturally as the the stuff out there tumbles down the entropy stairs, so to speak.

And here's where it gets interesting, if it's true that the building blocks of DNA are fairly common in the universe, then it's a reasonable assumption that DNA based life can emerge with some frequency.

flipbrad• 17 years ago

note that amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, not DNA. Also it's worth bearing in mind that DNA is a complex and fairly inert molecule, whereas RNA or TNA are often catalytic, thus potentially both simpler to spontaneously originate as a standalone, self-replicating entity (life!)

jimfl2• 17 years ago

"Also what does this say about the possibility of life outside of earth?"

A certainty. In fact, we may one day decide that life is just one of the phases of matter, along side liquid, solid, gas, plasma, and Bose-Einstein condensate.

Whether humanity ever finds anything more sophisticated than extraterrestrial algal mats before we go extinct is another matter.

hnal943• 17 years ago

I think it's strange that every time a scientific discovery occurs one of the first reactions to it is, "Well, that about wraps it up for religion, eh?" Followed by dismissive comments about how religion is completely different from science because it's "faith-based" (read: irrational, unconcerned with the facts).

Certainly, it's possible to come to different conclusions based upon the objective evidence. That doesn't mean that one of the conclusions is irrational and the other is rational.

In fact, I don't think there's any less faith involved in concluding that the only way life could have originated on earth is via panspermia (and that therefore, there is no God that matters) - all because we found an amino acid in space.

trapper2• 17 years ago

Over the last hundred years the probability most assign to the existence of an omnipotent god has decreased dramatically. Most rational people will come to the conclusion that there is such a vanishingly small chance of a god existing that there is no point believing. That's thanks to science.

jgrahamc2• 17 years ago

"The discovery confirms that some of the building blocks of life were delivered to the early Earth from space."

Surely that should be "could have been delivered". The article says that the C13 count was different from Earth collected samples. Where's the causality?

jimfl2• 17 years ago

Indeed, it turns out to be pretty easy to make amino acids, and they're everywhere. Take hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water, zap it with lightning, and you get amino acids.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment

reedlaw• 17 years ago

It sounds like they aren't even sure where the amino acid came from. From the article:

"With only about 100 billionths of a gram of glycine to study, the researchers were able to measure the relative abundance of its carbon isotopes. It contained more carbon-13 than that found in glycine that forms on Earth, proving that Stardust's glycine originated in space."

Does anyone know how they can know that space glycine should have more C13 than earth glycine?

jgrahamc2• 17 years ago

I suspect there argument does something like: if it has less than or equals to the amount of C13 as glycine on Earth then we can't rule out that it's contamination. But since it has more C13 than from Earth it must be from somewhere else.

lacker• 17 years ago

It's not that they know space causes more C13. They just know it's not normal earth glycine because it has the wrong C13 ratio.

nazgulnarsil4• 17 years ago

i for one hope that we don't discover nearby life. why? think about what it implies. if life is so phenomenally common that it pops up twice in the same solar system then it becomes downright unsettling that there is no sign of galaxy spanning civilizations out there.

yannis• 17 years ago

I wish we do. I just don't want to feel so lonely in such a large Universe. Life is probably something very common out there, the fact that we are not observing galaxy spanning civilizations doesn't prove that life is not out there. After all is only about two hundred years that we came to know that there are microbes all over the place.

charlesju• 17 years ago

I would hope that higher life forms try and protect lower life forms, such as ourselves, from the influences of galactic domination.

gloob2• 17 years ago

Because that's worked out so terrifically in our history.

noaharc• 17 years ago

I think Star Wars-type galactic civilizations are very unlikely. Instead, life forms (humans included, eventually) probably just upload their minds into better hardware and "live" in a virtual Shangri La. After that, why bother exploring?

pg2• 17 years ago

it becomes downright unsettling that there is no sign of galaxy spanning civilizations out there

Only if Einstein is wrong about the speed of light. Sci fi novels routinely assume he overlooked something, because they have to as a plot device, but he might not have.

thunk2• 17 years ago

Indeed. Out of curiosity, are you an SF fan? And if so, any favs?

nazgulnarsil4• 17 years ago

even with the speed of light as a constraint it should only take a few million years for self replicators to spread through significant portions of space.

steiger2• 17 years ago

It reminds me of the famous Drake equation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Equation

The most famous 'guesstimation' based on the Drake equation says there should be something around 10 civilizations in our galaxy. But there are other factors that influence here, like the tendency a civilization has to destroy itself before it reaches the space exploration era (and also the tendency it has to destroy other civilizations) [2]

Also, the fact that we have found none yet comes the famous Fermi paradox [2]. Alternative explanations for the seemly inexistence of extraterrestrian civilizations exist, such as impossibility of communication between long distanced civilizations.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

euccastro• 17 years ago

I wish that we discover it after we have learned to live reasonably well with each other here on Earth.

rms• 17 years ago

It would be more interesting to discover nearby life, but at least if no one else is out there we'll get to colonize the nearby stars ourselves without conflict.

leecho0• 17 years ago

FYI, glycine is the smallest amino acid, its chemical formula is C2H5NO2. color me surprised when they find tryptophan on a comet

Found: first amino acid on a comet

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