12 thoughts on “Mimicking An Early Impact In Earth’s Atmosphere”

  2. It’s a mystery to me why many (most?) science writers have held one of two positions: that life exists only on earth, because the events leading up to it were random and the odds of it being duplicated were effectively zero, or: that life couldn’t have started at all, anywhere, without a Creator because the odds are so small.

    As we look out into the universe, we see things required for life – and I mean things like amino acids, in particular glycine. The Miller-Urey experiment (which has fascinated me since I was 8), was a step forward. This is another step. Each of these steps ought to be informing us that the phenomenon of life is one of those things matter produces because of its nature. That means that it should be quite common, and that it doesn’t require a Creator.

    Beyond that one statement, we have a loooooonnnng way to go before we get a handle on the “how.”

    1. I more often see the kind of attitude you’re showing there: that life MUST be common. The logic is flawed, though.

      Experiments like Miller-Urey, or this one, say very little about how common life is. Experiments will find the easy steps first. Those experiments say nothing about how probable life is, since that is governed by very unlikely steps, if any. And Origin-of-Life is insufficiently understood to rule out the existence of very unlikely steps.

      The evidence that we do have is through the Fermi argument. The Earth was not urbanized by aliens in deep prehistory. The galaxy has not been overrun by colonization waves. We see no galaxies that have been thoroughly settled by a K-3 level civilization (and we’ve looked; the upper bound is fewer than 1 in 100,000 galaxies, and possibly none at all.) This is not very consistent with the idea that alien intelligence is very common, as traditional SETI would have you believe.

        1. “Each of these steps ought to be informing us that the phenomenon of life is one of those things matter produces because of its nature. That means that it should be quite common,”

          No, I was pointing out the argument of yours I have quoted there is nonsense. The evidence we have implies no such things.

          1. It’s hard for us to make statistical arguments when our sample size is still just one.

      2. The Fermi paradox is also evidence for another conclusion. Given the results of Einsteinian relativity, it seems unlikely that anyone, anywhere, will ever travel between two star systems unless they are much less than a light year apart. We don’t inhabit a space of that kind, so it isn’t necessarily a huge surprise that earth wasn’t “urbanized” long ago by aliens. As for galaxies being completely colonized, how would one ever spot such a thing? That’s complete nonsense.

  3. “This seems much more significant than Miller-Urey.”

    That’s not necessarily a high bar. To me, the whole storyline of how life evolved reads rather like the Underpants Gnomes’ business plan:

    1) Get together the right chemicals
    2) ???
    3) Life

    I’m not a creationist by any means. But, right now, I do not see that either side of the discussion is not relying on miracles to occur at some point.

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