7 ms·
NASA finds DNA components in meteorites, says they originated in space
- ColinWright 15y agoThis item - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2863503 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2863503 - is intended to be the same thing, but incorrectly points to a generic front page. A pointer has been put there to direct people here.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- baxter 15y agoThe original NASA article: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dna-meteorites.html http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dna-meteorit...
- aab1d 15y agoThanks for the link. Makes me wonder, if life did come from space then we will have to start exploring space more seriously. The possibility of a aliens existing somewhere else cannot be ignored any longer.
- scott_s 15y agoThis HN thread links to an article that describes the enormous difficulties in interstellar travel: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456
- beambot 15y agoMind you... space exploration does not have to be interstellar. There are probably lots of interesting discoveries to be had here in our own backyard.
- hirenj 15y agoCan anyone find the actual article on PNAS? The closest I can get is http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/04/1105715108.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/04/1105715108.abst... And this is the lab page, that also has no info on the paper. http://astrobiology.gsfc.nasa.gov/analytical/index.html http://astrobiology.gsfc.nasa.gov/analytical/index.html This is one thing that consistently annoys me about most scientific journalism online, and about the press releases by institutions. Is it really that hard to post a link to the abstract page of the actual journal?
- varjag 15y agoNo, NASA says they can originate in space. There is a difference.
- srl 15y agoNASA is confident that these, at least, did. (Of course, they could also have simultaneously been created terrestrially - but that doesn't change the fact that they were also created in space.) We have three lines of evidence that together give us confidence these DNA building blocks actually were created in space. (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dna-meteorites.html http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dna-meteorit...)
- torstesu 15y agoI have always been curious as to how religion will tackle proof of alien life. Do aliens get to go to heaven?
- peteretep 15y agohttp://i.imgur.com/nta4G.gif http://i.imgur.com/nta4G.gif (from SMBC, and I can't find the original :-P)
- benhoyt 15y agoA statement from within orthodox Christianity about this (http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/248/are_god_and_aliens_compatible http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/248/are_god_and_al...): God became man in Jesus in order to save us. So if there are also other intelligent beings, it’s not a given that they need redemption. They might have remained in full friendship with their creator. The article also includes an interesting quote from C. S. Lewis on the subject: I look forward with horror to contact with the other inhabited planets, if there are such. We would only transport to them all of our sin and our acquisitiveness, and establish a new colonialism. I can’t bear to think of it. But if we on Earth were to get right with God, of course, all would be changed. Once we find ourselves spiritually awakened, we can go to outer space and take the good things with us. That is quite a different matter.
- jimbokun 15y agoLewis also wrote a SciFi trilogy to explore these ideas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Trilogy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Trilogy
- corin_ 15y agoYour second sentance is irrelevant, it's not like every living thing on earth is believed to go to heaven.
- torstesu 15y agoI do not agree that it is completely irrelevant when including the possibilities of life at a higher intellectual level. It would still put religion in a difficult position; if God created humans, he must have created aliens. At what intellectual level would you set the barrier? Must it demonstrate empathy? Love? And who would decide? What gives a human the right, as it clearly is the guy in the sky that is the gatekeeper.
- rokhayakebe 15y agoMy biggest fear is dying before mankind finds the definite scientific answer to death and our origin/s. We seem to be so near (~ one century away).
- rufibarbatus 15y agoWe seem to be reaching good enough models (arguably some of them will be thoroughly reproducible in laboratories soon enough). But I don't think we'll arrive at a definite answer here. My guess is that we'll come up with multiple ways it could've happened, along with their respective degrees of likelihood. /me leans back on his armchair
- ams6110 15y agoThis is really your biggest fear? Or is that just a figure of speech. I'm genuinely curious, as while I think this "answer" might be intellectually satisfying to some degree, I see it as making little difference in practical matters. I also think it's an answer that will never come. I don't see any inconsistency between a universe created by God and any scientific observations we make within that creation.
- rokhayakebe 15y agoI see it as making little difference in practical matters It changes everything. It is like being 30 years old and finding you were adopted. You want to know where you come from. Edit: But besides what you and I think, what will it mean to the world if religion was "proven" to be man-made, as well as the idea of a Higher Power.
- sodiumphosphate 15y agoGood luck proving anything to those who unconsciously and automatically shun reason.
- Dove 15y agowhat will it mean to the world if religion was "proven" to be man-made A successful and complete theory of the origin of life wouldn't do that. Not every religion claims seriously that God directly created life. To my knowledge, it's really only a serious problem for people who live in the Religion:Christian/Protestant/Evangelical/Fundamentalist folder, which is really not a big fraction of the people on the drive. For example, I am Evangelical, and I wouldn't be bothered by either the success or failure of a scientific theory of the origin of life. Miracles are a part of my worldview, as are machines. I know that God created life, but whether he used a miracle or a machine, I don't know. I have seen him use one or the other at different times, so I would consider either an acceptable explanation. Now, I'm kind of interested as to what happened, but it doesn't affect my doctrine much either way.
- xerxes2001 15y agoI should not have watched Falling Skies before reading this...
