Theoretical origin of life: micro-lightning from water drops (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 15, 2025, 18:35 (18 days ago) @ David Turell

Latest theoretical finds:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2472382-the-surprising-new-idea-behind-what-sparke...

"The first molecules necessary for life on Earth could have been created when tiny flickers of “microlightning” between drops of water sparked the necessary chemical reactions.

“'This is a new way to think about how the building blocks of life were formed,” says Richard Zare at Stanford University in California.

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“'If you look at the gases that people thought were around on early Earth, they don’t contain carbon-nitrogen bonds,” says Zare. “They are gases like methane, water, ammonia and nitrogen.”

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"Zare and his colleagues have sprayed droplets of water into a mix of methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia and nitrogen gas – and have shown it can result in the formation of organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds, with no external electricity source needed.

"It works because the droplets in the water spray produce small electrical charges, says Zare. “The smaller droplets are negatively charged, the larger ones are positively charged,” he says. This is down to something called the Lenard effect, in which water droplets, such as those in a waterfall, collide and break up, generating an electrical charge.

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“'When the water droplets come within nanometres of each other, you get an electric field and this electric field causes the breakdown,” he says.

"The flashes of microlightning carried enough energy – about 12 electronvolts – to make gas molecules lose an electron and react with one another, generating organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds, including hydrogen cyanide, the amino acid glycine and uracil, one of the components of RNA.

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"The work implies that tiny sparks made by crashing waves or waterfalls would have been enough to provide the chemicals needed for life to start on this planet, says Zare.

"Water sprays are ubiquitous and often land on rocks, which would allow the organic chemicals to accumulate in their crevices, he says. The area would then dry out and get damp again. Such wet-dry cycles are known to make shorter molecules combine, or polymerise, into longer ones.

“'The study suggests that microlightning would have been abundant in early Earth’s water-rich environments, and may have driven prebiotic chemistry, especially where other energy sources, such as lightning or UV radiation, were scarce,” says Kumar Vanka at the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune, India."

Comment: a novel way precursor chemicals might have appeared, but it still is giant steps to life itself. I still favor ocean vents as the likeliest origin spots.