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Protein discovered inside a meteorite

phys.org

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Re: Protein discovered inside a meteorite

#31

Post by K0SM0S »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #20
westmeal wrote: post #2

Proponents of panspermia are pretty happy about this finding I bet.

While I have no objection to panspermia being possible, if it were true, it would be a significant hurtle added to the search for the origins of life. We would know how life on Earth started, but until we expand out into the galaxy, understanding the origins of the life that seeded Earth would be essentially unknowable.

At the same time, it's pretty clear we need to get out there (ultimately much beyond the galaxy itself) if we are to solve certain questions.

And there's a general idea that a purpose of life may be to "spread" through the universe — like, why die here on this planet instead of settling the universe... given the actual choice, there's no solution but to leave eventually, when your star dies (if only locally to "fix" it by adding more fuel in it, e.g. hydrogen).

So this, if true, is really just one more reason on top of an already high pile as I see it.

Re: Protein discovered inside a meteorite

#32

Post by LeonB »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #19
westmeal wrote: post #2

Proponents of panspermia are pretty happy about this finding I bet.

So far sugars, and amino acids have been found in both comets & gas clouds. BUT to find this protein is the slam-dunk, holy-shit they were right, proof that Panspermia is how we got here, and there _MUST_ be life in other parts of the universe.

I agree with the last part: it probably shows that there’s life out there.

It could show that life travelled here on meteorites etc. But it also could mean: life arises elsewhere, life commonly arises in the universe and may have also arisen here (and many places) independently.

Re: Protein discovered inside a meteorite

#33

Post by ampersandy29 »

VT_Dude wrote: post #30

Before we even get into the role of expert peer reviewers, does the article pass basic tests of authenticity, let alone extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proof? The third author of the referenced paper does have a page at Harvard, here: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~mcgeoch/index.html where she says she is at the "Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University" but she's not listed a…

Some cursory search shows papers published by Julie E. M. McGeoch on related topics over the last 30 years, many of which are also co-authored by Malcom McGeoch of Plex Corporation, who I assume is of some relation (significant other or relative). I admittedly don't know a ton about academic publishing, but from my outside position, it seems unlikely that this report is fraudulently attributed—though it's certainly possible that I'm missing something.

Re: Protein discovered inside a meteorite

#34

Post by briga »

MockObject wrote: post #25

They believe that this meteorite is native to our solar system, so it's not a candidate for panspermia from anywhere interesting.

You don't think it would be interesting to discover non-Earth proteins within our solar system? At the very least, this finding would be a pretty good indicator that proteins occur naturally outside of our solar system as well.

Re: Protein discovered inside a meteorite

#35

Post by andrewflnr »

qubex wrote: post #18
westmeal wrote: post #2

Proponents of panspermia are pretty happy about this finding I bet.

To be perfectly honest, you’ve drawn my attention to an ambiguity I had never before noticed: does panspermia’s hypothesis that “life” came from space require that life arrive fully formed and functional, or does it advocate that complex organic chemicals arrived from space and assembled on earth into a working configuration? I have always found the idea of panspermia to be a bit of a cop-out as it totally sidesteps…

A panspermia theory that involved non-living chemicals coming to Earth would be pretty useless. There's no real doubt that it's possible to generate those chemicals on Earth, and AFAIK it's still believed to be easier to make them on Earth than in space. Organic chemicals from space would just mix with all the ones that were already here.

Re: Protein discovered inside a meteorite

#36

Post by svachalek »

qubex wrote: post #18
westmeal wrote: post #2

Proponents of panspermia are pretty happy about this finding I bet.

To be perfectly honest, you’ve drawn my attention to an ambiguity I had never before noticed: does panspermia’s hypothesis that “life” came from space require that life arrive fully formed and functional, or does it advocate that complex organic chemicals arrived from space and assembled on earth into a working configuration? I have always found the idea of panspermia to be a bit of a cop-out as it totally sidesteps…

It's only a cop-out if you try to use it to explain the origin of life in general, not just on Earth.

Life arose very quickly on Earth, almost as soon as it was capable of surviving, so it raises the interesting question: were we just lucky, or is it easy to spawn life, or did it come from elsewhere? The answer creates very different pictures for what Earth-like planets elsewhere in the galaxy actually look like.

Re: Protein discovered inside a meteorite

#38

Post by JoeAltmaier »

svachalek wrote: post #36
qubex wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be perfectly honest, you’ve drawn my attention to an ambiguity I had never before noticed: does panspermia’s hypothesis that “life” came from space require that life arrive fully formed and functional, or does it advocate that complex organic chemicals arrived from space and assembled on earth into a working configuration? I have always found the idea of panspermia to be a bit of a cop-out as it totally sidesteps…

It's only a cop-out if you try to use it to explain the origin of life in general, not just on Earth. Life arose very quickly on Earth, almost as soon as it was capable of surviving, so it raises the interesting question: were we just lucky, or is it easy to spawn life, or did it come from elsewhere? The answer creates very different pictures for what Earth-like planets elsewhere in the galaxy actually look like.

I'm always confused by that. So there's only one form of life possible? Otherwise life may have arisen before, been wiped out when Earth changed, and life arose again. We may be just the latest in a long series of life forms.

Re: Protein discovered inside a meteorite

#39

Post by qubex »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #38
svachalek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only a cop-out if you try to use it to explain the origin of life in general, not just on Earth. Life arose very quickly on Earth, almost as soon as it was capable of surviving, so it raises the interesting question: were we just lucky, or is it easy to spawn life, or did it come from elsewhere? The answer creates very different pictures for what Earth-like planets elsewhere in the galaxy actually look like.

I'm always confused by that. So there's only one form of life possible? Otherwise life may have arisen before, been wiped out when Earth changed, and life arose again. We may be just the latest in a long series of life forms.

Good point. It might be that the kind of life that arises on a planet depends on what it is bombarded with and which of those various candidate life-forms ‘takes’ on the specific environment.

Re: Protein discovered inside a meteorite

#40

Post by jessaustin »

rolph wrote: post #6

A team of researchers from Plex Corporation, Bruker Scientific LLC and Harvard University > has found evidence of there is a mismatch between the title of that article and the level of confidence these researchers were expressing. the preprint is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11688

One of the cites at the link is a previous paper on similar investigations of one of the same meteorites plus one other, that was published in 2015 in Meteoritics & Planetary Science, a journal with a long publication history. That paper is cited by two other papers from different authors. [0]

At some level, these researchers seem to be doing basic chemistry. Maybe they're not characterizing the implications correctly or maybe they haven't controlled contamination, but if proper research discovered extraterrestrial protein it would probably generate papers that looked like these.

[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8914643017753968792...

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