Martian Invasion?

[Ursa major]

Life may have started on Mars before arriving on Earth, a major scientific conference has heard. New research supports an idea that the Red Planet was a better place to kick-start biology billions of years ago than the early Earth was. The evidence is based on how the first molecules necessary for life were assembled.

[...]

The molecules that combined to form genetic material are far more complex than the primordial "pre-biotic" soup of organic (carbon-based) chemicals thought to have existed on the Earth more than three billion years ago, and RNA (ribonucleic acid) is thought to have been the first of them to appear.

Simply adding energy such as heat or light to the more basic organic molecules in the "soup" does not generate RNA. Instead, it generates tar. RNA needs to be coaxed into shape by "templating" atoms at the crystalline surfaces of minerals. The minerals most effective at templating RNA would have dissolved in the oceans of the early Earth, but would have been more abundant on Mars, according to Prof Benner.

From BBC News - Earth life 'may have come from Mars'.

 

[mosaix]

Yes, I saw this on the BBC text service at lunchtime. Thanks for posting the link U.M. - very interesting.

As an aside I think that I remember that the conference was being in Venice. Strange isn't it? These conferences are never held in Hull or Walsall.

 

[Ursa major]

As H. G. Wells didn't quite say:

Yet across the Gulf of Venice, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this resort destination with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans to hold a meeting there.
​

 

[StormSeeker]

So what happened? Did the lifeforms move on to another planet, or die out? Does that mean we could have some ex neighbours who might want to swing by their old turf again one day? o_0

 

[Foxbat]

I'm assuming meteorites or something similar were responsible for them getting here.

 

[ed9428]

I've also read somewhere that DNA may be something like 9 billion years old, but the earth is only 4.5 billion.

Meteorites carrying life to earth is a theory called panspermia. And I think why not.

 

[Mirannan]

Yes, I saw this on the BBC text service at lunchtime. Thanks for posting the link U.M. - very interesting.

As an aside I think that I remember that the conference was being in Venice. Strange isn't it? These conferences are never held in Hull or Walsall.

Odd, isn't it? Reminds me of the old lightbulb joke. How many town hall bureaucrats does it take to change a lightbulb? Thirteen. One to call a qualified electrician to change the bulb costing £200, a dozen to fly to Barbados for two weeks at ratepayers' expense to find out how it's done there.