14 ms·

Found: first amino acid on a comet

46 points by JohnIdol 17y ago

kwamenum86 17y ago
I wonder what the repercussions are for religion? Does news like this threaten to derail believers' faith in God (or higher being(s))? [EDIT] Also what does this say about the possibility of life outside of earth?
- hnal943 17y ago
  I think it's strange that every time a scientific discovery occurs one of the first reactions to it is, "Well, that about wraps it up for religion, eh?" Followed by dismissive comments about how religion is completely different from science because it's "faith-based" (read: irrational, unconcerned with the facts). Certainly, it's possible to come to different conclusions based upon the objective evidence. That doesn't mean that one of the conclusions is irrational and the other is rational. In fact, I don't think there's any less faith involved in concluding that the only way life could have originated on earth is via panspermia (and that therefore, there is no God that matters) - all because we found an amino acid in space.
  - trapper 17y ago
    Over the last hundred years the probability most assign to the existence of an omnipotent god has decreased dramatically. Most rational people will come to the conclusion that there is such a vanishingly small chance of a god existing that there is no point believing. That's thanks to science.
    - three14 17y ago
      That's kind of a bizarre way to put it. Science has very little to say about the probability of God. Science has removed some old proofs of God - the watchmaker proof in particular, by providing alternative explanations for the existence of life. Science itself has come almost nowhere towards placing a probability on the existence of life given the universe we live in, using only known physical processes. It's completely plausible to say that, given a modern version of evolution, and all the time and planets and matter in the universe so far, the odds of creatures at least as intelligent as humans is one in a million. Or a trillion. Who could possibly know otherwise? There are, after all, thousands of unknowns in any such calculation. If, in a few centuries, someone did accurately calculate that the odds were one in a trillion, would you say that science gave "a vanishingly small chance of a god existing?"
      - trapper 17y ago
        "Science has removed some old proofs of God - the watchmaker proof in particular, by providing alternative explanations for the existence of life." Said more eloquently than I.
- TallGuyShort 17y ago
  >> I wonder what the repercussions are for religion? Very minimal. Most people who are serious about religion don't base their faith on science in the first place. So when scientific understanding changes, it doesn't shake their faith a whole lot. Me for example - I believe in God for reasons independent of science. Any scientific discovery that seems to contradict what I believe doesn't make stop believing in him. It just makes me reevaluate what I believed and why, and if I still have reason to believe that. For instance, I've always believed that if God's creations are infinite, and he put his children here on Earth, I'm sure there're planets elsewhere that he's created and made as beautiful as this one. And if one day someone found an asteroid with amino acids on it - that doesn't diminish my belief. It just makes me think things like, "I wonder if that's how God put life here". Nobody said God did it all by hand - maybe he just did it through natural laws. I'm very religious and I follow science, and it's extremely rare that I feel conflicted.
  - kevindication 17y ago
    What have you found that suggests that there is a god in the first place?
    - gloob 17y ago
      You are asking for what evidence he has of the existance of a god. That question, by its nature, is a scientific one. The poster you are responding to stated that they do not base their belief in God on science. You are asking the wrong sorts of questions.
      - TallGuyShort 17y ago
        Actually, in all fairness to kevin, I think it would be silly to believe in God for no reason. But on the other hand, it's equally silly to say that he doesn't exist just because we don't see him everywhere. If there is a God, he's obviously not going to do all the work for us - he wants to us to learn, and we do that by learning from experience and from testing for ourselves. So to answer Kevin's question: prayer. That's what suggests God's existence to me. Yes, it's very personal and subjective, but it's an 'experiment' of sorts. If God's there, AND wants us to know about him, AND created us, then surely he'd provide some way for us to find out about him, and he'd make it possible to tell him part of some 'trick' or 'coincidence'. I believe one can simply ask God if he's there, and he'll answer. I also believe you can ask him if the Bible, or the Koran, or any other thing is true. If you do your part to learn for yourself and then seek his guidance - he'll answer. How he answers is the very personal part. The Bible talks about 'fruits of the spirit' - feelings of love, joy, peace, comfort, etc... I've prayed, and I feel those things. They're distinct from anything