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.

How Old Is God?

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We are used to living in a limited world. Everything around us has limitations-beginnings and endings. We are aware of infants being born, of grandparents dying. We observe animals, plants and insects beginning life. We see their lives come to an end. We speak of the birth and the death of civilizations, of storms, volcanoes and comets. We are accustomed to seeing things get old. Clothing and furniture wear out. Automobiles fall apart. Buildings deteriorate. Our bodies become wrinkled and slow. To mortal man everything has a beginning, a period of usefulness and an end. We mark this progression of events on our clocks and calendars.

To us, only what is measurable by hours, days and years seems to have real significance. So when we hear that God is eternal, that He always has been and always will be, our minds balk. The words tend to be meaningless because we have nothing familiar to relate them to. And that is just the problem: we are trying to relate what cannot be related in physical terms. We are trying to apply the limitations of the physical existence we know to the unlimited spiritual plane on which God lives. The two cannot be compared. Our minds can encompass an hour, a century, a millennium, but we cannot grasp past eternity. They are not big enough to fully comprehend spiritual existence. We can’t even fully comprehend the physical universe! As an illustration, let’s consider for a moment what God has created.

Astronomers estimate that 100,000 million galaxies each with 100,000 million stars dot the universe. And who knows how many planets and moons? God says He counts and names them all (Ps. 147:4). Now if we allow God one full second by our reckoning of time to count and name each star in the heavens, do you know how long it would take Him to name them all? Working nonstop, by our clocks and calendars, it would take more than 300,000 billion years just to count and name them. How long must it have taken Him to design and create all those stars? To us these figures are inconceivable. But not to God. God is eternal. One of His names in Hebrew is Yahweh-the “Everliving One.” The Creator is not bound by the laws of space and time as we are. While men are able to theorize about time warps and the relation of energy to the speed of light, God masters it all. To Him, according to His wishes, “one day … is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (II Pet. 3:8). God “inhabits eternity” (Isa. 57:15). That is to say He comfortably dwells in what we might think of as beginningless and endless time. Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1 show that at whatever point in the past we wish to consider as the beginning-no matter how far back we try to stretch our finite minds-God already existed. “In the beginning God…” Where did God come from? He didn’t “come from” anywhere. He was always there!