Expansionary Institute

Michael Zey
futurist3000@aol.com

NASA's Genesis mission may bring some answers to the numerous questions posed on the origin of life. According to BBC Online, Astrophysicists speculate that particles swirling around planets could have been transformed into the building blocks of life by the solar wind, then fallen to Earth as dust.

A Polish team told BBC that it has shown in the laboratory that when space dust is zapped with a high-energy beam of light, a biological molecule is formed. Other scientists are very skeptical about claims that life arrived on this planet from outer space.

The astrophysicists, based at Jagiellonian University, claim that the biological precursors of life are more likely to have reached Earth in the form of dust rather than during a comet impact.

The astrophysicists argue that dust would be more likely to enter the Earth's atmosphere without burning up, while any complex biological molecules carried by comet would be destroyed.

"The formation of terrestrial life is still an open question. It is believed that abiotic creation of simple biogenic molecules and then later chemical and physical transformation could lead to the generation of cells and then contemporary organisms," Professor Lubomir Gabla of Jagiellonian University said. "Some of the molecules synthesized in our experiment have a biologically active nature," he added.

Mark Burchell of the Physics laboratory at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, told BBC Online that space missions bring the scientists closer to answering the question of how life began on Earth.

"The problem in the laboratory is that you always can do things on a bench top," he said. "But did it really happen? If you think that you could have generated some of these building blocks out in space, the thing to do is go out in space and have a look," he added.

Two weeks ago, NASA launched the Genesis mission: an unmanned mission to collect solar winds and dust. The Genesis spacecraft will travel a million miles towards the Sun. During this trip, the craft will open a lid and expose a series of arrays ready to pick up solar wind particles.

After three years the lid will close and the craft will return to Earth with about 20 micrograms of solar wind. According to scientists, it is estimated that around 3,000 tons of interplanetary dust fall to Earth every year.
Source: BBC