A couple of weeks ago I made the drive from southwestern Colorado to Washington state. If you’ve never done this particular route, it involves traversing first the Mormon outposts of desert Utah, then the suburban hell of the Salt Lake City metropolis, and, finally, the farmlands of southern Idaho. The radio waves along those thousand or so miles are god’s country. Not just one or two preachers on the lower end of the dial, but all over the place; at least half of the FM band, staking out either side of the few crackly secular stations like stone sentries. By the time I reached my destination, I’d absorbed enough Bible attacks on science (particularly evolution, naturally) that I could teach a class.You might be surprised to know that creationists don’t just pretend to be into science around school boards; they even do it in their own company (or on a religious radio show). One radio dude was hammering on what I imagine is a very popular creationist point: that there’s no hard evidence for how life comes from nonlife, how molecules just hanging around in space come together into amino acids, and how those amino acids come together correctly as RNA. The process is called abiogenesis, though this particular radio guest preferred “chemical evolution.” If you’re preaching to a creationist choir, that term comes conveniently preloaded. Though it's inaccurate.There are number competing hypothesis for how biogenesis happened, with none of them particularly nailed to a wall. Hence, the concept is a popular target. There is some proof, however: In 1953, Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey, performed a crucial experiment that involved locking some basic compounds into a sealed environment and zapping it with electricity. The result was complex organic molecules, the stuff of life. In 1961, Joan Oró found that the nucleotide base adenine (a necessary component of DNA and RNA) is possible to produce from a mixture of hydrogen cyanide and ammonia; it’s also been shown that RNA can reproduce itself indefinitely in the absence of any sort of cell protection. There is also the irrefutable proof of actual life: we know the building blocks of life are in the universe, and we know life is in the universe. Something happened that fits the definition of abiogenesis.A study out today in the journal Nature Geoscience boasts the discovery of a cosmic “factory” for creating the building blocks of life. It’s not just some theoretical circumstance, but one that happens all of the time probably all over the universe. All it takes is water and energy. Basically, if an icy comet (water ice) crashes into a planet or whatever, the result can be amino acids. Or if a dry comet crashes into an icy planet, you get the same gift of pre-life. This is hardly a rare event in the cosmos.“Our work shows that the basic building blocks of life can be assembled anywhere in the Solar System and perhaps beyond,” says co-author Zita Martins, of Imperial College London. “However, the catch is that these building blocks need the right conditions in order for life to flourish. Excitingly, our study widens the scope for where these important ingredients may be formed in the Solar System and adds another piece to the puzzle of how life on our planet took root."“The next step is to work out how to go from an amino acid to even more complex molecules such as proteins," adds the University of Kent’s Dr. Mark Price, another co-author.The idea is this: a collision of the magnitude created by a meteorite collision creates shock waves. These waves first generate the molecules that make up amino acids, while heat from the impact provides the energy needed to transform molecules into amino acids. The team was further able to demonstrate this in a lab using a large high-speed gun, capable of firing projectiles at 7.15 kilometres-per-second, and ice mixtures likely to resemble those found on comets or on, say, the moon Europa. Which we're already very interested in exploring for life.@everydayelk
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