aChristian1985 wrote:
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"Not only are organic molecules mechanistically permissible, but also direct evidence of their existence, in astounding proportions, elsewhere than on Earth is a fact."
"Astounding proportions , means what, exactly? Please quantify "astounding proportions" and provide evidence of this outlandish claim.
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These are the stuff of organic chemistry, the study of compounds producing, or produced by living organisms; and these are the kinds of reaction, which it now seems certain, are taking place between the stars.
"Between the stars"? In interstellar space, you mean? Where the temperature is 4 Kelvins and there's essentially nothing?
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Spectroscopic analyses kept coming up with results that showed less carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen than everyone expected to find there.
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The first substances detected in this way were nothing more than simple connections of the most common atoms: cyanogens (CN), carbon monoxide (CO), and hydrogen cyanide (HCN) But then formaldehyde (H2CO) was found, and before long formic acid (HCOOH), methanol (CH2OH) acetaldehyde (HCOCH3) and methyl firmate (HCOOCH3) turned up. One doesn't have to be a chemist to see that the progression is toward ever more complex organic compounds.
Acetaldehyde is rather far removed from cytochrome-C much less DNA.
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The chemical reactions permissible under cold conditions have been shown to be capable of producing a very high level of complexity of organic molecules, even up to the level of the basic constituent of all known life, DNA.
Evidence please. Where are those "peer-reviewed papers" that are always being demanded by the Anointed Ones?
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It is a big jump from prebiotic molecules in interstellar clouds to primitive organisms on a comet, but it is not an unreasonable one. When a comet gets anywhere near the sun, its water melts and could mingle with the trapped dust to produce a solution of organic molecules which, we know from spectroscopic analysis of Khoutek's comet in 1973, includes amino acids and heterocyclic compounds.
What? No DNA? No critters? Porquoi?
[quote]In other words, we don't depend on chance alone, but on chance guided by the laws of nature, and that should be enough. [quote]
"Chance guided by the laws of nature"-> humans.
That "should be enough." Do not forget A>B>C>D, the prime evolutionary scientific equation.
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That made it seem as though life were an inevitable product of high probability varieties of chemical reactions, and that the formation of life on the primordial Earth could not have been avoided.
All indications are that, given the constituency of the primordial?biosphere, the formation of life as we know it appears inevitable.
Not exactly Francis Crick's take on DNA synthesis.
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That means that of the 390 million civilizations in our galaxy, only 260 are as primitive as we are?an inconsiderable number. All the rest (meaning just about all of them) are more advanced than we are.
SETI instruments are simply overflowing with transmissions received from all those "civilizations" out there.
Well done, sir. Truly *science*.
™ Version 4.2
