comets

In the story we ran yesterday, “‘Compelling new evidence’ claimed for comets generating phosphates for earliest life,” we noted that our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon thinks that the idea that building blocks of life came from space is plausible and should be demonstrable. He offers his somewhat controversial thesis here: — I’ve argued elsewhere that the presence of cyanobacterial and eukaryotic microfossils on carbonaceous chondrites (comet fragments that land on the Earth), is evidence for ubiquitous cometary transport of life throughout the solar system and galaxy. This makes Darwin’s theory moot, because extraterrestrial transport destroys any “tree of life” that relies only on terrestrial modifications. It may also explain why NASA is adamantly opposed to publishing/acknowledging these discoveries. Every Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Little was known about a key element in the building blocks, phosphates, until now. University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers, in collaboration with colleagues in France and Taiwan, provide compelling new evidence that this component for life was found to be generated in outer space and delivered to Earth in its first one billion years by meteorites or comets. The phosphorus compounds were then incorporated in biomolecules found in cells in living beings on Earth. The breakthrough research is outlined in “An Interstellar Synthesis of Phosphorus Oxoacids,” authored by UH Manoa graduate student Andrew Turner, now assistant professor at the University of Pikeville, and UH Manoa chemistry Professor Ralf Kaiser in the September issue of Nature Communications. … Read More ›

Delivered by comets. Abstract: We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is multifactorial. One particular focus are the recent studies which date the emergence of the complex retroviruses of vertebrate lines at or just before the Cambrian Explosion of ∼500 Ma. Such viruses are known to be plausibly associated with major evolutionary genomic processes. We believe this coincidence is not fortuitous but is consistent with a key prediction of H-W theory whereby major extinction-diversification evolutionary boundaries coincide with virus-bearing cometary-bolide bombardment events. A second focus is the remarkable evolution of intelligent complexity (Cephalopods) culminating in the emergence of the Octopus. A third Read More ›