Alien life? -- your take on the subject

Did life's building blocks come from outer space?

Insight on origin of life????

No, but maybe Life's Tinker Toys...

I'm a biology major and we covered this a bit in one of my courses. If in life your talking like single celled organisms and not sentient per say. . . . . I remember in one my class that some of the basic building blocks of life like amino acids and some nucleic acids will spontaneously form under the right conditions which are hypothesized to exist during the pre-life stage of earth. So I think that its possible that over millions of years that life kind of evolved from just the basic elements but I think that some of the more complex basic elements could have been brought in on meteorites.

Hi midnight. I've read that gold isn't a naturally occuring substance and must have come from space.

http://chemistry.about.com/library/blau.htm

Gold is an element and you don't really make elements you just put them together to form other things. Everything that is natural is made from an element. . . . diamonds are made of carbon and water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. You don't really create or destroy elements out side of very high energy systems like the sun (fussion/fission processes) you just kind of rearrange them to form stuff like a diamonds and graphite are made of the same thing carbon atoms but they are arranged differently. I think in saying gold isn't natural its meant that it isn't essential to living systems (Http://www.webelements.com/webelements/scholar/elements/gold/biological.html)
A lot of the transition metals are not used by most living systems extensively like the mercury in thermometers is extremely toxic in any more than just trace amounts. (http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/text/Hg/biol.html)

I know gold is an element, but it isn't a naturally occuring one on Earth. I've read that all the gold had to have been created extraterresterially and then deposited here through some cosmic event. Unsure of source. Will check back when I have time.

didn't mean to sound condescending . . . . . yeah I'd like to see your source. . . . . I'm just confused at the idea of an element not being naturally occuring. . . . ooh I found this reference to an article in nature http://www.sciencenews.org/20000923/note7ref.asp. . . . . I'm going to look it up online and get back to you.

Really? What about Lawrencium? There are several super heavy elements that can only exist in a lab. By the way your link doesn't work.

Obviously, everything here on Earth came from space, but my point is that gold wasn't created here as a byproduct of any natural phenomenon, such as volcanic activity. Gold was created by the stars, possibly even the big bang. Here's a link that talks about it a little.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/heavy_metal_010823.html

"Elements heavier than lithium are all synthesized in stars. During the late stages of stellar evolution, massive stars burn helium to carbon, oxygen, silicon, sulfur, and iron. Elements heavier than iron are produced in two ways: in the outer envelopes of super-giant stars and in the explosion of a supernovae. All carbon-based life on Earth is literally composed of stardust."

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101bbtest2.html

That leaves only lithium, helium, and hydrogen that can "naturally" occur.

I'm sorry my link didn't it was referring to a paper published in Nature:

Holzheid, A., et al. 2000. Evidence for a late chondritic veneer in the Earth's mantle from high-pressure partitioning of palladium and platinum. Nature 406(July 27):396.

Only the abstract was available free of charge. It sounds like they are saying the larger than normal amounts of gold found in the earths crust had to come from some kind of outside source after the earth had begun to form.

Interesting, isn't it? Stars decay, form planets, and lifedust. This gives the chemical and biological unity of the universe. The same elements are present on the other side of the universe as they are in the solar system. Spectroscopy shows this.

Thus far, we can't detect the biological features of extrasolar planets, but we can detect the bigger planets, and that's fascinating.

Imo, it's evident that advanced (human-like) civilizations have detected us long, long time ago, probably from the moment Earth's fortunate bioforming. Just as we are now taking small steps in the exoplanetary field, exponentially advanced civilizations must be doing this since ages, and thus must have detected us, long before our young technological era.

Ergo, one should assume that the Earth must have been visited - at least once - and even more... Extraterrestrials must have played a certain role in the Earth's biological evolution. Wouldn't we garden a young, fructile planet?

There is good evidence for antique visits. The same saucer-shaped UFO's that we've been photographing since the '50s are painted on classical paintings and tapestries. No doubt about that.

Compare these(Argentinia, 1970's) to these(15th century).

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More on http://homepage.ntlworld.com/m.hurley/

Does the possibility of another intelligent species negate or confirm god? c.i.

I'm increasingly tending towards a scientific reading of Bible stories. It's interesting - although misused by certain religious sects - that the etymology for 'God' is 'Jahweh', and the etymology for 'Jahweh' is 'Elohim', which means 'beings from the sky'. I think that angels and heavenly creatures are probably not metaphors or symbols or fantasies, but primitive interpretations of real, and still happening events. It always was man's reflex to deify nature, Earth, life, the stars. But no indigenous culture has ever imagined real live beings to come from the sky for no reason.

I realize that this is an easily discreditable standpoint, but it makes more sense to read the Bible as a semi-realistic, more or less witnessed account, than as a kind of totally incomprehensible fantasmagorical epos with random moral implications.

So extraterrestrial life neither negates nor confirms God, but alters our perception of the whole universe, and gives ourselves godly features, as we are just as extraterrestrial to them as they are to us.

I don't know if I make myself clear. What do you think c.i. ?

Maybe the Star of Bethlehem was a flying saucer. And Ezekiel's wheel. And Moses' "Cloud by day and Pillar of Fire by night". And what about Elijah climbing to the heavens on a chariot of fire? There's plenty of stuff in the Bible that could be easily explained by alien visitation.

wolf, A lot of what you say makes sense, but I'm not that knowledgeable about the bible or the torah. And you point about godly features of humans to other aliens sounds reasonable, if we can assume life outside of our plant. The one thing that seems to permeate my thinking on human life is the fact that we are all decended from the first humans on earth. That to me is the most amazing of concepts. c.i.

Equus, that's the way I've always felt. There is also the stuff that happened in pre-historic Mexico and other incidences that just don't go away!

They won't come back because we are still a waring world - shoot first, ask questions later!

aliens
Wolf, what puzzles me is that believers in ancient alien visitors who were inclined to give ancient Maya, for example, the technological skills to build pyramids decided to give them only the most primitive knowledge. Why didn't they give them more advanced knowledge? And why do we assume that those stupid mayas could not have achieved what they did without outside help?

JLN and wolf, I'm going to be visiting Cuzco and Machu Picchu on April 30 to visit some Mayan ruins. It's going to be interesting to see first hand how 'advanced' their civilizatin was so long ago - somewhat on a par with Egypt. I've been to Egypt twice, but this will be my first visit to Peru and the Galapagos Islands. c.i.