Could extraterrestrial sugar help explain how life began on Earth?

[sl8]

From http://astronomy.com/news/2018/12/could-space-sugars-help-explain-how-life-began-on-earth

Could extraterrestrial sugar help explain how life began on Earth?
By bombarding compounds with ultraviolet radiation, researchers have derived 2-deoxyribose, the sugar responsible for the "D" in DNA.

By Chelsea Gohd | Published: Friday, December 21, 2018

Extraterrestrial Sugar
Scientists have discovered derivatives of life’s building blocks in carbon-rich meteorite samples, a first. They also showed how biological compounds can form in interstellar space. These new findings support the theory that life on Earth originated with help from cosmic impacts.

Sugars and sugar derivatives are essential to life on Earth. But they, along with amino acids and other organic molecules, can be found in space as well, on asteroids and comets. Scientists have suggested that objects in space may have fallen to Earth and delivered the compounds that would spark biological processes on our planet.

Sugar and Ice
In this new study, scientists analyzed five residues from ice mixtures exposed to ultraviolet radiation in conditions simulating the interstellar medium in space. The goal was to see whether organic molecules found in life on Earth would form in a simulated space environment. In these residues, they found 2-deoxyribose, or the sugar component that makes up the “D” in DNA. They also found derivatives of 2-deoxyribose, similar compounds that have one atom or a group of atoms that are different.

“Astrochemistry ice photolysis experiments, such as those described in our paper, provide a convincing explanation on how those compounds may form in such astrophysical environments,” lead researcher Michel Nuevo of NASA Ames Research Center said about these experiments in an email.

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More at link.

Nature article:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07693-x

[wasupaloopa]

1. where did the life force come from? Intimate particles sprang into life?

[MineralMan]

3. Well, if they were intimate, breeding might have taken place.

I think the word you were looking for was "inanimate."

[Nitram]

4. There is no such thing as a "life force". What is needed is a self-sustaining chemical reaction of a

particular kind. Life on Earth started under very different conditions than now exist on Earth. For one thing, until plants evolved, there was almost no oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. The presence of oxygen makes the kind of reaction needed to sustain life impossible too sustain at a chemical level.

"The transition from non-living to living entities was not a single event, but a gradual process of increasing complexity that involved molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis and cell membranes...Life functions through the specialized chemistry of carbon and water and builds largely upon four key families of chemicals: lipids (fatty cell walls), carbohydrates (sugars, cellulose), amino acids (protein metabolism), and nucleic acids (self-replicating DNA and RNA). Any successful theory of abiogenesis must explain the origins and interactions of these classes of molecules.[15] Many approaches to abiogenesis investigate how self-replicating molecules, or their components, came into existence. Researchers generally think that current life on Earth descends from an RNA world."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

[brush]

2. Good info. If it happened here on Earth it sure could happen elsewhere...

Last edited Sat Dec 22, 2018, 06:48 PM - Edit history (1)

what with the millions of planets in the universe/multi-verse. What's interesting is that different forms of sugar out there in celestial space are mentioned in the article.

Makes one wonder, since life here evolved from the sugar found in DNA to simple life forms which eventually resulted in humans, if a different form of life may have evolved from a different sugar molecule being sparked into life on a distance planet?

Or it also makes you wonder if celestial visitors somehow left the ingredients for life here, maybe even purposely?

[MineralMan]

5. The emergence of lifeforms from inanimate chemicals has never surprised me.

When I consider the amount of time, energy, and mixtures of elements that must have been present in the universe, I would think that life would pretty much have emerged anywhere conditions that could support it occurred.

Carbon and hydrogen were everywhere, and that is the essential pair of elements needed for life as we know it. Nitrogen, sulfur, potassium and other crucial elements were also present. Energy was also everywhere, and chemical reactions of all kinds take place anytime those two things exist.

What would be truly surprising would be the failure of life to begin in such environments over time. Billions of years of time. We have little conception of that kind of time period.

Some point out that humans have not managed to recreate life from chemicals in a few hundred years. How silly! Billions of years and countless combinations of chemistry and energy? Our feeble attempts are, well, feeble, and yet, we're making some progress along those lines, really. As we understand more about the early environments in the universe, we'll probably do even better. In a few more hundred years, I imagine we'll recreate the conditions that caused at least one lifeform to emerge. We get better at such things.

[brush]

8. "What would be truly surprising would be failure of life to begin in such environments over time."

So true, MM. It still boggles my mind that many haven't embraced the distinct mathematical probability of that.

[Nitram]

6. Well, probably not anywhere. Current scientific thinking is that water and an atmosphere are

necessary for life to survive. We look for "Goldilocks" planets, which are the right distance from the nearest star to allow water to exist as a a liquid. Too far from the star, and all water is frozen. Too close, and it all boils off or evaporates. But the type of atmosphere can also influence temperature. Venus is impossibly hot because of a greenhouse atmosphere.

[brush]

7. Billions of stars and even more planets. You're not thinking there isn't another...

planet in the habitable zone of one of these billions, possibly trillions of planets that may be hosting some form of life, right?

See post #6.

[Nitram]

9. I assume there are countless such planets in the universe. I was just pointing

our some of the conditions we assume are required for life.