[HN Gopher] The Cosmos Teems with Complex Organic Molecules
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The Cosmos Teems with Complex Organic Molecules
Author : sundarurfriend
Score : 40 points
Date : 2024-11-23 11:25 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| what about chirality?
| gus_massa wrote:
| They have 50% and 50%. Also, "complex" is very small, like
| 20-30 atoms. I think someone found small polymers with 100. A
| lot for not-live stuff, but tiny in comparison to the molecules
| inside a cell.
| roughly wrote:
| Do you have a source for the 50/50 chirality?
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Only human-level organisms can contemplate the grandeur of this
| vast, vast universe and its Unfathomable Creator. We Earthlings
| required billions of years of cellular evolution on our planet
| before we were even possible, so, yeah, the seeds of life are
| _naturally_ produced by relatively basic chemistry.
|
| "There are no accidents." --Master Shifu
| cmiller1 wrote:
| The seeds of life, but the next step, their germination so to
| speak, is the hard part. All life on Earth is part of one grand
| tree, so out of those billions of years the step from complex
| organic molecules to life only was completed successfully once
| as far as we can tell.
| conjectures wrote:
| Genuine question: how would we tell/know if it was more than
| once?
|
| Doesn't other life-2 floating around in the primordial soup
| look like food to life-1? Or wouldn't it be co-opted
| mitochondria style?
| cmiller1 wrote:
| There's a whole wikipedia page answering exactly this
| question:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_common_descent
|
| From biochemical similarities, the chirality of certain
| sugars and amino acids, dna similarities, etc. the evidence
| for a single common ancestor of all life on Earth is fairly
| strong; however we don't really have evidence that there
| never were other lifes that simply were outcompeted at
| their very early stages.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| The speed of light has put a severe limit on what we can
| "know" about life in the other 1+ trillion (?) galaxies, or
| even in the other hundreds of billions (?) of stars in our
| own Milky Way.
|
| And it was all apparently very difficult, from our point of
| view, but that aspect of creation -- and more specifically,
| its Creator -- are beyond the ken of _creatures_ such as
| ourselves, even with our vastly superior talents and
| abilities. Very few of us reach the pinnacle of our ability
| to commune with the vast information system that is the
| universe around us.
|
| "It is so wonderful, now that I am in in a constant
| conversation with You." --Rumi (my paraphrase from memory)
|
| "The Way goes in." --Rumi
| spacemark wrote:
| Who or what exactly is this Creator you speak of? Would
| love to know.
| exe34 wrote:
| > Very few of us reach the pinnacle of our ability to
| commune with the vast information system that is the
| universe around us.
|
| what did you smoke to get this power?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| If life can happen here it can happen in another part of the
| universe from similar conditions and that's only for the
| conditions we know of. People go down to the ocean where we
| didn't think life can exist, and found out it can, and that's
| just on earth
| spacemark wrote:
| Right, but life down there didn't independently spark from
| raw organic molecules. Or, rather, there is no evidence for
| that, whereas there is quite a bit of evidence to suggest all
| such life on earth is migratory to new ecosystems and shares
| one common ancestor.
|
| That leap from organic molecules to "life" is still a bit of
| a mystery. And how often it occurs is still up for debate.
|
| Look at Earth's history - trees existed for 60 million years
| before some chance bacterial mutation stumbled on efficiently
| breaking down lignin. And then boom, trees everywhere - every
| continent on earth - immediately (in geologic timescales)
| were decomposed.
|
| The fact that it took 60 million years for extant bacteria to
| allow for that should give pause to any sweeping statements
| about the certainty of life and especially complex life.
| octopoc wrote:
| Doesn't this essentially prove that if there is life outside
| earth, almost all of it will be carbon based? As opposed to
| silicon based.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Sulfur and phosphorus can also form complex molecules in
| addition to silicone. Carbon forms complex molecules in a
| larger array of chemical environments though.
|
| Ultimately everything hinges on how you define life.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Silicon based never really made much sense to me anyway. The
| bonds it forms are too stable and hard to break apart.
|
| https://www.the-ies.org/analysis/does-silicon-based-life-exi...
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| Given the abundance of elements, Carbon-based life with water
| as liquid is probably the most likely.
| roughly wrote:
| Roughly, life is carbon based because carbon has interesting
| properties for biochemistry and is the cheapest way to make a
| range of complex molecules. If life somewhere were not to be
| carbon based, there'd need to be some reason why carbon based
| life didn't take off instead.
| asah wrote:
| Does this affect the Sagan equation?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| No because we don't actually know any of the coefficients. It's
| not supposed to be a real measure, it's just a fun thought
| exercise. Guessing at a many variables is still just guessing.
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