The eternal may-have: “But in the early stages of Earth’s evolution, a young, active sun emitting more cosmic rays and a different atmospheric makeup may have allowed these cosmic visitors to nudge primitive, fragile biomolecules towards their forms we see today.”
Another recipe for the origin of life
You would think origin of life was like pizza. All we need is another wow recipe:
The magnetic polarization of muons—meaning they all share the magnetic orientation as they pass through the atmosphere and interact with the Earth’s surface, like raindrops all falling at the same angle—creates a type of radiation, which researchers think could have been what caused certain small differences in mirror-image lifeforms. This radiation doesn’t cause any danger to humans or the relatively stable DNA helix. But in the early stages of Earth’s evolution, a young, active sun emitting more cosmic rays and a different atmospheric makeup may have allowed these cosmic visitors to nudge primitive, fragile biomolecules towards their forms we see today.
PhysicsBuzz, “Particles from Space may have Given Early Biomolecules an Evolutionary Nudge” at PhysicsCentral
See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips – origin of life What we do and don’t know about the origin of life.