Scientists Claim to Have Found Evidence 'the Origin of Life Started in Space'

Simply put, there's never been a bigger question in the history of humankind than "Where did we come from?" Not just us, but all living things. The fact we're here with the limited intellect to even ask the question and grope along in the dark through the incomprehensible scope of the universe searching for an answer is nothing short of a miracle. Even the fact living things came into existence, survive, and reproduce defies all the odds. Never mind that we've been given the mental capacity make such inquiries. As Carl Sagan famously put it, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

This scene in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey suggested that human development was guided by an ancient alien species, using 4 million year old monoliths as sort of celestial guideposts to point us in the right direction. 

There's another theory, referred to as "Panspermia," which is "the hypothesis that life exists throughout the universe and can be spread between planets, stars, or galaxies by microorganisms carried on meteorites, comets, or other cosmic bodies." Which always seemed to me to just be a way of avoiding the question. The real miracle is that basic elements in the cosmos came together to produce plants, fish, Monarch butterflies, the 1976 Oakland Raiders, and Ana de Armas. The issue is how. Whether these things happened in North America or on Tatooine is sort of small potatoes. 

But that is apparently what a group of researchers who didn't get a C- in Physics at Weymouth South High School seem to be leaning into. And they're going with the Galaxy Far, Far Away ... hypothesis.

Source -  Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international team of astronomers announced the detection of 17 complex organic molecules (COMs) in a protoplanetary disk surrounding a distant star. This includes the first tentative detection of ethylene glycol (CH₂OH)₂ and glycolonitrile (HOCH₂CN), which are believed to be building blocks of amino acids and their precursors. While these molecules have been detected in space before, this is the first time scientists have observed them in a planet-forming disk around a protostar, which offers tantalizing clues about the origin of life in the Universe.

The team was led by Abubakar Fadul, a visiting scientist with the Department of Planet and Star Formation at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA). He was joined by fellow MPIA members and researchers from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Columbia University, Purdue University, the University of California Berkeley, and the University of Michigan. ...

The organic molecules they identified were found in the disk surrounding V883 Orionis, a protostar located about 1,350 light-years away in the constellation Orion. COMs are molecules with more than five atoms and at least one carbon atom. The detection of glycolonitrile is especially significant since it is a precursor in the amino acids glycine and alanine, and the nucleotide base adenine, one of the four that make up DNA and RNA. The discovery of COMs in the protoplanetary disk of V883 Orionis has helped resolve an enduring puzzle regarding the evolution of organic molecules in star systems. 

Just in case you didn't catch what I was implying just now, I'm the mediocre student at a public school I was referring to. In fact, I was one of the kids who didn't get caught cheating on the Chemistry final, but only because I wasn't ambitious enough to take Chem. All that studying would've cut into my time playing Strat-o-matic baseball and watching Archie Bunker. So far be it for me to question people with all these impressive people with their Mr. Spock brains and bowl of Alpha-Bits cereal in all their titles. 

But that's precisely what I intend to do. 

Assuming their findings are correct and these molecules are zizzing around space like interstellar Amazon packages, getting left by "cosmic bodies" on the front porch of inhabitable planets like ours, what does that prove? Finding "building blocks of amino acids and their precursors" is all fine, not to mention dandy. Good on you fellas.

But that still leaves is the big question of how they went from attached to some delivery comet, into becoming Ana de Armas.

It's not like they just randomly assembled themselves into a shape that's pleasing to the eye of our species' leader, Tom Cruise. I mean, there are elements of iron, copper and nickel in rocks spinning around protostars in Orion. But it take more than that to get the 1968 Ford Mustang Mach 1 Fastback Steve McQueen tore around San Francisco in in Bullitt. 

Of course, I have my answer. It comes in a book I've been using for a little casual beach reading this summer. Where the main character is eternal, but the universe is not. No, not that book. It's called "The Return of the God Hypothesis," by frequent podcast guest (he was on Joe Rogan some months ago) Stephen Meyer.

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In it, he describes the enormously small odds any of the basic proteins these eggheads are talking about could ever assemble themselves into living organisms. And the much, much longer odds they'd be able to produce DNA, which contains actual information. A language all its own. Capable of being being passed down to future generation. I'd call them "genes," but I don't want to be accused of a hate crime:

It's like finding computer code and saying all the digits arranged themselves in the exact order you'd need to play League of Legends. Except far, far, FAR less likely. Meyer crunched the numbers:

I show that the probability of producing even a single functional protein of of modest length (150 amino acids) by chance alone in a prebiotic environment stands at no better than a "vanishingly small" 1 chance in [10 to the 164th power], an inconceivably small probability. To put this number in perspective, recall that physicists estimate that there are only [10 to the 80th] power elementary particles in the entire universe.

So thanks to the scientists for their hustle. But the more the big question from the beginning of this post gets asked, the more likely it becomes that we had the answer all along. We're here because someone made us.