Life Chemistry

Recently, there have been many articles and shows about the fact that the chemicals that are needed for life to form have been located in the most unexpected places. Notably, there is a NASA report that indicated that some of the moon rocks contain traces of amino acids. The Rosetta Mission to a comet has detected amino acids. There is also evidence of life forming chemicals on Mars. What does all of this mean?

Let's start with amino acids. As you might know amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which make up much of the tissues of living creatures including us. Although amino acids could not by themselves create life, they are very important ingredients in the process, whatever it turns out to be. I say this because scientists have not yet discovered how life arises.

Some critics have said that the astronauts contaminated the moon rock samples with amino acids. This is not very likely because everything that went to the moon was sanitized to remove any possible contamination.
Although, contamination cannot be ruled out, the probable cause of life chemistry on the moon is comet or asteroid collisions either with the moon directly or from collision with the Earth that blew the material to the moon. Some scientists believe that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs could have blown chemistry from the Earth to the moon.

The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to a comet was successfully completed recently when they crashed the spaceship into the comet. Before this they landed a probe on the comet, but it subsequently bounced into a crevice that shadowed it. This allowed only a short time to conduct science experiments. They found both nucleic and amino acids in the soil of the comet. They also found water, but it's not the same water that makes up our oceans. The deuterium to hydrogen isotope ration is wrong. This is yet another proof that comets did not bring water to Earth, at least not in the amounts needed to form the oceans.
Nucleic acids are needed to form RNA and DNA, the chemical structures that life uses to reproduce.

Gycine is the simplest amino acid, and it has been detected in the weirdest places in space, including in gas clouds around forming stars, namely Sagittarius-B2 and Orion-KL and W51. The only conclusion about this is that these gas clouds were the result of the destruction (supernova) of stars that contained planets that harbored life. It also suggests that life came from outer space.

The problem with these life chemicals is their formation process. It's possible to synthesize them from simpler organic chemicals such as carboxylic acids using bromination or reacting potassium cyanide with aldehydes. Sorry about the chemistry stuff. The bottom line is that amino acids could have been created from simple chemistry, the kind that could form out in space from radiation and/or heat.

The only other way to from life chemicals is from biological processes, but that would require some simple forms of life to already exist. It's the old chicken/egg dilemma.

My take on this is that until we discover a method that could create RNA and DNA from simpler chemicals, we'll never understand how life arose from the primordial soup.

More on this later.

Thanks for reading.