Theoretical origin of life; lightning did it (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 22:47 (1136 days ago) @ David Turell

New theory reverts to Urey-Miller lightning in a bottle from the 1950's. Old ideas are resurrected:

https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth/earth-sciences/did-lightning-spark-life-on-earth/?utm_...

"The earliest undisputed signs of life show up around 3.5 billion years ago, although researchers have good reason to suspect that the whole affair of living could have got going much earlier. But there’s a small problem: life didn’t have the right ingredients yet.

"The organic molecules that make up the building blocks of life – including sugars, enzymes, protein and DNA – didn’t exist naturally on the very early Earth, and the elements needed to make them (like carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen) were bound up in the rocks, atmosphere and early oceans.

"Now, a new study published in Nature Communications suggests that lightning could have “freed” one such element: phosphorous.

“'We propose that under the conditions on early Earth, phosphorus reduction via lightning strikes is a more significant process than previously appreciated,” the authors write in their paper.

"Phosphorous has long been known to be fundamental to all living things, essential to the formation of DNA, cell membranes and more. Today, it enters the planet’s systems through the weathering of rocks over time, but the phosphorous on early Earth was locked up in insoluble minerals.

***

"The team, led by Benjamin Hess from Yale, used computer modelling to estimate that the ancient Earth experienced far more lightning than we do now.

"The Earth today sees about 560 million flashes of lightning per year, while the early Earth saw 1–5 billion flashes, with between 100 million and 1 billion of these striking the ground.

"Over a billion years, those kinds of numbers add up: potentially, a quintillion (a billion billion) strikes could have struck the ground and helped release usable phosphorous.

***

"Their models also suggest that lightning would have been more prevalent on land masses in tropical regions, potentially creating areas of concentrated phosphorous.

“'This work helps us understand how life may have formed on Earth and how it could still be forming on other, Earth-like planets,” says Hess. “It makes lightning strikes a significant pathway toward the origin of life.'”

Comment: The usual pie-in-the-sky hopefulness. Phosphorus is only one tiny part of the complex mass of items/processes required to start life. Ten days ago I entered an article that between 3-4 million years ago the Earth was covered totally by water. ( Wednesday, March 10, 2021, 14:25) So, what did the lightning strike? Not land. All these OOL researchers need to read all the papers produced to get their acts together.