Abiogenesis

Esav Benyamin

Esav Benyamin

MidniteSuperMod
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Where did it all begin?

Panspermia is a Greek word that translates literally as "seeds everywhere". The panspermia hypothesis states that the "seeds" of life exist all over the Universe and can be propagated through space from one location to another. Some believe that life on Earth may have originated through these "seeds".

Perhaps it looked like this (courtesy of Vimeo)


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You can do it, too!

mouse click
hold the mouse
hold and move the mouse
 
Esav. You are using big words and concepts in a forum where people prolly can't even spell probably. :D
 
They did OK with my other far out videos. :)

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Did you ever see this science fiction movie?

Here's the trailer:

saucers spinning overhead
draw me from a troubled bed

tossing turning aching dreaming
listen to the aliens screaming

see them fly above the town
get your rifle shoot them down

Here's the movie:

Close Encounters of the Hallucenogenic Kind

Whistling dizzily overhead,
the saucer spins, I leap from bed,
the little green men float eerily,
I watch them waving, wearily.

It's always the same, they seem to say,
we're glad we came to Earth today;
but, don't you wonder, won't they stay?
They drift and tilt and go away.

It's always the same, they never speak:
I never hear a peep or a squeak.
Quietly staring, whatever they seek,
their alien eyes are always bleak.

It's always the same, I seem to dream,
like smoke that gleams in a fading beam,
their eyes aglow, like wisps of steam,
and time goes by like a stagnant stream.

Whistling languidly, singing goodbye,
I wish you a pleasant trip, I cry.
The little green men float eerily,
I watch them waving, wearily.

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How about this classic monster flick?

the dragon that lives in the sea

Be careful when you walk beside still waters;
You never know what lurks within the depths.
The snake that's swimming just below the surface
Is the unimportant offspring of the dragon in the sea.

As it rises to confront us, steaming, slashing
With the spines along its back at passing clouds,
Its jaws engulf the pier, the fishermen are splashing
Through the surging waves that drown the near-by crowds.

Now the shore is littered with the screaming, bleeding victims,
Who survived their wounds sustained in that first ravaging attack;
The dragon wasn't even trying to inflict them,
But he will when soon he rushes up the beaches, coming back!

But what churns the river's edge?
Black and white, it leaps and charges,
With the tall, thick dorsal fins proclaiming:

Killer whales approach!
The sight brings hope to puny humans,
Faced with nature's retribution for our sins!

As they chase away the reptilian interloper,
The saviors of our sea-front
Stop and smile in their own way,

And they promise to come back,
When we have seals to feed them,
In gratitude for how they saved the day!
 
Reminds me a little of the Shattering of the Vessels myth. Panspermia, that is. The video as well, even if the vessels don't exactly shatter.
 
We know that the essential building blocks of life, the amino acids, occur naturally. We have discovered them in cometary material, for instance.
Early experiments in creating the conditions that would have prevailed on a "pre-biotic" Earth resulted in the formation of amino acids.
But the exact mechanism that resulted in a self-replicating molecule, a sort of proto-RNA, remains elusive. There are all manner of hypotheses... Deep-ocean mineral-rich vents, tidal pools bathed in sunlight, even mineral-rich clay formations.

All could have provided an environment, a chemical "stew" that resulted in the building blocks coming together in a way that could have provided the spur to self-replication.
We know that life appeared on Earth about as soon as it could... About 3.5 billion years ago. When the planet had cooled and solidified, and had accumulated liquid water.
Richard Dawkins thinks that this must have been a rare event, since after all we only have DNA-based life on Earth. If there were other processes... We should see non-DNA life as well....
But we don't.
However, "rare" in this case means that over the whole planet, with all it's mineral richness and energies, such a molecule only had to form once...

The transpermia idea is viable as well, but it doesn't really solve anything... The molecule would have had to form the same way...Somewhere.
 
My personal opinion is that life is far older than the planet, and that it came from with in the Universe.
 
The Pheromones used to perform a song called the "Galactic Funny Farm" about how aliens from all over the universe must have ditched all their mad on a little colony now known as earth.

I would have posted a video but it appears I've finally found something that can't easily be found for free on the internet.
 
One of the problems with the "much older than the Earth" notion is that there is a certain amount of time necessary before any life was possible in the universe.
Provided the "Standard Model" is correct, of course... The universe had to go through the stages of the condensation of matter from the original super-hot, super-dense energy of the Singularity (the "Big Bang"). This resulted in lots and lots of the simplest element, hydrogen.
This hydrogen formed the first stars, large, energetic, and short-lived (comparatively) which "cooked" more complex elements in their cores and then blew these materials out into the void when they went nova and supernova.

Which then had to re-form into solar systems with complex, rocky, mineral-rich planets (like Earth) that could sustain life.
The universe is about 14.5 billion years old. Our solar system is about 5 billion years old. I think most astrophysicists are thinking ours is a second generation system, but possibly a third-generation....
At any rate, we don't know how much earlier it might have been possible for other complex systems to form.

Certainly not vastly earlier... There simply wasn't anything in the universe much more complex than a hydrogen atom.
 
mwerner said:
Richard Dawkins thinks that this must have been a rare event, since after all we only have DNA-based life on Earth. If there were other processes... We should see non-DNA life as well....
But we don't.
However, "rare" in this case means that over the whole planet, with all it's mineral richness and energies, such a molecule only had to form once...
Click to expand...

Perhaps early RNA equivalents began to develop at the same time as our DNA base was developing elsewhere on Earth, but were overwhelmed when DNA spread more efficiently? All of these would have been prior to any hard body structures that could have been preserved.
 
Since DNA itself is carbon based, I imagine it is most likely correct to assume that it represents the most efficient means of conveying cellular instructions among carbon based life forms. If silicon based life forms exist, and are ever found, it would be very interesting to see what instructions they follow.
 
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