Origin of Life: new commentaries (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 05, 2011, 22:29 (5012 days ago) @ dhw
edited by unknown, Saturday, March 05, 2011, 22:51

In any case, if our type of life started somewhere else, we are still faced with the same mysteries. How did the mechanisms put themselves together in the first place?-A NASA studying a carbonaceous meteorite claims to have found life from elsewhere!:-http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/03/05/exclusive-nasa-scientists-claims-evidence-alien-life-meteorite/#ixzz1FlAqtoBl-Comments from Robert B. Sheldon-http://www.rbsp.info/rbs/RbS/cv.html -First, these pictures are of fossils, like petrified wood. They have virtually no nitrogen in them. Living organisms are more than 15% nitrogen.Samples of dinosaur bone and mammoth hair show that it takes more than a million years to eliminate all the nitrogen.-Second, the isotopes in these fossils don't match earth isotopes, they are clearly meteoritic ratios.-Third, the meteorites are largely held together by hygroscopic minerals like magnesium sulfate.
The fossils are made of mostly things like magnesium sulfate, held in a keratogenic carbon sheath. If they were exposed to rain water and weathering, they would dissolve. That's why we only have nine of them in the past 100 years, we had to grab them while they were hot and store them in a jar before they dissolved.-Fourth, many of them have fusion crusts, caused by passage through the atmosphere which would sterilize the outside of them from invasive bacteria, yet they still have these fossils.-Fifth, in large samples of the meteorite that have undergone chemical extraction, we find something like 10 or 15 amino acids. (The parts per billion sensitivity of chemical mass spectrometers is much greater than the scanning electron microscope atomic sensitivity to nitrogen at about 0.1%.) The ones that are missing are the least stable ones, with half-lives in the thousands of years. Invasive life would have all 26 amino acids present.
And there are no "bizarre" amino acids that would be produced abiotically. They all show some L-amino optical activity, which also indicates life.-Sixth, some of the fossils are of microorganisms that went extinct on earth some 400 million years ago. Seventh, some of the fossils are clearly biological, but have never been observed on earth, including one that has the atomic composition of teflon.
It looks both homey and alien at the same time. That's why I believe there is a much larger biosphere than Earth, and it is all on comets, the mother object of these strange meteorites.