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Basic
Worldview:
102
Atheism vs. Theism
Scientists: Life on Earth
Imported from Outer Space
Prelude:
"Atheism/Theism" vs. "Science, the Bible, & Creation"
Atheism:
Introduction and Charges
Charge
1, Deduction and Induction
Charge
2, Question 1
Charge
2, Questions 2 and 3
Charge
2, Summary and Question 4
Charges
3 and 4, Definitions
Empirical
Evidence
Scientists
Acting as Mechanisms, Article 1
Scientists
Acting as Mechanisms, Article 2
Scientists
Acting as Mechanisms, Article 3
Occam's
Razor and Conclusions
Footnote
1
Footnote
2 and 3
Proof
of Life
Not
Theories, Unsubstantiated Hypotheses 1
Not
Theories, Unsubstantiated Hypotheses 2
Not
Theories, Unsubstantiated Hypotheses 3
Not
Theories, Unsubstantiated Hypotheses 4
Scientists:
Life on Earth Imported from Outer Space
Atheisms
Circle of Reasons
Is
God a White Crow?
For reasons that we will soon detail, scientists now believe
that life on earth had to originate from some other planetary
body. As such, Atheism and Agnosticism as well as all of naturalistic
(atheistic) evolutionary theory now hang on the notion that
life on earth as we know it did not come about from the evolution
of a living cell on this planet, but from the evolution of
a living cell on another planet that came here most likely
through a meteor shower of some kind. The quotes below are
intended to demonstrate that this remarkable claim, that life
on earth came from outer space, is now a major premise in
the scientific search for an unintelligent explanation for
the origins of life.
1) On the other hand, it is believed that our young planet,
still in the throes of volcanic eruptions and battered by
falling comets and asteroids, remained inhospitable to life
for about half a billion years after its birth, together with
the rest of the solar system, some 4.55 billion years ago.
This leaves a window of perhaps 200-300 million years for
the appearance of life on earth.
This duration was once considered too short for the
emergence of something as complex as a living cell. Hence
suggestions were made that germs of life may have come
to earth from outer space with cometary dust or even,
as proposed by Francis Crick of DNA double-helix fame, on
a spaceship sent out by some distant civilization.
- American Scientist article
NOTE: The reason that scientists now assume that life
on earth had to be imported from some other planetary body
(perhaps even via a space ship) is that earth's history involved
major cataclysmic events that would make it impossible for
life to have evolved on earth. The next quote from Discover
will describe these reasons in greater detail.
2) Astronomers and geologists were discovering that Earth
had a violent infancy--hundreds of millions of years after
the planet had formed, giant asteroids and comets still crashed
into it, burning off its young atmosphere and boiling away
its oceans. In the process, they also destroyed all the chemicals
that researchers assumed were in liberal supply on the early
Earth, including the building blocks of lipids.
Research now suggests that the source was extraterrestrial.
Comets and meteorites evidently brought seeds of creation
to replace the ones they had destroyed, in the form of hundreds
of different organic carbon molecules synthesized when the
solar system was a swirling disk of gas and dust. After the
last atmosphere-killing impacts--about 4 billion years ago--smaller
comets, meteorites, and dust from space could, in the space
of a few hundred million years, have brought enough organic
carbon to cover the planet in a layer ten inches deep.
Deamer wondered whether space could also supply him with his
membranes; specifically, he wondered whether he could dig
them out of a 200-pound meteorite that had fallen in Murchison,
Australia, in 1969 and that was positively tarry with organic
carbon. In 1985 he traveled to Australian National University
in Canberra to study it. "The question was," he says, "are
there any things in the meteor that form bilayers?" If so,
it would be fair to assume that after impacts of similar meteorites
in the ocean billions of years ago, such substances could
have washed up onshore in a tide pool, dried, and then been
rehydrated.
Deamer ground a piece of the Murchison meteorite and extracted
the organic carbon, made it into a slurry, dried it, and then
added water again. "I took that ordinary extract and put it
on a slide; I didn't know what I was going to see. It was
a wonderful surprise--the whole slide began to fill with these
beautiful little vesicles. I started taking pictures immediately.
It's like what they say about seeing a UFO--you want to get
your shots in. I can remember running downstairs to a lunch
group of my colleagues and showing the pictures, and they
looked at them and said, ÔFrom meteorites?' It was pretty
hard to believe." - Discover article
NOTE: According to this longer description, the early
history of the earth involved bombardments from meteors and
such which would have followed any initial developments of
life on this planet, and which would have destroyed any such
developments in the process. Both of these two quotes also
clarify that, due to these series of cataclysms, a long enough
time frame would not be available for life to originate on
earth. Thus, life on earth, must have fallen from the heavens,
as the following two quotes also exemplify.
3) To what extent these substances arose on earth or were
brought in by the falling comets and asteroids that contributed
to the final accretion of our planet is still being debated.
- American Scientist article
4) Deamer was encouraged by this work--he had found hints
that meteorites supplied material to form membranes that could
have enclosed complex genetic molecules and could have trapped
energy. - Discover article
NOTE: Now we will conclude this article with a series
of similar quotes, all of which indicate that scientific theory
incorporates the notion that life arose on some other planetary
body and then came to earth.
5) The clues come from the earth, from outer space, from
laboratory experiments, and, especially, from life itself.
- American Scientist article
6) The final demystification of organic chemistry has been
achieved by the exploration of outer space. - American
Scientist article
7) That such processes indeed take place is demonstrated
by the presence of amino acids and other biologically significant
compounds on celestial bodies--for example, the meteorite
that fell in 1969 in Murchison, Australia, Comet Halley (which
could be analyzed during its recent passage by means of instruments
carried on a spacecraft), and Saturn's satellite Titan, the
seas of which are believed to be made of hydrocarbons.
- American Scientist article
8) The first hints that this might be so came from the
laboratory, before evidence for it was found in space, through
the historic experiments of Stanley Miller, now recalled in
science textbooks. - American Scientist article
9) Although the primitive atmosphere is no longer believed
to be as rich in hydrogen as once thought by Urey, the discovery
that the Murchison meteorite contains the same amino acids
obtained by Miller, and even in the same relative proportions,
suggests strongly that his results are relevant. - American
Scientist article
10) According to most experts who have considered the problem--notably,
in relation with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
project--there should be plenty of such sites, perhaps as
many as one million per galaxy. If these experts are right,
and if I am correct, there must be about as many foci of life
in the universe. Life is a cosmic imperative. The universe
is awash with life. - American Scientist article
Sources
http://www.americanscientist.org/articles/95articles/cdeduve.html
September-October 1995
The Beginnings of Life on Earth
by Christian de Duve
http://www.discover.com/archive/index.html
First Cell
By Carl Zimmer
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