Using a powerful laser, scientists managed to recreate in the laboratory what could be the original spark of life on Earth. To do this, they warmed the clay and chemical broth with a laser to simulate the energy of an asteroid crashing into the planet. Ultimately, what turned out to be important building blocks of life has turned out.
The results do not prove that this is how life appeared on Earth about 4 billion years ago, and some scientists are not at all impressed with the results. But this experiment reinforced the old theory.
"The results showed that the emergence of life on Earth is not the result of chance, but a direct sequence of conditions of the primary Earth and the environment," the researchers summed up in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Laser arson produced all four chemical bases needed to create RNA, the simplest basis of life, when compared with DNA. After these reasons, there is a place for many mysterious steps that life had to go through in order to develop. But this experiment can be a potential starting point in this process.
Scientists could recreate RNA bases in other ways using chemical mixtures and pressure, but this is the first experiment that confirms that the energy of space bombardment could cause a critical chemical reaction, says lead author Svatopluk Tsivis from the Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry in Prague.
Tsivis said that scientists used a laser of almost 150 meters in length to heat the chemical broth for an split second with an invisible beam. The laser power was so high and concentrated that a billionth of a second of its operation was equivalent to the output power of several nuclear power plants. As a result, for a fraction of a second, a billion kilowatts of energy was concentrated on a small piece in a fraction of an inch, which warmed up the broth to 4200 degrees Celsius, writes Phys.org.
It is believed that the early forms of life on Earth in an incomprehensible way evolved during a period called the Late Heavy Bombing, when the asteroid belt in our solar system was larger and crashing space attacks on our planet more often, writes research co-author David Nesvorny Western Research Institute in Colorado. Then asteroids bombarded the Earth ten times more often than before or after that.
The opinions of other experts on the importance of the experiment were divided.
Steve Benner, an outstanding biochemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Florida, says that the experiment is quite relevant because it produced starting material that could well have appeared on young Earth.
But John Sutherland of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge believes that the amount of the substance of one base formed so little that the results can not be called relevant. Other scientists also advised the experiment leader not to exaggerate their merits.
An alternative theory of the appearance of life on Earth implies that microbes came here from space on a comet or an asteroid — such is the seed of life. The work of Tsivis implies that instead of the seed there was the fire of life. This is the theory of creation and destruction at the same time.
In order for this entire chemical reaction to work, the incredible energy of an asteroid's collision had to break up the molecules into less complex chemicals, which would then be rearranged into more vital combinations. Nesvorny says that such an asteroid that sowed a spark of life on Earth, after billions of years, could have killed dinosaurs.
The article is based on materials .
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