else - they almost have a 'personality' to them. Maybe another person will get a different answer. I would never claim that a person who got different results was somehow 'less worthy', because like I said - it's personal. It's between that person and God, and he judges our lives. I'm in no position to judge what someone else feels. Now, I don't expect everyone to believe what I said just because I said it, but to me what I experienced is evidence. Nothing anyone could say or show me could convince me that I didn't feel that. And that's why I said that no science could change my mind about God. It could make me question complex beliefs and assumptions, but the aforementioned comet doesn't make me question those feelings by any stretch of the imagination. edit: I added my email address to my profile - if anyone has further questions or issues with anything I've said - feel free to email me.
- biohacker42 17y ago
  I don't think it does anything for religions, they are by definition faith based. As to your other question. We have known that amino acids exist out there for a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite And there's a reasonable theory that these compounds form naturally as the the stuff out there tumbles down the entropy stairs, so to speak. And here's where it gets interesting, if it's true that the building blocks of DNA are fairly common in the universe, then it's a reasonable assumption that DNA based life can emerge with some frequency.
  - flipbrad 17y ago
    note that amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, not DNA. Also it's worth bearing in mind that DNA is a complex and fairly inert molecule, whereas RNA or TNA are often catalytic, thus potentially both simpler to spontaneously originate as a standalone, self-replicating entity (life!)
- jimfl 17y ago
  "Also what does this say about the possibility of life outside of earth?" A certainty. In fact, we may one day decide that life is just one of the phases of matter, along side liquid, solid, gas, plasma, and Bose-Einstein condensate. Whether humanity ever finds anything more sophisticated than extraterrestrial algal mats before we go extinct is another matter.
jgrahamc 17y ago
"The discovery confirms that some of the building blocks of life were delivered to the early Earth from space." Surely that should be "could have been delivered". The article says that the C13 count was different from Earth collected samples. Where's the causality?
- jimfl 17y ago
  Indeed, it turns out to be pretty easy to make amino acids, and they're everywhere. Take hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water, zap it with lightning, and you get amino acids. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment
- reedlaw 17y ago
  It sounds like they aren't even sure where the amino acid came from. From the article: "With only about 100 billionths of a gram of glycine to study, the researchers were able to measure the relative abundance of its carbon isotopes. It contained more carbon-13 than that found in glycine that forms on Earth, proving that Stardust's glycine originated in space." Does anyone know how they can know that space glycine should have more C13 than earth glycine?
  - jgrahamc 17y ago
    I suspect there argument does something like: if it has less than or equals to the amount of C13 as glycine on Earth then we can't rule out that it's contamination. But since it has more C13 than from Earth it must be from somewhere else.
  - lacker 17y ago
    It's not that they know space causes more C13. They just know it's not normal earth glycine because it has the wrong C13 ratio.
nazgulnarsil 17y ago
i for one hope that we don't discover nearby life. why? think about what it implies. if life is so phenomenally common that it pops up twice in the same solar system then it becomes downright unsettling that there is no sign of galaxy spanning civilizations out there.
- yannis 17y ago
  I wish we do. I just don't want to feel so lonely in such a large Universe. Life is probably something very common out there, the fact that we are not observing galaxy spanning civilizations doesn't prove that life is not out there. After all is only about two hundred years that we came to know that there are microbes all over the place.
- charlesju 17y ago
  I would hope that higher life forms try and protect lower life forms, such as ourselves, from the influences of galactic domination.
  - gloob 17y ago
    Because that's worked out so terrifically in our history.
- noaharc 17y ago
  I think Star Wars-type galactic civilizations are very unlikely. Instead, life forms (humans included, eventually) probably just upload their minds into better hardware and "live" in a virtual Shangri La. After that, why bother exploring?
- pg 17y ago
  it becomes downright unsettling that there is no sign of galaxy spanning civilizations out there Only if Einstein is wrong about the speed of light. Sci fi novels routinely assume he overlooked something, because they have to as a plot device, but he might not have.
  - 17y ago
leecho0 17y ago
FYI, glycine is the smallest amino acid, its chemical formula is C2H5NO2. color me surprised when they find tryptophan on a comet

