Theoretical origin of life; in meteorites (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, July 11, 2015, 15:40 (3423 days ago) @ David Turell

Researchers of meteorites keep finding 'specimens' they try to pass off as evidence of alien life from afar, but so far all claims are debunked:-http://phys.org/news/2015-07-extraterrestrial-life.html-"As we become more advanced in astronomy, continuously searching and finding lots of potentially habitable extrasolar planets that could harbor alien life, it seems that it's not a matter of if but when we will find extraterrestrial organisms. However, the real tough problem here is: How we could determine if the alien life has really been found? "The question is not so much 'when will we find extraterrestrial life?' But 'when will we know we have found extraterrestrial life?'" Terence Kee, the President of the Astrobiology Society of Britain told Phys.org. "My feeling is that we may indeed find signs of life in a few decades, but whether we will be unambiguously able to identify it as 'extraterrestrial life' - as opposed to terrestrial contamination or abiotic far-from-equilibrium processes - in such a short time-frame, I'm not so sure." -"We could also turn to meteorites in the ongoing search for E.T. and hope that these rocks came from a parent body that may have harbored life. If we're lucky, relics of life are contained within that sample and have not been destroyed. Kee surprisingly admits that luck is really the key condition here.-"'As most of these relics are likely to have been fossilized in some way, we would need to cash in on some more luck so that we can demonstrate sufficient differences between such relics and potential abiotic mechanisms of formation on earth—chemical compositional differences, isotopic ratio's mineral morphologies or, most valuable perhaps, presence of specific molecules which could only be produced by biogenic processes, etcetera," he said.-****-"But the last week's claims also sparked skepticism among other scientists specializing in the search for extraterrestrial life, debunking the newly presented hypothesis. The researchers rejecting the new findings emphasize that complex organics are generated in many places in the solar system through photochemistry and this is evidence for anything other than abiotic chemistry.-"So far, we haven't found any convincing proof of alien life embedded in meteorites. However, Kee, undeterred by the long-lasting search and continuous skepticism, is looking to the future with hope."