"Sustained wet–dry cycling on early Mars" - Curiosity Rover finds possible pre-conditions for 'life' on Mars.

"On the basis of this evidence for wet–dry cycling within surface environments, and considering the delivery of organics and accumulation of volatiles on the Martian surface for almost a billion years prior (Fig.4), our findings suggest that the Noachian–Hesperian transition period could have been favourable for the emergence of life—possibly more so than the earlier Noachian eon with its potential for perennially wet surface environments."
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s415...w5LKaUTrQ6A%3D

I object to this title. Not your choice of words, I'm sure, but the ceaseless repetition of a lie. Water on an otherwise barren planet ≠ Conditions for life. No atheist knows how life originated, and science has utterly failed to replicate life. Yet the notion is perpetuated that somehow electrocuting a few chemicals will do it. It won't.

Perhaps not, but it WILL create the organic compounds upon which life is based making life more likely to spontaneously occur. We are still working on finding the additional conditions under which that might depend, and cannot rule out conditions that might have existed on Mars.

Life on asteroids, anyone? https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard...t-in-asteroids

Not yet, but progress continues. There was a time when, before the invention of the microscope (roughly just 400 years ago), people thought primitive lifeforms like maggots spawned spontaneously. Little was understood even how lifeforms managed to continue to survive, how food is digested and transformed into fuel for survival. Before the microscope,nobody had any idea that primitive lifeforms existed on scales invisible to the unaided human eye. If you can find a Biology textbook from 1800, even 1900, and compare it to one from the year 2000, the difference is astounding. The difference between one from 2000 and one from 2020 is nearly as great in a mere 20 years as those 100 years apart.

While electricity does play a part in transforming simple organic compounds into precursors for life, current thinking is that hydrothermal vents very likely provided the environment for the first prokaryotes emergence. That word, prokaryotes, didn't even exist less than two hundred years ago. Nobody knew life could exist in the incredibly hostile environments there to previously known lifeforms in temperature, pressure and acidity prior to 1977, just a little over 40 years ago.

The salient point is the unknown grows smaller every year IF one actually wants to know what is possible.

That you are offended by even a hint of the search with tenuous conditional words like "possible" and "pre-conditions" seems to me to fit your religious convictions that one shouldn't even pursue such knowledge and instead just accept the words of superstitious people 2000-4000 years ago without question. It is understandable that you are offended, given your predilection, and I honestly feel for you for how upsetting that must be, but to conclude it is "a lie" is an egregious leap to a conclusion as of yet unsupported by objective, testable evidence.

I will paraphrase the words to you spoken by Georges LeMaitres to the then Pope who leapt to the conclusion that his evidence supporting his theory of The Cosmic Egg (named Big Bang by Fred Hoyle as a pejorative title) proved Creation. He said, (paraphrased) "That is a non sequitur. You should stick to what you know, scripture, and leave Science to scientists".

Scientific work indeed continues, but progress on self replicating cells originating on earth does not. That's why I object. Your quoted statement is demonstrably false. What has happened in the intervening 68 years since Francis Crick's paper on the double helix & dna is that our greater knowledge of the cell has excluded even the most remote chance that life could originate by chance. It was well described except in this case, it is not one, but a multiplicity of facts. Scientists can not bring themselves to admit the truth in this instance, as it brings their house of cards crashing down. I am simply pointing out that Water on an otherwise barren planet ≠ Conditions for life. There was plenty of water on earth and that doesn't facilitate cell parts assembling. It prevents them forming any of the fantastically complex cfhemical structures like folded proteins necessary. You can't build a Lego city if your environment doesn't allow the formation of a single Lego brick.

I think it strange to see an atheist bringing up religion on a subject like this. You wish to discredit my rational, logical views because you cannot deny the facts. As Alexander Hamilton once put it This constant repetition of a lie does no service to true science. It only serves the lie - the fiction that life occured spontaneously. But I note, enorbet that you are not on this thread to express your opinion. You're only here to argue with me expressing mine.

That is actually not true. Multiple fields provide additional clues every year. Except that nothing we know actually excludes that possibility, and every significant advancement in our knowledge of the subject makes it more likely that chance had help. Self replicating chemical compounds in the organic category are now well documented (old science) and conditions that generate primitive life match well with our understanding of conditions on earth at points int he distant path when life did begin. Scientists have no "house of cards" or agenda other than to find out the truth. Water IS a requirement for life as we know it. (Life based upon a different chemistry is possible, but we have no way to predict it or detect signs of it.) The discovery of water is not sufficient in itself, but is a prerequisite. What the recent article was about was not water alone, rather the discovery of periodic water event behavior that indicates cyclic conditions that increase the odds of more complex replicating compounds leading to life. This is exciting in itself, but also gives them a clue about where to look for more evidence.

