Did Life Begin On Comets?

Clay particles seen in Comet Tempel 1 suggest comets once had warm, liquid interiors that could have spawned life, a controversial new study argues (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD)Tools

If you buy a lottery ticket this week, what are the odds that you'll win the grand prize then get struck by lightning as you pop open the champagne? Vanishingly small, but still much higher than the odds that life on Earth first evolved on our planet, according to an ardent proponent of the notion that life came from space.

Chandra Wickramasinghe from Cardiff University, UK, has long argued the case for cometary panspermia, the idea that comets are infected with primitive life forms and delivered life to the early Earth. That would explain why life on Earth arose so quickly after our planet formed around 4.5 billion years ago.

Wickramasinghe says the case has been bolstered by NASA's Deep Impact probe, which blasted Comet Tempel 1 with a projectile in July 2005. Scientists reported seeing clay particles spewing out from the interior.

Because clay needs liquid water to form, Wickramasinghe says that suggests comets once had warm, liquid interiors due to heating from radioactive isotopes. Clay is also a favoured catalyst for converting simple organic molecules into complex biopolymers on the early Earth.

Now, Wickramasinghe and his colleagues argue that the sheer volume of watery clay environments on comets makes them a far more likely site for the origin of life than our home planet.

The team estimates that the volume of these environments on the early Earth would have been about 10,000 cubic kilometres. A single 20-kilometre-wide comet could offer about a tenth of that, but when you include all the comets in

It need not be a question of design versus randomness. Other possibilities would include a kind of musical analogy of the nature that produces the limited varities of elementary particles, chemical elements, and chemical compounds. That is, only certain combinations are stable enough to stick. When extended to life forms it is called organicism.

Yes, it is. Considering this is the main reason why evolutionists and creationists have spent the last few decades beating each other over the head.

Actually, creationists just kept backing up their objections to the theory of evolution until they finally seized on abiogenesis (which the theory of evolution has never addressed) as some sort of reason why the theory is flawed. But it's rather like objecting to meteorological theories because they don't address the genesis of the first water molecule.

It makes sense if you do not believe in God or intelligent design to extend evolution into somehow randomly creating the DNA molecule out of liquid soup which then happily spits out a human being a few billion years later through the process of evolution.

No, it doesn't make sense. You aren't "extending evolution" by conflating it with biogenesis theories, you are simply distorting it. Evolution is what happens when self-replicators are present. How the replicators got here in the first place is interesting, but no more necessary to evolutionary theory than the genesis of water molecules is to meteorological theory.

That was what I was taught in school growing up.

I keep hearing about these mysterious schools that conflated abiogenesis with evolution in the distant past. I'm rather up there in years, and I can't recall anything of the sort. If you were truly taught this, you were taught wrong. Happens sometimes. But your mis-education has no bearing on the science itself.

That was what I was taught in school growing up.

I keep hearing about these mysterious schools that conflated abiogenesis with evolution in the distant past. I'm rather up there in years, and I can't recall anything of the sort. If you were truly taught this, you were taught wrong. Happens sometimes. But your mis-education has no bearing on the science itself.

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Okay, I take your word for the biological viewpoint that I may be mixing semantics. I also think your mis-education statement is somewhat selective memory as every school child who attended public school in the 70's and 80's (and probably even today) was told that single cells led to fish which led to land animals which led to monkeys which led to man. They taught that as evolution. People today drive around in cars with little fish with feet that say "Darwin" attached to their car. It has been pounded into our brains that evolution starts with a single cell organism that started in an ocean way back in time. Where the single cell came from may technically not be evolution, but it was sure sold as a factual starting point in the process of evolution in the standard science class. If evolutionist have given up their starting point of their theory, after all these years, I am not aware of it.

The point I am making is that modern science cannot explain where the single cell organism came from. They have failed to reproduce it under idea laboratory conditions and it doesn't pass scientific scrutiny as far as the mathematics of probability theory or the physics of thermodynamics. In my opinion, biologists continue to happily ignore the mathematics and physics discussion or attempt to redirect it. That is the part that wasn't covered in my mis-education that is a key part to the ongoing debate on this topic.

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