14 DAY TRIAL // How it was exactly that life emerged on our planet is, at least for the time being, one great big mystery. Interestingly, it looks like it could be that, as proposed by some scientists, it was repeated collisions with cosmic debris that livened things up here on Earth. Literally.
In a recent series of experiments, a team of Japanese researchers simulated the chemistry of having meteorites, i.e. pieces of debris from outer space, crash-land in ancient oceans here on our planet. They found that, rather than give rise to mayhem and mayhem alone, such impacts can instead turn out to be surprisingly life-friendly.
It all comes down to chemistry
In a report in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the Tohoku University scientists explain that, according to their data, having meteorites strike Earth and land in bodies of water such as oceans can result in the creation of chemical compounds such as nucleobases and amino acids.
What makes these compounds quite special to scientific research is the fact that they count themselves among the building blocks of life, the researchers further detail.
Not to overly complicate things, amino acids are the ingredients of proteins, which in turn means they are present in each and every cell in our body. As for nucleobases, they are what DNA is made from. So, yes, they too are one of the key ingredients of life as we know it.
Turning back to the Japanese researchers and their work, their discovery that meteorite impacts on oceans can form both nucleobases and amino acids does suggest that space debris might have had a say in the emergence of life here on Earth.
“The present results expand the possibility that impact-induced reactions generated various building blocks for life on prebiotic Earth in large quantities through the use of terrestrial carbon reservoirs,” the team write in their paper in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
Then there's the other explanation
While it might be that meteorite hits cooked up the building block of life on our planet, other scientists have a somewhat different scenario in mind when it comes to explaining how Earth got its first dwellers, be they merely microscopic organisms.
In a nutshell, there are voices that say meteorites didn't so much create the building blocks of life when impacting Earth, but brought them all the way from deep space. It's what researchers like to call the theory about extraterrestrial delivery of all the ingredients needed for life to appear.