- haakon 15y agoI should not have watched Falling Skies either, but mostly because it sucks so bad. :-(
- po 15y agoSo one thing to keep in mind here is that according to NASA, the meteorite itself is generating these compounds: Thirdly, the team found these nucleobases -- both the biological and non-biological ones -- were produced in a completely non-biological reaction. "In the lab, an identical suite of nucleobases and nucleobase analogs were generated in non-biological chemical reactions containing hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and water. This provides a plausible mechanism for their synthesis in the asteroid parent bodies, and supports the notion that they are extraterrestrial," says Callahan. (from the NASA article: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dna-meteorites.html http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dna-meteorit...) This does not mean that there is developed life on another planet that then traveled to us. What it does mean is that the building blocks of life that were seeded on earth are probably pretty common and therefore were probably also seeded elsewhere.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- patrickyeon 15y agoAbsolutely. Also, for those not necessarily familiar with the composition of outer space: hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and water are all relatively common "out there", as in "in the spaces between planets and stars and everything else.
- bh42222 15y agoIt means that the components of life are a "naturally" occurring things, which appear all over the universe, and do not require life to produce them. This in turn implies that life, not just any life, but carbon based, DNA using life, could be more common in the universe then previously thought. And this implies that we here on Earth are even less of an unique snowflake then we thought.
- winestock 15y agoIf we, here on Earth, are not unique precious snowflakes, then that makes the Fermi Paradox even more paradoxical.
- mykhal 15y agocool. i have found components of my compiled code in ancient mesoamerican, indian and arabic math
- evilswan 15y agoThis could just be the most significant news in all of human history. Mind blowing that there's now evidence that the building blocks of life exist off-Earth.
- abeppu 15y agoI vaguely recall from highschool bio that the Miller-Urey experiment demonstrated that it's surprisingly easy to produce a lot of organic stuff by abiotic means. Does anyone with some real knowledge about this area care to explain how surprising this actually is?
- hugh3 15y agoI would classify it as "not particularly".
- nikhilgk 15y ago> lot of organic stuff The organic compounds produced by the Miller Urey experiments were mostly amino acids and some sugars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment). These are the building blocks for most of the things that constitute a cell. This discovery may better our understanding of the origins of DNA and RNA - which are the blueprints for putting together the building blocks to make a cell.
- axusgrad 15y agoUniverse is only 13 billion years old, life on Earth started ~4.5 billion years ago, and the travel times are pretty long. Even if DNA came from outer space, it would have had to start somewhere. At some point it must have developed from inorganic components.
- srl 15y agoThe current theory is that the organic material actually originated on the asteroids themselves - on a class known as "CM2 Meteorites". (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dna-meteorites.html http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dna-meteorit... - last couple of paragraphs) Also according to that article, we've successfully reproduced the process of creating organic matter from inorganic matter.
- hugh3 15y agoBefore anyone gets too excited: Amino acids on a comet, 2009: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17628-found-first-amino-acid-on-a-comet.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17628-found-first-amin... Amino acids in interstellar space, 2002: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2558-amino-acid-found-in-deep-space.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2558-amino-acid-found-... and a few more examples exist if you google "amino acids in space". We've known about amino acids in space for a long time. Amino acids exist all over the damn place.
- kia 15y agoI agree about not getting too excited. But to be precise in this case they are talking about nucleobases [1] which are building blocks of DNA. Amino acids [2] are building blocks of proteins. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleobase http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleobase [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid
- ANH 15y agoYes, but what's interesting about this are the mechanisms of formation and delivery. We have evidence of how these things were formed in space and then delivered to Earth. It's not little green men, but a piece of the puzzle. I think it's pretty damn cool.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoNot left over smudges from the former inhabitants of planet Krypton? Ah shucks :-). The interesting point here was the nuceobases (vs the amino acids). Mars water should be interesting to look at. And of course a sample return mission to Ceres would be interesting as long as we didn't open the capsule in an uncontrolled environment :-).
- eru 15y agoAre you concerned about the capsule getting contaminated, or about Earth getting contaminated? I'd bet on the Earth's microbes to dominate.
- powertower 15y agoAmino acids have also been made by slamming meteorite like material into earth like material at impact speeds (impact chemistry creates them due to the greate pressures and energy involved).
- omarchowdhury 15y agoMeteorite/comets hitting the sphere of the Earth. The sperm reaching the egg cell. The answer to the beginning is at the beginning.
- calebmpeterson 15y agoWhile NASA's discovery of nucleobases as opposed to amino acids is certainly interesting, there's a long way between "hey, nucleobases on an asteroid," and "wow, the entire genome of a living creature." There's a big jump in complexity, structure, and organization between organic chemistry and the multi-trillion cell organism we call homosapien. The comparison in complexity is the rough equivalent of finding a few MOV/JMP/ADD instructions in a random text file as opposed to the source tree for the Linux kernel (I might be underestimating the human genome a little here).
- alanh 15y agoWhy on earth would you compare these to the human genome, instead of the smallest archeobacteria? Evolution adds complexity over time, we know this, we just need something to replicate first. A better analogy than the Linux kernel might be a quine.
- andrewflnr 15y agoThere is still an enormous jump in complexity between a few nucleobases and the smallest archeobacteria. Maybe a full Linux kernel is not the best illustration, but the idea of a kernel in general is a remarkably apt one. At the least, we're talking stuxnet or something. Even the simplest life is incredibly sophisticated.
- calebmpeterson 15y agoWhy wouldn't one make the comparison with the human genome? If the evolutionay mechanisms credited with responsibility for the jump from nucleobases to archeobacteria (which is still incredible, if true) can't be fully and comfortably accredited with the nucleobase to human genome jump then said evolutionary mechanisms are suspect. According to the notion of evolution inherently adding complexity over time, nucleobases to human genome just requires some very large time. If we do know this with such certainty, then my comparison is both apt and reasonable.
- orofino 15y ago"nucleobases on an asteroid" does this star Samuel L Jackson?