Seriously? What "house of cards" and to what end? Quite literally every scientist, even those that worked methodically with objective evidence before the scientific method was even defined, like Hypatia (~360-417 AD) , throughout History that is remembered and celebrated became so celebrated by upsetting traditional beliefs, not at all by supporting some house of cards. Some like Hypatia and Galileo were jailed or even murdered by religious zealots who require Deus Ex Machina as the answer for everything, case closed, move on... nothing to see here.

On the flip side, Fred Hoyle had made a very seriously lauded reputation for himself in the early 1900's studying and discovering the evidence that backs up Nucleosynthesis, the creation of heavier elements from hydrogen and helium in stars, an extremely important milestone in Science. Then he proceeded to undermine his own status by refusing to even examine the evidence supporting the expanding Universe from a hot, dense beginning and doggedly hanging on to Steady State Theory. Albert Einstein began in that camp but Georges LeMaitres' evidence convinced him to change his conclusions.

I ask you, who is more widely known and whose work is taught and celebrated today and very likely for centuries to come and by contrast who is but a footnote? House of cards indeed!

For people who fit in the fundamentalist religion camp, as you do, business_kid, being a member of Jehovah's Witnesses cult, who hang on to the literal interpretation of scripture as irrefutable Divine Truth, any advances toward discovering a natural evolutionary process of chemistry to evolve what we see as living cells as a natural consequence of physical law and enough time, quite obviously undermines the very foundation of your belief system. Scientists, even scientists who also ascribe to some manner of spirituality, but not locked into scripture as Ultimate Truth, have no such belief system and are not threatened by searching for a natural Evolutionary process.

So, who is it that has an unquestioning faith and a vested interest in a house of cards and is, in fact, a detractor of scientific discovery?

Did they find some beer? I don't think life is possible without.

That's quite disingenuous. Every chasm remains in the process of a cell assembling itself. You guys can't tell me how it happened. Nobody can even finish the explanation: "Perhaps life began <this way>......" There's been no valid hypothesis in 60+ years and yet you guys are waffling about progress? I agree water might be necessary to support life, and oxygen. But both would be fatal to life beginning. That's one of the many reasons it never happened. I see a stubborn refusal to accept the fact that self replicating cells did not assemble themselves from inorganic chemicals. Of course atheists need the false to be true.

The "house of cards" I referred to I thought was obvious. But seeing as you both ask:
The science shows the impossibility of cells assembling in a natural environment. I will mention two catch-22 show stoppers. Be kind enough to address them if you have more to say.

You need proteins and nucleotides in a cell. But to make nucleotides you need proteins. To make proteins you need nucleotides. So which came first?

A cell must live inside it's sac. If that is punctured, the parts come out and it dies. Cells are formed by binary fission inside a cell sac, which is then split in two, housing both cells inside their sacs. So how did the first cell form inside the first cell sac?

Now in the atheistic scenario: without the impossible, = life forming by chance, there's no life on earth, nothing to evolve. No vegetation, no Microbes, no higher life forms. That's the house of cards. So there'a a lot resting on a lie. Here's the situation on earth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4sP1E1Jd_Y

That's not quite true. It is true that DNA can only be synthesised by protein enzymes and proteins nowadays are encoded by DNA, so each needs the other. But most biologists think that the earliest life used RNA as its blueprint medium (as some viruses still do). RNA is single-stranded, so it can curl up into varying shapes and act as a chemical catalyst just as protein does. Sooner or later there would be an RNA molecule that could autocatalyse its own formation so that it would become common and would naturally spawn variants that could catalyse the formation of other RNAs. In other words, there would eventually be a kind of genome of useful RNAs.

Some of these RNAs would be able to catalyse protein formation; present-day life uses an RNA complex called a ribosome for precisely this purpose. And since proteins make better catalysts, they would eventually take this role over. DNA probably evolved fairly late as a back-up tape for RNA, since it is much less vulnerable to mutation.
The two main divisions of prokaryotic life, archaea and bacteria, have chemically different cell membranes (eukaryotes like us belong to the archaean branch). So the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) obviously didn't have a cell membrane. It may well have evolved within porous rocks in alkaline deep sea vents with each pore acting as a cell. Membranes only became necessary when LUCA escaped into the open ocean.

Speculative I admit but not unreasonable.

It certainly appears that yeast existed before any higher life forms (along with bacteria and early virus) so naturally occuring beer may have predated anything other than single cell life.

In response to
business_kid replied...