46 points by JohnIdol 17y ago

I wonder what the repercussions are for religion? Does news like this threaten to derail believers' faith in God (or higher being(s))? [EDIT] Also what does this say about the possibility of life outside of earth?

hnal943 17y ago
I think it's strange that every time a scientific discovery occurs one of the first reactions to it is, "Well, that about wraps it up for religion, eh?" Followed by dismissive comments about how religion is completely different from science because it's "faith-based" (read: irrational, unconcerned with the facts). Certainly, it's possible to come to different conclusions based upon the objective evidence. That doesn't mean that one of the conclusions is irrational and the other is rational. In fact, I don't think there's any less faith involved in concluding that the only way life could have originated on earth is via panspermia (and that therefore, there is no God that matters) - all because we found an amino acid in space.
- trapper 17y ago
  Over the last hundred years the probability most assign to the existence of an omnipotent god has decreased dramatically. Most rational people will come to the conclusion that there is such a vanishingly small chance of a god existing that there is no point believing. That's thanks to science.
  - three14 17y ago
    That's kind of a bizarre way to put it. Science has very little to say about the probability of God. Science has removed some old proofs of God - the watchmaker proof in particular, by providing alternative explanations for the existence of life. Science itself has come almost nowhere towards placing a probability on the existence of life given the universe we live in, using only known physical processes. It's completely plausible to say that, given a modern version of evolution, and all the time and planets and matter in the universe so far, the odds of creatures at least as intelligent as humans is one in a million. Or a trillion. Who could possibly know otherwise? There are, after all, thousands of unknowns in any such calculation. If, in a few centuries, someone did accurately calculate that the odds were one in a trillion, would you say that science gave "a vanishingly small chance of a god existing?"
    - trapper 17y ago
      "Science has removed some old proofs of God - the watchmaker proof in particular, by providing alternative explanations for the existence of life." Said more eloquently than I.
TallGuyShort 17y ago
>> I wonder what the repercussions are for religion? Very minimal. Most people who are serious about religion don't base their faith on science in the first place. So when scientific understanding changes, it doesn't shake their faith a whole lot. Me for example - I believe in God for reasons independent of science. Any scientific discovery that seems to contradict what I believe doesn't make stop believing in him. It just makes me reevaluate what I believed and why, and if I still have reason to believe that. For instance, I've always believed that if God's creations are infinite, and he put his children here on Earth, I'm sure there're planets elsewhere that he's created and made as beautiful as this one. And if one day someone found an asteroid with amino acids on it - that doesn't diminish my belief. It just makes me think things like, "I wonder if that's how God put life here". Nobody said God did it all by hand - maybe he just did it through natural laws. I'm very religious and I follow science, and it's extremely rare that I feel conflicted.
- kevindication 17y ago
  What have you found that suggests that there is a god in the first place?
  - gloob 17y ago
    You are asking for what evidence he has of the existance of a god. That question, by its nature, is a scientific one. The poster you are responding to stated that they do not base their belief in God on science. You are asking the wrong sorts of questions.
    - TallGuyShort 17y ago
      Actually, in all fairness to kevin, I think it would be silly to believe in God for no reason. But on the other hand, it's equally silly to say that he doesn't exist just because we don't see him everywhere. If there is a God, he's obviously not going to do all the work for us - he wants to us to learn, and we do that by learning from experience and from testing for ourselves. So to answer Kevin's question: prayer. That's what suggests God's existence to me. Yes, it's very personal and subjective, but it's an 'experiment' of sorts. If God's there, AND wants us to know about him, AND created us, then surely he'd provide some way for us to find out about him, and he'd make it possible to tell him part of some 'trick' or 'coincidence'. I believe one can simply ask God if he's there, and he'll answer. I also believe you can ask him if the Bible, or the Koran, or any other thing is true. If you do your part to learn for yourself and then seek his guidance - he'll answer. How he answers is the very personal part. The Bible talks about 'fruits of the spirit' - feelings of love, joy, peace, comfort, etc... I've prayed, and I feel those things. They're distinct from anything else - they almost have a 'personality' to them. Maybe another person will get a different answer. I would never claim that a person who got different results was somehow 'less worthy', because like I said - it's personal. It's between that person and God, and he judges our lives. I'm in no position to judge what someone else feels. Now, I don't expect everyone to believe what I said just because I said it, but to me what I experienced is evidence. Nothing anyone could say or show me could convince me that I didn't feel that. And that's why I said that no science could change my mind about God. It could make me question complex beliefs and assumptions, but the aforementioned comet doesn't make me question those feelings by any stretch of the imagination. edit: I added my email address to my profile - if anyone has further questions or issues with anything I've said - feel free to email me.
biohacker42 17y ago
I don't think it does anything for religions, they are by definition faith based. As to your other question. We have known that amino acids exist out there for a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_meteorite And there's a reasonable theory that these compounds form naturally as the the stuff out there tumbles down the entropy stairs, so to speak. And here's where it gets interesting, if it's true that the building blocks of DNA are fairly common in the universe, then it's a reasonable assumption that DNA based life can emerge with some frequency.
- flipbrad 17y ago
  note that amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, not DNA. Also it's worth bearing in mind that DNA is a complex and fairly inert molecule, whereas RNA or TNA are often catalytic, thus potentially both simpler to spontaneously originate as a standalone, self-replicating entity (life!)
jimfl 17y ago
"Also what does this say about the possibility of life outside of earth?" A certainty. In fact, we may one day decide that life is just one of the phases of matter, along side liquid, solid, gas, plasma, and Bose-Einstein condensate. Whether humanity ever finds anything more sophisticated than extraterrestrial algal mats before we go extinct is another matter.

