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Ryugu asteroid samples contain all DNA and RNA building blocks, bolstering origin-of-life theories (phys.org)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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[–] 64 points 7 months ago (8 children)

Religions should disband

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  • [–] 37 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    "God put it there"

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago* (4 children)

    Plus, religion and science aren't mutually exclusive. One of the guys who contributed to the Big Bang Theory was a priest. He's the one who theorized that the recession of nebula was due to the universe expanding (which Hubble later observed).

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    They are, but only if you try to resolve the conflict - that is, if you aim for philosophical consistency.

    I could believe that a unicorn magicked my lab into existence, and that elves and fairies make and sell the apparatus, and trolls with huuuge rubber stamps make the reference books I use.

    I could believe all that, and still do perfectly good science in my lab! Make novel and correct discoveries, and everything.

    But if I aimed scientific method, and modern epistemology, at my religious beliefs it'd become apparent that they're wrong.

    So what's required to have both "scientist" and "religious" bits flipped is double-think. Nothing new, and it's not surprising that scientists are as prone to it as any other demographic.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    There will always be a space for God behind the curtain of what we don't understand. And indeed, if you set to stone what God is, then when you lift the curtain a bit, then you have disproved God. But if you're more flexible about it, then their will always be a space behind the curtain we do not understand. And even if we would ever understand the whole mechanism of how the universe came to be, then we can still imagine there to be a meaning behind that whole mechanism. Add to that: science is about what we can observe. But if you believe there are things you can perceive that are not vested in observable phenomena, you have something that can never be disproved by science.

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    • [+] 33 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (11 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 25 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    An interesting hypothesis I read about focused on the era of the universe when everything was lukewarm. Literally an entire universe in the "sweet spot" for the building blocks of life to form and propagate.

    The idea is that the molecules would form, and then once the universe cooled further would freeze and be spread literally everywhere in similar asteroids. The rare part would be a location sufficiently stable in the goldilocks zone to evolve advanced life, not life itself.

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  • [–] -2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

    And that we should probably stfu instead of, you know, shooting golden maps to our planet out of the solar system.

    edit: you fools

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    • [–] 26 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Honestly, that's a very, very cool discovery and now I'm thinking that means we can be somewhat confident that the building blocks of life can be found floating in space but yet we don't see any kind of evidence of life in our decades of searching and that's kind of sad to me and thinking of that instead of working.

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  • [–] 27 points 7 months ago

    Sample size of 1, admittedly, but we’ve had life on earth for 4 billion years. We’ve had life capable of radio communications for about 50 years. That’s .0000000014% of the time life has existed. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad assumption to think that only that proportion of stars would have even had the time to get to this stage.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago*

    Well, the building blocks of life are far from being life. It's like finding bricks and randomly a building appears. Sure, given enough time, samples, and agitation, it'll eventually happen. It's far from saying that if you find bricks you should expect to find buildings though. As far as we can tell, even on Earth, all life has come from one source (they all share common traits), yet we have even further developed building blocks for DNA and RNA. Hell, we have actual DNA and RNA floating about.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago*

    Maybe we're slow learners and aliens are better at hiding than us because they know better. Maybe Mars is teeming with life under the surface. Though, I guess we'd detect some pretty huge signals like methane exhausts and what not, unless they're just also very good at hiding that. Maybe Jupiter's gas is an artificial smoke screen. We could also be a lot physically closer than we think to dormant alien AI left over from long dead civilizations.

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    • [–] 19 points 7 months ago

    Cesar Menor Salvan, an astrobiologist at Spain's University of Alcala not involved in the research, emphasized that "these results do not suggest that the origin of life took place in space."

    However, "with this and the results from Bennu, we have a very clear idea of which organic materials can form under prebiotic conditions anywhere in the universe," he added.

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    [–] 9 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    I like the idea of being the outcome of a violent collision.

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  • [–] 14 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Is your mum that kind of lady?

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    • [–] 3 points 7 months ago

    Religions should be disbanded by governments. They'll never disband in their own as it's a tool to control people

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    1 comment in c/astronomy@mander.xyz view that post
    [–] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    You can also identify aminoacids in molecular clouds that go on to form stars and planets e.g. https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/523/2/2876/7176071?login=false

    I'm just not sure if there is any research on whether this forms spontaneously on dust grains, like on a metal catalyst, or whether this is something ejected from a former star/planet that died...or...actual panspermia.

    Lots of organic molecules floating around in space eg https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2022/06/aa43575-22/aa43575-22.html

    https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsearthspacechem.1c00369

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234065515_Detection_of_interstellar_trans-ethyl_alcohol

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