That's not at all disingenuous. It's a fact. wpeckham specified "clues" not conclusions. Disingenuous would be like leaving Chicago saying you're headed to Los Angeles when you're actually heading South. What wpeckham said was like. "We left Chicago headed for LA and today arrived at Denver". Depending on what route he would take he might possibly choose a road that was closed due to avalanche or landslide and have to backtrack for a detour to another route, but he would still be honest and accurate saying he was en route to LA.


That statement is inaccurate. There have been hypotheses, just insufficient data as of the first half of 2023 for a formal theory. Here you may find an interesting if still controversial hypothesis. I chose this one as a single example though there are quite a few others, some similar and some opposed and this is readily available publicly and the speculative bits aren't overly wild. More data will shed more light and either rack up some positive points or shed doubt, and at some point possibly falsify those speculative bits but it does qualify as "valid hypothesis" for important "legs of the trip". Just because gaps remain does not imply the only possible answer is "God made Adam from clay and Eve from his rib".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LhBZ2H5SwM


Not so. Water needn't be fatal, might even be required, and oxygen WAS fatal to early life. Oxygen was released into the ocean and atmosphere in mainly 2 stages or epochs and was in fact one element responsible for the destruction of early prokaryotes leading to the domination of eukaryotes. It is not established fact that "self replicating cells did not assemble themselves from inorganic chemicals". If I am mistaken on that point, please be so kind as to cite the source of the refutation.

Here is an extremely important and mistaken assumption.

I can't be expected to speak for all atheists since it is not a homogenous belief system and I am but one individual atheist. I assure you that I have no need for "the false to be true". I do not hate God. I simply am convinced there is no Supreme Being Creator of All Things, but I wish it were true that some such entity did exist. I'd positively LOVE to know I have an immortal soul. I'm simply unconvinced and frankly don't see any way I could become convinced. I strongly suspect I am a prisoner of my environment with far too puny a brain to comprehend such a vast concept.

Yet it seems you, and many fundamentalist believers, need to assume atheists hate God or have some aversion to living by rules or something else I don't fully grasp. I am not demonic nor the spawn of Satan. I don't believe in them either. I am aware of having none of those attributes. I am sincerely sorry if that disturbs your "pat hand" but it's true. I have no clue how it could be accomplished but if scientific evidence led to a Creator I'd have no problem accepting that. I'd be grateful.

Though I sincerely doubt you watch any videos I post links for, I did watch yours even though I knew it would make me frustrated and angry. The Discovery Science Channel is a part of Discovery Institute and they are proven liars who know they are lying. This is established fact in a court of law for Dover vs/ Kitzmiller. They lied before the trial, denied it during trial and it was discovered in their own manuscript they had lied and knowingly lied. They lied during the trial and were caught doing it and then lied again after the trial. They even lie just by calling their Channel, Discovery Science, because in fact they are rabidly anti Science. Disgusting! They blatantly lie in the video you linked... either that or they have not the faintest of clue as to what Science actually is, and since the definition has been public for hundreds of years, that seems nigh impossible.

I rather expect such wackadoo nefarious sources from the likes of Young Earthers, but I am sincerely disappointed to witness it in you, business_kid. I thought you had better judgment than that.

Yes, there is a lot of speculation as you outline. No proof, no experiments, just talk. Yes, it is interesting to some. What always happens is that when someone apparently 'solves' one issue, you make another more impossible. For instance, take your cell sac example: the cell sac needs to expand to replicate, and then bisect itself. How does a rock pore do that?

Let's go one better and see it: Only 7 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFCvkkDSfIU

That is from a Ted Talk, and I suggest you skip the first 2 minutes and 50 seconds. Then it gets interesting. That's a very simplified DNA replication process. Every cell needs this. And that's not postulation. That's fact. Cell replication is depicted from about 6 minutes. It makes clear the vast chasm between the simple 'get-out-of-jail' postulations you outline and the most basic form of living object.

What's irritating is that scientists won't do what scientists should do, and call it B.S. Postulations continue in the charade that life is possible. Reality is ignored.

I'm surprised to have all this protest at my stating what is to me an obvious fact. My point was plain & simple. Water on an otherwise barren planet ≠ Conditions for life. I suppose I could have predicted enorbet would go on noising endlessly, but the facts are on my side. Have I gored some well-loved sacred cow, or something?

I wonder! I don't know of any religion which postulates a uniformly good post-mortem existence. Either there is a heaven and a hell, or there is reincarnation in a better or a worse earthly life. In all cases there is some kind of judgement (either a personal judgement by a deity or a mechanical working out of karma) and a bad outcome for those that fail it. I can see why a lot of people might find it comforting to believe that death is simply the end. There is such a thing as fear fulfillment as well as wish fulfillment!