http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 88844.html (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-reveal-life-on-earth-may-have-begun-on-mars-8788844.html)
QuoteGrowing evidence is suggesting that life on Earth may have actually begun on Mars.
Scientists gathered at the Goldschmidt meeting in Florence were told that the planet would have been a more suitable place for biological life to form in than the conditions of early Earth.
An element believed to be crucial to the origin of life would only have been available on the surface of the Red Planet, it is claimed.
Geochemist Professor Steven Benner outlined his theory that the "seeds" of life probably arrived on Earth in meteorites blasted off Mars by impacts or volcanic eruptions.
All living things are made from organic matter, but simply adding energy to organic molecules will not create life. Instead, left to themselves, organic molecules become something more like tar or asphalt, said Prof Benner told the conference.
He described the oxidised mineral form of the element molybdenum, believed to be a catalyst that fostered the development of organic molecules into the first living structures.
"It's only when molybdenum becomes highly oxidised that it is able to influence how early life formed," said Prof Benner, from The Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in the USA. "This form of molybdenum couldn't have been available on Earth at the time life first began, because three billion years ago the surface of the Earth had very little oxygen, but Mars did.
"It's yet another piece of evidence which makes it more likely life came to Earth on a Martian meteorite, rather than starting on this planet."
He added: "Certain elements seem able to control the propensity of organic materials to turn to tar, particularly boron and molybdenum, so we believe that minerals containing both were fundamental to life first starting.
"Analysis of a Martian meteorite recently showed that there was boron on Mars; we now believe that the oxidised form of molybdenum was there too."
Life would have also struggled to kick-start on early Earth because it may have been covered by water, said Prof Benner.
Water would have prevented sufficient concentrations of boron forming and is corrosive to RNA, a DNA cousin believed to be the first genetic molecule to appear. Whilst there was water on early Mars, it covered a much smaller surface area of the planet.
He said the evidence was building that humans are in fact all martians and that "life started on Mars and came to Earth on a rock".
"It's lucky that we ended up here nevertheless, as certainly Earth has been the better of the two planets for sustaining life. If our hypothetical Martian ancestors had remained on Mars, there might not have been a story to tell."
The Goldschmidt conference is jointly sponsored by the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society.
This strikes me as yet more grasping at straws to try to find a way for life to have begun in a circumstance shackled by naturalism/materialism. Given the difficulty of bringing useful proteins into existence naturalistically, assuming amino acids are readily present for such a circumstance to plausibly begin in the first place, the addition of molybdenum doesn't seem to actually move anything forward. It always make me laugh though when I get a chance to observe the naturalist/materialist community closing their eyes, crossing their fingers, and chanting..."I think it can, I think it can, I think it can...!"
I'm all for continuing the research, but they are going to end up at the same dead end of being unable to produce an appropriate number of "useful proteins" and the ultimate production of information-bearing structures like DNA.
You'd make a fantastic scientist.
"Goddidit! That's a wrap people, everyone go home!"
Quote from: "gomtuu77"This strikes me as yet more grasping at straws
or...........as science has a habit of doing, presenting hypothesis for discussion and review. Unlike religion, which, if one uses there facts as facts we have a plethora of gods and fascinating stories of creation from the sun and moon mating to a giant crocodile fucking the moon, definitely religion presents the more factual possibilities.
[quoteThis strikes me as yet more grasping at straws to try to find a way for life to have begun in a circumstance shackled by naturalism/materialism. ][/quote]
If you don't believe in materialism try not eating or drinking material objects for a month so you can become a spiritual being instead of one shackled in a material body. Want to be born again, then die. :roll: Solitary
Quote from: "aitm"Quote from: "gomtuu77"This strikes me as yet more grasping at straws
or...........as science has a habit of doing, presenting hypothesis for discussion and review. Unlike religion, which, if one uses there facts as facts we have a plethora of gods and fascinating stories of creation from the sun and moon mating to a giant crocodile fucking the moon, definitely religion presents the more factual possibilities.
Would love to see a believer come on here that actually understands the scientific method and what these claims represent. You can claim a miraculous beginning but there is no discussion stemming from that, just belief based on a supposition. If you can believe that life began because a deity snapped it/their finger and made it happen, but poo poo ongoing research to actually determine a provable answer, don't expect a lot of sympathy here.
Quote from: "gomtuu77"This strikes me as yet more grasping at straws to try to find a way for life to have begun in a circumstance shackled by naturalism/materialism.
There's objective evidence that material objectively exists. Gods? None yet. At all. Ever.
QuoteGiven the difficulty of bringing useful proteins into existence naturalistically
Difficulty, not impossibility. Given billions of chemical reactions per second, and 500 million years, the only rational question is, "why did it take so long?"
Quoteassuming amino acids are readily present
They weren't at first. There wasn't any DNA at first either.
