The main planetary clinical network has become so obsessed with the search for life outside the global that it forgets how little we know about how life formed on our own planet.
Astrobiology, after all, is not just about locating life on planets surrounding other stars, or on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, but also about understanding how microbial life began on our own planet. Did he want the help of the meteorites that seeded the planet with the chemistry necessary for life to begin?
And life here was born more than once?And did this take place at the same time around our planet around the same time?
At least one eminent astrobiologist thinks it is conceivable that the answers to the last two questions are yes.
We still don’t know how life arose on Earth, Zita Martins, an astrobiologist at Portugal’s Instituto Superior Tecnico, told me in her office in Lisbon. But we have found small pieces of a puzzle that build this wonderful picture of prebiotic chemistry. , that is, what happened just before the birth of life. “We also know a lot more about chemistry, geology and physics when our solar formula started, and that’s data we didn’t have when I started 25 years ago,” he says. .
Life would possibly have originated in the two hundred million years after the formation of the Earth. But the oldest evidence of life dates back at least 3. 5 billion years.
As for how it happened?
Many of the biological molecules that make up cellular life are found in meteorites, asteroids and comets, Martins says. And this biological matter brought Earth early in Earth’s history, he says. But those same effects would possibly have also favored the emergence of life. through the creation of local niches in which life can also develop.
Nearly a decade later, Martins and his colleagues at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom simulated comets having an effect on a planetary surface. Such effects generate so much energy that that energy has to pass somewhere, Martins says. And obviously, the effect on power will be enough to break molecular bonds and create more complex molecules, he says.
Martins says that once Earth cooled enough to harbor liquid water on its surface, our planet reached a critical level at which life could begin to form. Same time.
But Martins also notes that it’s also vital to get a complete picture of the chemistry of the first solar nebula to perceive the raw curtain of the molecular parts that contributed to the evolution of early life here. chemistry that she and her colleagues continually locate in meteorites, comets and asteroids.
Knowledge about the composition of the fuel and dust from which our solar formula formed also gives us clues about the kind of interstellar chemistry that contributed to the first chemical building blocks of our early solar formula.
Martins wonders why life chooses bonded express molecules to use and not others that were available. That’s one of the things that doesn’t force us so much if we’re ever going to respond,” Martins says. “We can get a glimpse of what happened, yet I don’t know if we’re ever going to answer that question,” she says.
Then there’s our lack of insight into how life has enabled the big leap from undeniable prebiotic chemistry testing to biology, Martins says. to have from which life may have begun first, she says.
What intrigues Martins Maximum about the origin of life on Earth?
When it happened, why, and if there was an occasion that triggered the origin of life here, Martins says. “I’m interested to see if similar situations that happened when life was born here on Earth also happened elsewhere in the solar system,” she says.
Martins also wonders if life has evolved here more than once. Did you repeat several cycles of origin and destruction before even though everything stabilized?And is there any way to scientifically prove that life evolved here more than once?
That’s still a very difficult question to answer right now, Martins says. “We want to continue analyzing samples, doing fieldwork and reading other fossils to see if they have a normal genesis or not,” he says.
Will we ever come to perceive precisely how life began here?
“I don’t know if we’ll ever know precisely how and when life began on Earth,” Martins says. But certainly, we’ll know more about our solar formula situations before life starts here, he says.
Ironically, we spend all this time searching for life, but we still struggle to find an accurate definition of what life is. If you ask two other molecular biologists, you’ll probably get two other answers.
Being an autonomous formula capable of replicating itself is a very undeniable definition.
And he has a metabolism, obviously, she emits.
This leaves out viruses, which are parasitically and metabolically inert in nature.
As for the Martins?
Although viruses like Covid wreak havoc here on our own planet, Martins still doesn’t consider them a way of life, simply because they are not self-sufficient.