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marcosdumay 19 hours ago

We know 2 things that are apparently incoherent:

1 - Abiogenesis is incredibly rare. We don't know how much exactly, but it's a lot.

2 - Abiogenesis happened on Earth about as soon as it became possible. Where "as soon as" means within half a billion years, but it's still way quicker than its rarity implies.

A lot of people think panspermia is what made those two happen. Life had about a full billion years to appear in meteors before they could appear here.

There are some problems, e.g. that each meteor only stayed chemically active for less than that half-a-billion years Earth had. Or that all the meteors that fell on Earth had only a fraction of the material that was later available here. But IMO, the largest issue is that just doubling the time is absolutely unsatisfying.

adrian_b 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Life cannot appear in any of the small bodies that become meteors, because there is no source of energy for it.

Life can appear only on big planets or on big satellites, like the big satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, if they have a hot interior and volcanism.

Volcanism brings at the surface substances that are in chemical equilibrium at the high temperatures of the interior, but which are no longer at chemical equilibrium at the low temperatures of the surface, providing chemical energy that can be used to synthesize macromolecules.

Solar energy cannot be used for the appearance of life. Capturing light requires very complex structures that can be developed only after a very long evolution and which cannot form spontaneously in the absence of already existing living beings.

The only theory of panspermia that is somewhat plausible is that life could have appeared on Mars, which had habitable conditions earlier than Earth. Then, some impacts on Mars have ejected fragments that have fallen as meteorites on Earth and some remote ancestors of bacteria have survived this interplanetary trip.

There are many meteorites on Earth that have their origin in impacts from Mars, so at least this part is known as being possible.

asdff 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Solar energy cannot be used for the appearance of life. Capturing light requires very complex structures that can be developed only after a very long evolution and which cannot form spontaneously in the absence of already existing living beings.

I think that is putting the cart well before the horse. Earliest "life" I would say looks something like a short sequence of random RNA, in some structure (as in secondary), in some solution, among some nucleotides, where brownian motion lead to collision with nucleotides in the chain that grow the chain and/or template off the chain and make a copy. The energy requirements for this sort of pre cell life are far less than cell based life which has to spend energy on cell membrane or wall building. Energy could be quite low, it would just reduce the number of interactions over time. Likely also that this pre cell "life" would not die either so long as it is protected somewhat by cosmic radiation bombarding the chain (although to an extent this is also a ripe source of mutagenic potential).

adrian_b 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Not true.

What you describe is a perpetuum mobile.

No kind of life can exist without a continuous flux of energy. The formation of any organic polymers requires energy, it cannot happen spontaneously.

Nucleotides that collide do not form polymers in water. The polymerization of nucleotides and of amino-acids and of most other organic macromolecules is done by water extraction (a.k.a. polycondensation).

Water extraction inside water requires considerable energy (i.e. you must dry some thing while it is still submerged in water). This is provided by certain dehydrated molecules, like ATP, from which water must have been extracted as a result of capturing some energy from the environment.

The common ancestor of all living beings known on Earth obtained energy by the reaction between free hydrogen (dihydrogen) and either carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. It is likely that the capability to use carbon dioxide has appeared later and the very first living beings were powered by the conversion of dihydrogen and carbon monoxide into acetic acid. The energy from this reaction was captured because the first result of the reaction was not free acetic acid, but acetic acid condensed with another molecule, like in the acetyl-CoA that is used today by all living beings. Than that condensed molecule could be used to extract water from other molecules, producing dehydrated molecules like ATP, which can be used for the polymerization of nucleic acids.

There is no way to circumvent the need for a continuous source of energy for the appearance of life. Besides the H2 and CO gases, there was an alternative source of energy that was used very early, but it is not known if it was already needed for the initial appearance of life or it began to be harvested at a later stage. This second source of energy is the difference in ionic concentration between the acidic water of the primitive ocean and the alkaline water that is produced by dissolving volcanic rocks in places like hydrothermal vents, where H2 and other gases are also produced. The ionic concentration gradients produce ionic currents, which can power certain chemical reactions, like they also do in all present living beings.

pfdietz 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> no source of energy

Asteroids early in the solar system would be very radioactive due to short lived isotopes formed during the formation of the solar system. The existence of these isotopes is known from the patterns of decay products found in asteroids. The current guess is the early protoplanetary disk was bombarded by intense GeV-scale protons accelerated in the shock of a nearby supernova, causing large scale transmutation in the disk.

adrian_b 3 hours ago | parent [-]

There is no known way in which nuclear radiation could have been the source of energy for the first living beings.

While a little radiation might have been beneficial at a later stage in the evolution of living beings, by increasing the frequency of random mutations, for a faster evolution, for the early living beings the only effect of radiation would have been to destroy them and prevent them for having descendants.

The only positive effect of the increased radioactivity in the early Solar System is that it is possible that not only the planets but also some smaller asteroids might have had warm interiors and volcanism.

So in none of the huge number of small bodies that exist in the Solar System there have ever been conditions for the appearance of life, but perhaps on some of the bigger asteroids there might have been such conditions, if they also had water and volatile chemical elements, besides a warm interior.

If life has ever appeared in such a place it must have used the same sources of energy that are known to have been used by the ancestors of life on Earth, i.e. gases and ionic gradients produced by chemical reactions between water and volcanic rocks.

nomel 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> because there is no source of energy for it.

Couldn't it have started in the accretion disk?

adrian_b 3 hours ago | parent [-]

There not only there was no known source of energy for the synthesis of organic polymers, but also everything, with the exception of interstellar dust particles, was in a gaseous state, not suitable for forming the structure of a living being.

pfdietz 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

People make the inference that "early occurence of life" implies "life must be easy to start". But that inference requires the assumption that the chance of OoL (origin of life) remains mostly constant with time. An alternative would be that the conditions under which life could arise are transient, so life either starts early or not at all. We don't know enough about OoL to rule this out. Some chemicals that might be needed for OoL, like ammonia, are not stable for long. And if life originated in small asteroids, this might have only a few million years for it to occur while they are still warm enough from early short lived radioisotopes like Al-26.

adrian_b 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It is indeed possible that in the early Solar System, before the short-lived radioactive elements completely decayed, there were some asteroids with good conditions for the appearance of life.

However, I would not describe those as small. The majority of the interplanetary bodies that orbit the Sun and which fall from time to time on Earth as meteorites are far too small to have ever had conditions for the appearance of life.

Even an asteroid like that which has wiped out the dinosaurs, with a diameter of a few km could not ever have suitable conditions.

Only relatively large asteroids, presumably with diameters from tens of km to hundreds of km, might have had warm interiors and volcanism for enough time to allow the appearance of life.

Such asteroids must also have been among those distant from the Sun, in order to contain enough water and volatile chemical elements.

The fact that the most volatile chemical elements are those most important for life is not due to chance, but due to the necessity. The volatile elements are those prone to forming covalent chemical bonds. Unlike the metallic or the ionic chemical bonds, the covalent bonds are strictly required for forming the complex molecular structures that may lead to living beings.