But please, post all the actual evidence you have of any god ever existing. We'll buy more database space for the forum if necessary. (But be warned, the smallest amount of space you can use is one byte [I'm not writing bit-manipulation software for the forum], and I don't think you'll ever find even that much evidence, so although there's no practical upper limit to the amount of evidence you can post, there's an actual lower limit.)
Quote from: "aitm"Quote from: "gomtuu77"This strikes me as yet more grasping at straws
or...........as science has a habit of doing, presenting hypothesis for discussion and review. Unlike religion, which, if one uses there facts as facts we have a plethora of gods and fascinating stories of creation from the sun and moon mating to a giant crocodile fucking the moon, definitely religion presents the more factual possibilities.
Maybe, but this is not a new theory. It's just a new novel location for the overall theory. And they already know about the fantastically long odds even given the entire age of the universe against creating sufficient useful proteins, to say nothing of the rest of the processes and information bearing structures that we find in cells. So the chanting continues...
Quote from: "Solitary"If you don't believe in materialism try not eating or drinking material objects for a month so you can become a spiritual being instead of one shackled in a material body. Want to be born again, then die. :roll: Solitary
Do you understand what I mean by materialism? It certainly has nothing to do with a disbelief in drinking or eating. After all, I didn't say that I don't believe that a material world exists.
Quote from: "Colanth"There's objective evidence that material objectively exists. Gods? None yet. At all. Ever.
None that you're familiar with or that you accept, which is quite different than "None yet. At all. Ever."
Quote from: "Colanth"Difficulty, not impossibility.
You are correct. It's obviously not impossible, as we are here. But doing so through a purely undirected purposeless material process likely moves that task outside the bounds of "difficult" and into the realm of the "impossible". However, I'm sure willing to let them try for the next several million years or for however long the Earth goes on to exist.
Quote from: "Colanth"Given billions of chemical reactions per second, and 500 million years, the only rational question is, "why did it take so long?"
Because of the probabilities involved in the very first step, not counting the nearly countless steps to get you the rest of the way to an actual lifeform with information bearing structures and processes for continued existance through time.
Quote from: "Colanth"They weren't at first. There wasn't any DNA at first either.
I know...making the idea itself that much more implausible. I have no doubt that we'll be able to re-create some kind of novel never before extant life in the lab, but I know it will never be done by way of a purely naturalistic process.
Quote from: "Colanth"But please, post all the actual evidence you have of any god ever existing. We'll buy more database space for the forum if necessary. (But be warned, the smallest amount of space you can use is one byte [I'm not writing bit-manipulation software for the forum], and I don't think you'll ever find even that much evidence, so although there's no practical upper limit to the amount of evidence you can post, there's an actual lower limit.)
There's quite a 'bit' of information to consider actually, and if I thought I was dealing with someone who was genuinely interested, I might actually post information. I'm sure it'll come up over time with someone though. Just out of curiosity though, where do you think information originated? I'm not making any argument, but I am interested in your point of view.
Quote from: "gomtuu77"And they already know about the fantastically long odds
of 1. It happened, therefore the odds of it happening are 1.
Where the necessary conditions took place is irrelevant to the fact that they
did take place for the purposes of your argument.
I don't really know why some folks here bother wasting paragraphs on you when your own ignorance speaks for itself.
Quote from: "Hijiri Byakuren"Quote from: "gomtuu77"And they already know about the fantastically long odds
of 1. It happened, therefore the odds of it happening are 1. Where the necessary conditions took place is irrelevant to the fact that they did take place for the purposes of your argument.
I don't really know why some folks here bother wasting paragraphs on you when your own ignorance speaks for itself.
Okay, so the odds are 1 in what? And are you speaking of our existance or all of the individual steps it would have taken to get here?
And the idea that we 'know' abiogenesis took place in an undirected purposeless process is simply false. We don't know that. That's the assumption on which most work, but it's not a known fact. I have no doubt that I'm as ignorant as anyone else here, since none of us know everything, but what specific ignorance are you speaking of?
Quote from: "gomtuu77"Quote from: "Hijiri Byakuren"Quote from: "gomtuu77"And they already know about the fantastically long odds
of 1. It happened, therefore the odds of it happening are 1. Where the necessary conditions took place is irrelevant to the fact that they did take place for the purposes of your argument.
I don't really know why some folks here bother wasting paragraphs on you when your own ignorance speaks for itself.
Okay, so the odds are 1 in what?
And the idea that we 'know' abiogenesis took place in an undirected purposeless process is simply false.
