Some scientists are now admitting the unlikelihood of comets having played a role in delivering life or its ingredients to Earth. Gee, where do you think you’ve heard that before?
“It’s Kind of a Romantic Idea”
From the University of Cambridge:
Comets didn’t seed life on Earth after all, a new study suggests, potentially overturning a century-old idea.
The theory that comets delivered the molecular building blocks for life on Earth is a long-standing one, since comets are known to carry many of these molecules. However, a new study challenges this idea.
The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, found the cometary delivery of these building blocks would be — at best — a ‘one-off fluke’, and not the steady rain of prebiotic molecules that had been theorised.
Using computer modelling, the researchers determined that comets travel too fast and at too sharp an angle to Earth’s atmosphere for the fragile organic molecules to survive: they would almost certainly vaporise on impact with the surface. However, the researchers also found that another planet in our system — Mars — could be a slightly more promising candidate for cometary delivery of prebiotic molecules, although this is still highly unlikely. The results are published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“Historically, scientists thought that comets were important for the origin of life on Earth, because they carried carbon and nitrogen-bearing molecules, so these giant space snowballs were almost like a ‘get out of jail free card’ that brought all the molecules a planet would need to seed life,” said lead author Dr Richard Anslow from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. “It’s kind of a romantic idea, but our results suggest it’s highly unlikely.” [Emphasis added.]
Note the telling phrase, a reference to the game Monopoly, from Dr. Anslow: the comet theory had been “almost like a ‘get out of jail free card.’”
No Information and No Design
Yes, you’ve heard much the same from advocates of intelligent design in the past — along with the even more fatal problem for abiogenesis that “molecular building blocks” without information content and intelligent direction take you not even one inch toward the origin of life (OOL).
It all falls under the heading of undirected panspermia, and astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez talked about it with geologist Casey Luskin on ID the Future. From, “Did First Life Come From Space? Not Likely, Says Astrobiologist” in connection with the 2021 book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, co-edited by Dembski, Luskin, and Holden:
Undirected panspermia is the idea that the first life on our planet came from outer space, carried by chance processes from a faraway living planet on space dust, asteroids, or comets either from within our solar system, or from another star system to here. The idea of panspermia was inspired by the extreme difficulty of satisfactorily explaining the chance origin of life on planet Earth. Two of the idea’s earliest proponents, Gonzalez notes, were the scientists Lord Kelvin and Svante Arrhenius, each with a different take. Gonzalez argues that our increasing knowledge about the conditions of interstellar space renders the idea of life successfully hitchhiking around trillions of miles and millions of years from a faraway star system to our big blue marble unlikely in the extreme.
Coppedge Rolling His Eyes
The “building blocks” idea is related to this, and now scientists are being compelled to concede that it’s not a very hopeful solution, either. We were talking about all this going back to at least 2014.
- “European Space Probe Lands on Comet, Heralded by Overheated Promises of Solving the Enigma of Life” (2014)
- “Origin-of-Life Research: Start Over” (2016)
Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, once the subject of excited speculation, is pictured at the top. A decade ago, David Coppedge rolled his eyes: “Hardly a month goes by without a celebration in the news that the ‘building blocks of life’ have been found somewhere in space, or that chemical reactions ‘show how life emerged’ on the primitive Earth.”
Explaining life’s origin through purely material processes without intelligent design just took another step backward. Life itself being delivered by comet was far-fetch already. If even its ingredients couldn’t make it here that way either, that’s an even greater disappointment for materialists.