Comet-Based Life?

“Life almost undoubtedly began in space,” writes LiveScience staff writer Ker Than this week, introducing new findings to be published in an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Astrobiology. We would agree—life did begin in space, since we note, tongue in cheek, the earth is certainly not outside of space!

This latest allegation is that life specifically began inside comets rather than on earth.

Humor aside, this latest allegation is that life specifically began inside comets rather than on earth. Astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University led a team whose calculations reveal that “it is one trillion trillion times more likely that life started inside a slushy comet than on Earth.”

Of course, what is left unsaid is these are calculations of life starting, effectively, by chance. And if the chance of that happening is infinitesimally small on earth, then one trillion trillion times more likely still isn’t very likely at all!

Wickramasinghe explains, “The comets and the warm watery clay pools in comets are settings in which the organic molecules are transformed into living structures in comets. That transformation is more likely in some comet somewhere in the galaxy than in any small pond on the Earth.”

Unfortunately for Wickramasinghe, even his fellow advocates of abiogenesis are rejecting the idea. “It looks to me as if their conclusions are constructed from a series of speculations, none of which is based on much evidence. It is a theory built on air, not solidly grounded in scientific facts,” according to David Morrison, a scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center.

Furthermore, research published just last week—and based on evolutionary assumptions—struck a powerful blow against the cometary-life hypothesis. In a story News to Note covered last week, we wrote:

It seems, then, that Wickramasignhe’s hypothesis is being torn apart quite well by his fellow evolutionists.

But perhaps more interesting is the researchers’ conclusion that the bugs’ resuscitation has put a freeze on the “life came from space” idea, known as panspermia to astrobiologists[.]

(Read more in last week’s second item.) It seems, then, that Wickramasignhe’s hypothesis is being torn apart quite well by his fellow evolutionists. But biochemist Paul Falkowski of Rutgers University unwittingly reveals the why behind evolutionists’ continued proposals of quaint ideas for life’s origin:

“These basic kinds of things are dependent on the beginning initial assumptions. I don’t know that we know the odds. We know the odds for exactly one planet, and it happened once, so everything else is a game.” [emphasis added]

Aha! The presupposition is laid bare: these scientists “know” life evolved from slime once, despite being unable to explain where, how, why, or when—the result, undoubtedly, when you leave out the who.

Meanwhile, in more news from the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence, an international team reporting in the New Journal of Physics has used computer simulations to show that it’s possible “for dustlike particles to divide, replicate, and even evolve.” We know God created Adam from the dust of the ground, but this new research seems to be taking it a little too far!

Somewhat humorously, this throws a small wrench in the current search-for-ET works, since today’s astrobiologists “have based all of their searches and instruments on the existence of carbon and—on Mars, for example—on minerals that only could have formed in the presence of water.” Instead, it seems they should be searching for interstellar dust devils.