The following continues Chapter 2 of SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity:
The Science of Eternal Life
Before delving into the realm of eternal life, let us first explore how life began…according to scientists. Quasi-equal treatment of more biblical beginnings will be found in CHAPTER 5. In CHAPTER 4 on Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is a term, F1, representing the percentage of planets where life could have originated. There are, of course, theories that comets or aliens brought life. See the SETI discussion for those alternatives. So if life was initiated on Earth, how?
Starting with energy, water and elements, there is a range of likely environments where life could have begun:
o Aristotle (Greek philosopher) in the 4th Century BC said that life occurred abiogenetically, that, is, spontaneously.
o Louis Pasteur (French microbiologist) proved Aristotle wrong in 1862.
o Joseph Dalton (English botanist) in 1871 suggested that life began in a “warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc, that a protein compound formed.”
o How close to right he was, for Aleksandr Oparin (Soviet bioscientist) and John Haldane (Scottish geneticist) organic soup theory pretty much exhibited in 1953 by Stanley Miller (photo on right) and Harold Urey at the University of Chicago just about did that. Miller was a graduate student of Urey, who by then had already won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1934) through his work on deuterium and heavy water. Water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen, compounds of primordial times, were heated and sparked in a flask for a week, producing more than 10% organic compounds, 2% being amino acids, including 13 of 21 used to make proteins in living cells (schematic on left). Clearly, though, they should have also added hydrogen sulfide and some phosphate compound. Hmm…sounds like another good experiment.
o J. Brooks and G. Shaw (UK bioscientists) in 1973, though, surmised that there was no soup, for nowhere on Earth are there any massive sediments of these compounds, also more recently stated by David Abel and Jack Trevors (U.S. and Canadian bioscientists).
o Graham Cairnes-Smith (Scottish bioscientist) in 1985 postulated the clay theory, that complex organic molecules are formed over time on clay crystals in a process of exaptation, a form of biological adaptation.
o Then there are theories about life starting at the bottom of the ocean through chemical genesis, in deep rocks in the form of archaea (a microorganism somewhat like bacteria), and at bubble interfaces.
The Origin-of-Life Foundation will give you a million dollars if you can explain how the original genetic code arose. There is, yet, no winner.
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Typhoon Molave, at 125 MPH, just (very early Sunday morning) in Shenzen City (just north of Hong Kong). That disturbance in the Atlantic still far away from any island remains of interest.
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