[youtube:1xrl83a8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-yHDBHxAfI[/youtube:1xrl83a8]
Scientific progress does not have a habit of being made on half-cocked assertions. If it did, one or more religions would have been proven years ago. Perhaps if you did a little reading on the subject, you would understand why an "undirected purposeless process" (your words, not science's) is more convincing than anything religion will ever come up with. I dug up a few articles to get you started. Feel free to read up on their source material as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis)
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Abiogenesis (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Abiogenesis)
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/ (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/)
Oh, and don't try to tell me you've heard all of this before; I've read all of these at least once, and I'll be able to tell immediately how full of shit you are. Happy reading. :-D
QuoteBecause of the probabilities involved in the very first step, not counting the nearly countless steps to get you the rest of the way to an actual lifeform with information bearing structures and processes for continued existance through time.
How big do you think the universe is?
Quote from: "gomtuu77"they already know about the fantastically long odds even given the entire age of the universe
That would be kind of true if there had been, say, one chemical reaction per day. But, since there were probably trillions of trillions of reactions per second, the odds come WAY down. MANY orders of magnitude down. It's a combination of time and reactions per unit of time. The more reactions in a given amount of time, the less time is needed. And with the entire planet full of reacting ocean, the time needed should have been a lot less than half a billion years.
Quoteagainst creating sufficient useful proteins
ANY proteins would have been "useful". Abiogenesis had no goal. As Gould said, rewind it and everything would turn out different.
Quoteto say nothing of the rest of the processes and information bearing structures that we find in cells.
Actually, we know how simple it would have been for RNA to have formed from earlier life, and it wouldn't have taken that long. (Minutes, actually.)
See, that's another gap your god no longer lives in. When we know how something can occur, "it couldn't happen" becomes just silly words. (No, we'll never know how it DID occur, but if there's at least one simple way it COULD occur, saying that it can't becomes childish.) And we're learning more about abiogenesis all the time. Four years ago, we had a rough idea how a single ribonucleotide may have come to be. Now we know how life could have come to be. Give it a few more years and we'll have a completely artificial life form, made of completely non-living material.
Quote from: "gomtuu77"Quote from: "Colanth"There's objective evidence that material objectively exists. Gods? None yet. At all. Ever.
None that you're familiar with or that you accept, which is quite different than "None yet. At all. Ever."
Instead of making meaningless assertions, just post whatever objective evidence you have. Assuming you have anything that's actually objective and actually evicentiary.
QuoteQuote from: "Colanth"Difficulty, not impossibility.
You are correct. It's obviously not impossible, as we are here. But doing so through a purely undirected purposeless material process likely moves that task outside the bounds of "difficult" and into the realm of the "impossible".
Maybe that would have been a rational sentence a few years ago, but since we know know of at least one method by which life could have originated from non-life, it no longer is.
QuoteQuote from: "Colanth"Given billions of chemical reactions per second, and 500 million years, the only rational question is, "why did it take so long?"
Because of the probabilities involved in the very first step
But, as I said, we already know one such first step, and it's pretty trivial, so the question of why it took so long still remains.
Quotenot counting the nearly countless steps to get you the rest of the way to an actual lifeform
One step. Please stop relying on 5 year old science. The field is moving much too fast for that to be anything but comical.
Quotewith information bearing structures and processes for continued existance through time.
As I said, 5 year old science. Which, considering what's been learned in the past 5 years, may as well be 5,000 year old science.
QuoteQuote from: "Colanth"They weren't at first. There wasn't any DNA at first either.
I know...making the idea itself that much more implausible.
Only if you don't actually understand the idea. RNA-based life existed for a LONG time before DNA came on the scene. And non-RNA-based life existed for a long time before RNA came about. Unless, by "life", you mean little beasties swimming around with fins and tails. There were clumps of chemicals that took in nourishment, excreted waste and reproduced. That's life.
QuoteI have no doubt that we'll be able to re-create some kind of novel never before extant life in the lab, but I know it will never be done by way of a purely naturalistic process.
Aside from the fact that something man-made is purely "naturalistic" (man exists within nature), not if we want to see the results while our great-grandchildren are still alive. Remember, the original abiogenesis took half a BILLION years. If you want to wait around that long, I'm sure someone could set up a "premordial soup" for you and you could see life coming from non-life. But as far as science (and reality) is concerned, doing the same thing manually doesn't invalidate the fact that any life we get from non-living material, by setting up the same conditions that originally existed, proves beyond doubt that life COULD HAVE come about naturalistically without any outside agency.
If you choose to deny reality, that's your choice.
QuoteQuote from: "Colanth"But please, post all the actual evidence you have of any god ever existing. We'll buy more database space for the forum if necessary. (But be warned, the smallest amount of space you can use is one byte [I'm not writing bit-manipulation software for the forum], and I don't think you'll ever find even that much evidence, so although there's no practical upper limit to the amount of evidence you can post, there's an actual lower limit.)
There's quite a 'bit' of information to consider actually, and if I thought I was dealing with someone who was genuinely interested, I might actually post information.
You're dealing with about 5 billion people (every non-Christian human being on the planet) who'd love to see actual objective evidence that the Christian god objectively exists.
