An Organic Cosmos

December 28, 2024 8:52 AM

The Cosmos Teems with Complex Organic Molecules "Organic molecules — compounds containing carbon — abound on Earth, especially in the bodies of living things. They’re often called the building blocks of life, and for good reason: Carbon atoms can chemically bond to four other atoms and easily form long, stable chains that serve as “carbon backbones” for complex biological molecules. The Rosetta mission and others have shown just how ubiquitous organic molecules are in space, too." [Spoiler: Still no evidence of life beyond Earth, but lots of cool science in the article]
posted by gwint (12 comments total)

In the hot, gas-rich environments around dying stars, she explained, “it’s quite easy to put carbon atoms together into pretty large molecules.”

They must have those fancy Tweezerman tweezers.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:05 AM on December 28 [4 favorites]

Cool article.

A bit of a reach technically, but that's most of these sort of articles. The concepts are good enough for me. The idea of "space" being sterile, empty and lifeless not being taken as gospel is good, and pushing boundaries in these regards is also good.

It can be tough to wrap my head around how much the observable universe has gotten larger just in my lifetime. That wide view long exposure shot from Webb(I think?), with the multitude of galaxies was a real eye-opener.

Douglas Adams was right about space.
posted by Sphinx at 9:28 AM on December 28 [2 favorites]

Spoiler: Still no evidence of life beyond Earth, but lots of cool science in the article

I want to believe.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 9:39 AM on December 28 [1 favorite]

All the ingredients for space viruses exist, but they are a very large leap and it will be a remarkable discovery.

Rosetta raises our understanding of the odds of life on other planets because so much surface area and so much reaction time and so much variety of reaction conditions makes the "1000 monkeys on typewriters-shakespean brute-force" thing scales of magnitude easier. The fact that space is littered with the fuel and components of cellular life is... a bit terrifying really.

Also, as an aside about the FPPS aside, Viking Mars lander in 1976 found evidence of life (active metabolism upon hydration)
in martian soil and follow up proposals to investigate chirality were rejected by conservative NASA administrators exactly because they could add to the evidence. The public non-life explanations of martian soil chemistry are barely internally coherent let alone consistent with our existing chemical knowledge, both at the time and now.

its a great case study in the philisophy of science " we designed an experiment thst if it gives X these results, it means Y".

experiment gives X results. "Well, it can't be Y, so we'd better change our analysis and never do the experiment again or any followup".
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 9:50 AM on December 28 [2 favorites]

It took longer than it should to find the publish date on that page. I assume it's the publish date because it's the only date on the page, but it appears in a place where it might instead be the date the author profile was created. Very confusing.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 10:18 AM on December 28

One of the interesting makes sense possibilities is that adenine, one of the four bases that carries the info in nucleic acids, is essentially a polymer of inorganic cyanide / Prussic acid = (HCN)₅.
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:24 AM on December 28 [1 favorite]

We're still untangling the evolutionary history of amino acid usage on earth (this was published last week)
posted by lalochezia at 11:05 AM on December 28 [1 favorite]

No climate - no food wrote: "Viking Mars lander in 1976 found evidence of life (active metabolism upon hydration) in martian soil"

Did it really? As far as I know, there is still no evidence for life on Mars. A link to some source material would be appreciated.
posted by Termite at 1:07 PM on December 28

“Organic chemistry — it’s just kind of normal chemistry in the universe,” Schmitt-Kopplin said. “You always have a coevolution of the mineral world with the organic world.”

Right. We privilege organic chemistry, because we are made of carbon, but are the molecules they are seeing more remarkable than some "common" minerals like Ca₂(Mg, Fe)₅Si₈O₂₂(OH)₂? It's kind of unsurprising they are out there.

(It's true you can get very elaborate long variations with carbon backbones that you apparently can't get with silicon, so life may need organic molecules in a way it doesn't need serpentine or jadeite. But those huge ones aren't the structures being detected.)

As for life on Earth, the hypothesis I believe is still leading the pack was that life happened in alkaline sea vents, which provide energy flux and convenient cell-size environments to exploit the energy and concentrate the chemical products of initial reactions. Under those conditions I'm not sure researchers consider the "early" stage carbon compound assembly to be a headscratcher, though it's certainly conceivable it made a difference if they were there already.

Mostly I do think a lot of this reporting and even research combines "space is cool" with "alien life would be cool" rather than giving the most likely path to explaining abiogenesis.
posted by mark k at 2:24 PM on December 28 [1 favorite]

As far as I know, there is still no evidence for life on Mars. A link to some source material would be appreciated.

Each of the two Viking landers carried four experiments to detect signs of life. Two of the experiments returned positive results, one negative, and one returned inconsistent results between Viking 1 and Viking 2. The positive results don’t necessarily mean that the Viking landers found life, but they did detect processes that their designers hypothesized would provide evidence for life.
posted by mbrubeck at 2:47 PM on December 28 [1 favorite]

more to the point, any one positive test was viewed as confirmation of life before launch, and the test that supposedly is negative fails to find life on some earth samples of soil and its measurements were overwhelmed by solvent (anyone who does NMR and uses non deuterated solvent can attest to the problem). But subsequent visits have been all geological and not biological or biochemical. But this is a digression.

the ubiquity of increasingly life-relevant organic compounds space as detected by spectroscopy, really is evidence that these molecules are easy to produce and durable in space conditions and make "andromeda strain" style space exploration plausible.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 3:41 PM on December 28

I'm a committed believer in the Mediocrity Principle. If there's intelligent life here, the galaxy must be lousy with it.
posted by Lemkin at 6:17 PM on December 28 [2 favorites]