Did Life Really Originate From Asteroid Microbes?

U of A scientist Christopher Herd with the Tagish Lake meteorite - http://www.vancouversun.com

Scientists are now fawning over a meteorite found in British Columbia, Cananda, supposedly containing evidence that asteroids are production sites for molecules such as amino acids which form the building blocks of life.

The space rock first crashed to Earth along the B.C.-Yukon border (Tagish Lake) in 2000, and now scientists are saying it contains important new clues about the building blocks of life and how they formed in the early universe more than 4.6 billion years ago.

“What we’re seeing are the ingredients of life,” said planetary geologist Christopher Herd at the University of Alberta. Herd and a team from NASA and several U.S. universities report in the journal Science today that they have found several types of organic molecules of “prebiotic importance” in fragments of the meteorite.

This indicates there may have been a “Goldilocks window,” when organic molecules formed on asteroids may have seeded Earth and other newly formed planets with the chemical precursors needed for life to emerge, Herd said. The analysis turned up a dozen different amino acids, which are used to build proteins and other molecules common in cell walls. (VancouverSun.com)

Herd believes that warmer temperatures in the asteroid and the presence of water and possibly certain minerals provide a good environment for certain chemical reactions needed to produce organic molecules, a class of carbon-based chemicals that living things are largely made of.

However, looking to microbes as early evidence of the building blocks of life, without substantial support, is merely straining at a gnat, and as evidence for life this is pathetic. But we shouldn’t be surprised at the waves this research is making, because in 1996 researchers also claimed they had found fossil bacteria on a meteorite from Mars. Eventually, most scientists decided that what the overeager scientists were really looking at was simply a rock.

“And in 2010, another NASA scientist claimed to have discovered bacteria in a California lake that redefined life—handily making alien life much more plausible. The microorganisms apparently used arsenic instead of phosphorus to make DNA. The implication was that this proved that there may be similarly non-conventional life in outer space using other non-phosphoric DNA. Despite all the now-almost-perfunctory hoopla, it turned out to be just another case of toxic junk science. (Trumpet.com)

I’m amazed at the extremes scientists will reach for to prove that alien life exists. And taxpayers spend millions of dollars annually funding projects run by ideologues and sloppy scientists, with the media hyping their preposterous stories. Why? Because they want to prove an evolutionary theory that life could have spontaneously sprung out of muddy water, evolve a system of DNA-type replication, then undergo a combination of random mutation and natural selection to create the millions of various and unique species that populate Earth today.

What’s galling is that all of this concludes with a complete lack of fossil evidence. Still, many desperately hold out hope that they can find life in outer space, even when you multiply the non-existent odds by trillions of planets. You have to really think about what is being said – that life came from dead material on some other planet, then ricocheted over here aboard a blasted-off piece of rock.

Even though looking at a rock and seeing alien life is ridiculous enough to make a small child chuckle, it allows adherents to cling to the cherished faith that God doesn’t exist. This type of godless existence permeates science, leading to half-baked guesswork and wishful thinking.

In July 2010, the journal Nature reported that there may actually be 300 sextillion stars in the universe. If true, that means the known universe is three times larger than previously estimated. But despite the vastness of the universe and the virtually infinite numbers of planets, not once has anyone discovered concrete proof of alien life. And with each upward revision in the size of the universe, the evidence gap becomes more obvious and harder to explain.

Surely, among a virtually infinite number of worlds, signs of extraterrestrial life must be more obvious than the pathetic evidence of organic molecules formed on asteroids with chemical precursors needed for life to emerge. Like the fossil record, the evidence for alien life is missing because it isn’t there.