QuoteJust out of curiosity though, where do you think information originated? I'm not making any argument, but I am interested in your point of view.
I don't have the vaguest idea. The fact that I don't know everything isn't evidence of any god, though. If that's the kind of "evidence" you're thinking of, it's not evidence of any god and it's certainly not objective evidence that any god objectively exists. (You DO know what "objective evidence" and "objectively exists" mean, right?)
Quote from: "Plu"How big do you think the universe is?
ooh, I dunno. Maybe 18,000 miles? Sometimes I look at the night sky and feel like I could reach up and touch the stars... with my heart. So it can't be too big. :-D
Quote from: "SGOS"Quote from: "Plu"How big do you think the universe is?
ooh, I dunno. Maybe 18,000 miles? Sometimes I look at the night sky and feel like I could reach up and touch the stars... with my heart. So it can't be too big. :-D
It's an interesting question to ask of anyone who throws around the word 'unlikely' when it comes to things like interaction of natural materials. Most people get it wrong by many orders of magnitude.
I really do wish we could figure out the answer in my lifetime. I wonder what life would have been like for the earliest "humans". Or what they looked like.
Quote from: "fingerscrossed2013"I wonder what life would have been like for the earliest "humans". Or what they looked like.
That depends on what you mean by "earliest humans". Homo sapiens? Homo? Hominids? Anthropoids? Primates?
We have pretty good ideas going back about 3 million years, and some ideas, not so accurate, going back about 6 million. If you're limiting it to Homo sapiens sapiens, they all looked pretty much like us. You wouldn't take notice of someone who lived 50,000 years ago, if you brought him/her up to now, cleaned him/her up and put him/her into modern clothes.
Quote from: "fingerscrossed2013"I really do wish we could figure out the answer in my lifetime. I wonder what life would have been like for the earliest "humans". Or what they looked like.
At one time, I would have said man has been around for 5 million years, but as pointed out, that would include the early hominids. 50,000 is what I hear, too, Maybe 100,000 on the high end.
I read someplace that most animals with such a short lived success like man, probably haven't even made it to the fossil record, so we don't even know about them. There were probably some evolutionary wonders that we could never imagine.
And as far as man's success and longevity, we don't have much of a track record to point to. Homo Ergaster of 1.8 million years ago, inhabited Africa for 500,000 years (10 times longer than us), and were in such numbers that they actually made it into the fossil record, but then just disappeared. Not sure if Ergaster was even an ancestor of ours or just a branch on the hominoid limb. If we met one, he would probably just eat us anyway, so he's probably not what I would consider "us".
Quote from: "gomtuu77"Quote from: "Hijiri Byakuren"Quote from: "gomtuu77"And they already know about the fantastically long odds
of 1. It happened, therefore the odds of it happening are 1. Where the necessary conditions took place is irrelevant to the fact that they did take place for the purposes of your argument.
I don't really know why some folks here bother wasting paragraphs on you when your own ignorance speaks for itself.
Okay, so the odds are 1 in what? And are you speaking of our existance or all of the individual steps it would have taken to get here?
The odds of something which has already occurred occurring are always 1 in 1.
Quote from: "gomtuu77"This strikes me as yet more grasping at straws to try to find a way for life to have begun in a circumstance shackled by naturalism/materialism. Given the difficulty of bringing useful proteins into existence naturalistically, assuming amino acids are readily present for such a circumstance to plausibly begin in the first place, the addition of molybdenum doesn't seem to actually move anything forward. It always make me laugh though when I get a chance to observe the naturalist/materialist community closing their eyes, crossing their fingers, and chanting..."I think it can, I think it can, I think it can...!"
I'm all for continuing the research, but they are going to end up at the same dead end of being unable to produce an appropriate number of "useful proteins" and the ultimate production of information-bearing structures like DNA.
It strikes me as sensationalism. It has not been established that oxidized molybdenum is actually necessary for the initial formation of life.
Quote from: "gomtuu77"I know...making the idea itself that much more implausible. I have no doubt that we'll be able to re-create some kind of novel never before extant life in the lab, but I know it will never be done by way of a purely naturalistic process.
Could you explain what is a non-naturalistic process and how it relates with abiogenesis?
Also what do you mean by naturalistic?
Quote from: "mauricio"what do you mean by naturalistic?
For most of us that would be not involving god. For gomtuu77 I'm assuming it means not involving scientists (otherwise know as demons.)
Quote from: "PopeyesPappy"Quote from: "mauricio"what do you mean by naturalistic?
For most of us that would be not involving god. For gomtuu77 I'm assuming it means not involving scientists (otherwise know as demons.)
Well I'm always confused when someone talks about something non natural , antinatural or non material, cause as far as i know those words are by the definition of the word they negate: meaningless.
So i think he might have different definitions...