As a fellow Rutgers alumni, I love the trolling effort but am disappointed it wasn't something like "Pork Roll", Danny DeVito, or "Bon Jovi" so we could have sentences like "Only after Bon Jovi could life as we know it develop on Earth".
> Based on laboratory studies, Rutgers scientists say one of the most likely chemical candidates that kickstarted life was a simple peptide with two nickel atoms they are calling “Nickelback,” not because it has anything to do with the Canadian rock band, but because its backbone nitrogen atoms bond two critical nickel atoms. A peptide is a constituent of a protein made up of a few elemental building blocks known as amino acids.
Very doubtful this has anything to do with origins of life.
The complex catalyzes the production of dihydrogen from hydrogen cation. It's a cool reaction, but to say this may have "sparked life on earth" is way off.
Small peptide catalysts like this one have been known for some time and can even be designed for a wide range of reactions. A Nobel prize was awarded for this very field a few years back.
I agree. Perhaps I'm too enthusiastic about the RNA world hypothesis, but if the RNA world hypothesis is true, shouldn't they be looking for a Ribozyme (made of RNA) instead of and Enzyme (made of protein)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribozyme
Some versions of the RNA world hypothesis state that small peptides acted as cofactors for ribozymes. At some point their roles were reversed, with nucleotides ending up as cofactors for protein-based catalysts (enzymes).
I learned that this year and it's so obvious that it hurts that I didn't thought it myself. [I'm not a Biologist, so I guess it is not mandatory that I make brilliant Biology discoveries :) .] [Yes, I know it's not confirmed, but IMHO it's too good not to be true.]
> We believe the change was sparked by a few small precursor proteins that performed key steps in an ancient metabolic reaction
Anyone believe the Panspermia[0] theory?
> Panspermia proposes that organisms such as bacteria, complete with their DNA, could be transported by means such as comets through space to planets including Earth.
For all we know there could have been an Earth-like planet that had life in the early solar system, and they got destroyed by large impacts, and some of that life rained down on Earth (in a simple form).
There is also the theory that life propagated from distant star systems that harbored life (or still do) and had enough time to spread to Earth.
Why would we believe that, though? Why bother with the extra layer of indirection, through an environment we know even less about?
Then there's the fact that life appeared on earth almost as soon as it was possible for it to exist. Either it was easy and formed really quickly on Earth, or space is/was so full of it that earth got contaminated almost immediately... which still implies life is common and easy. Panspermia just doesn't help.
It helps exploring other options, since we are still unable to create artificial life. No one is saying to stop those experiments. But maybe they cannot succed, in the same way the alchimists could not create gold in the middle ages - because some fundamental understanding or ingredient is missing. (today we can create gold, but it is not worth it with our current technology)
"Either it was easy and formed really quickly on Earth, or space is/was so full of it that earth got contaminated almost immediately"
Or it was just random chance, that a "contaminated" comet hit earth at the right time, or an alien vessel passed by and planted life seeds. We simply don't know. So we cannot rule those options out at this moment. And "almost immediately" is still in the timespan of millions of years, so plenty of time for many asteroids to hit the earth and possibly bring life.
My thinking with panspermia at least is the building blocks may be relatively common but planet earth is a unique environment for harboring life. Kind of like why we define a “Goldilocks zone” to look for et life
Kind of, but wouldn’t that free us up to use even more exotic parameters in our simulations? Maybe there are seed conditions that simply aren’t present on Earth.
I think this idea would be more credible if we had evidence that the earliest organisms were quite complex, with sophisticated metabolic pathways. That would be highly unlikely to evolve in a single step. As it is, it seems like early life on Earth developed from extremely simple roots. That doesn't exclude panspermia, but it means IMHO we have no compelling evidence for it and that even if it's true the organism that seeded Earth was probably very primitive.
I've always imagined this as plausible. Confronted with the infinite, it seems not only probable, but possible.
I would imagine us doing it ourselves in the future.
We might have already done it in an interplanetary way with mars.
EDIT: reading the wikipedia entry, I found this funny:
... fragment of the Orgueil meteorite ... Despite great initial excitement, the seed was found to be that of a European Juncaceae or Rush plant that had been glued into the fragment and camouflaged using coal dust. The outer "fusion layer" was in fact glue.
The text on the press release (and this title here) has almost no relation to what is on the paper. It's amazing. Except for it being somewhat related to abiogenesis, I don't think it gets any single thing correctly.
It's unlikely we'll ever be able to prove how life got started. The best we'll ever do is show how it could have started, if we're lucky with actual experiments that demonstrate the processes.
"After sequences of experiments, researchers concluded the best candidate was Nickelback. The peptide is made of 13 amino acids and binds two nickel ions.
Nickel, they reasoned, was an abundant metal in early oceans. When bound to the peptide, the nickel atoms become potent catalysts, attracting additional protons and electrons and producing hydrogen gas. Hydrogen, the researchers reasoned, was also more abundant on early Earth and would have been a critical source of energy to power metabolism."
If a God provided proof of it's existence as a God, then worship or regarding the God as a God would not be an act of free will; no leap of faith would be required.
There's proof everywhere that this world is just an incredibly detailed simulation. Even if you inspect the tiniest grain of sand, the simulation is such high resolution that you simply can't tell it apart from a real world. Just goes to show how perfect the sim is. Praise the sim, blessed be its circuits.
Per an Einsteinian viewpoint, they could be the same thing. Einstein basically labeled the creating force "God" without characterizing it as any specific person, place, force, or thing(s); saying, "I don't really know yet what the creating force is; that's what science is all about."
Ok, so God is defined as "transcendent", but Time (in substitution of God) can't be transcendent, otherwise it could not possibly be subject to science...
Being a Rutgers grad, this 100% sounds like a troll that would come out of a New Jersey based institution of higher learning.