jgrahamc 17y ago

"The discovery confirms that some of the building blocks of life were delivered to the early Earth from space." Surely that should be "could have been delivered". The article says that the C13 count was different from Earth collected samples. Where's the causality?

jimfl 17y ago
Indeed, it turns out to be pretty easy to make amino acids, and they're everywhere. Take hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water, zap it with lightning, and you get amino acids. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment
reedlaw 17y ago
It sounds like they aren't even sure where the amino acid came from. From the article: "With only about 100 billionths of a gram of glycine to study, the researchers were able to measure the relative abundance of its carbon isotopes. It contained more carbon-13 than that found in glycine that forms on Earth, proving that Stardust's glycine originated in space." Does anyone know how they can know that space glycine should have more C13 than earth glycine?
- jgrahamc 17y ago
  I suspect there argument does something like: if it has less than or equals to the amount of C13 as glycine on Earth then we can't rule out that it's contamination. But since it has more C13 than from Earth it must be from somewhere else.
- lacker 17y ago
  It's not that they know space causes more C13. They just know it's not normal earth glycine because it has the wrong C13 ratio.

nazgulnarsil 17y ago

i for one hope that we don't discover nearby life. why? think about what it implies. if life is so phenomenally common that it pops up twice in the same solar system then it becomes downright unsettling that there is no sign of galaxy spanning civilizations out there.

yannis 17y ago
I wish we do. I just don't want to feel so lonely in such a large Universe. Life is probably something very common out there, the fact that we are not observing galaxy spanning civilizations doesn't prove that life is not out there. After all is only about two hundred years that we came to know that there are microbes all over the place.
charlesju 17y ago
I would hope that higher life forms try and protect lower life forms, such as ourselves, from the influences of galactic domination.
- gloob 17y ago
  Because that's worked out so terrifically in our history.
noaharc 17y ago
I think Star Wars-type galactic civilizations are very unlikely. Instead, life forms (humans included, eventually) probably just upload their minds into better hardware and "live" in a virtual Shangri La. After that, why bother exploring?
pg 17y ago
it becomes downright unsettling that there is no sign of galaxy spanning civilizations out there Only if Einstein is wrong about the speed of light. Sci fi novels routinely assume he overlooked something, because they have to as a plot device, but he might not have.
- 17y ago

leecho0 17y ago

FYI, glycine is the smallest amino acid, its chemical formula is C2H5NO2. color me surprised when they find tryptophan on a comet