SubJeff on 29/8/2013 at 22:38

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No they aren't.

And I'm an atheist.

Robert4222 on 30/8/2013 at 01:10

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EDIT: nothing

Caradavin on 30/8/2013 at 02:13

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Aren't these types of discussions (religion) prohibited or discouraged or something for this very reason? Someone might get offended. I've learned the hard way that discussing my religious beliefs in a forum can lead to persecution and attacks, and I'm a believer. I guess the discussion of religion itself could be safe it there was a way to make it objective, but there just isn't a way to do that because it is a personal belief. The same goes with controversial topics like abortion, people are unable to withhold personal feelings about the issue when they discuss it. Eventually, there is flaming all around and there will be no agreement or mutual ground. Anyway, it might be a good idea to close this thread, but I'm just giving my opinion.

demagogue on 30/8/2013 at 04:02

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In my humble opinion a discussion forum which can't discuss religion or politics and has to be reduced to "cats and weather", as a friend of mine would say, is a sad state of affairs, and happily never really been the case here.

That said, there isn't really a religious discussion here to be had anyway. It's about the science of the origin of life, which has theological implications to be sure, but all the cool things to actually talk about IMO are the scientific question of how important is oxygen to the start of life & how to solve the mystery that early earth didn't have much, and maybe at most the philosophical question of whether we should see ourselves or the natural living world on Earth any differently if we hypothetically understand it as not of terrestrial origin.

It'd mean we're all ultimately invasive aliens to this planet that don't naturally "belong" here, though we've done a fair job of taking it over & claiming it as our own. Maybe it's not a bad thing that we shouldn't feel so bold as to think this planet is really ours to claim, or even claiming it for anything in the living world for that matter, with such blase confidence.

Edit: In the big scheme of things, though, as the great Fred Hoyle taught us, every particle in our galaxy came from the same supernova'd entrails of our sun's predecessor anyway, much if it (every atom bigger than helium) synthesized from that very moment itself. So even discovering that some molecules got interplanetarily mixed up much later would kind of be playing second fiddle to that astounding & unsung little revelation about our origins that we've already known about for some time now.

Briareos H on 30/8/2013 at 08:39

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Yep, lighter, post-big bang elements are/were formed either through regular nucleosynthesis (within the star, then ejected) or through cosmic ray spallation (hit by a ray, then 'sploded).
Anyway, we still come mostly from stars and travelled on chondritic highways.
Pretty cool.

EDIT: RE: The OP.
Steven Benner is the cool dude who almost single-handedly invented synthetic biology so you can tell two things from that news article (I haven't looked into the paper itself, if there is one -- Zee News get zero cookies for not including a source):

* His work is to be taken seriously;
* This study is based on experimental results obtained in a lab. Extrapolating them to what happened in actuality in the interstellar medium or on proto-/early planets is not conclusive proof, as there might have been other synthetic pathways catalysing the formation of viable RNA without early molybdenum/boron, or those elements could have come from a different place. Chondritic origin of life is a very serious thing to consider, and those chondrites don't have to come from Mars.

Ultimately, I think the best way to approach it is what I believe demagogue wanted to put forward: In the early times of the solar system there were rocks everywhere swarming about, forming planets with very different compositions. The primitive Earth and even the protoplanetary disk were a melting pot of rocks from all over the place, probably already holding a few organic molecules. This study will help us understand better the dynamics of interactions within the solar system, as elements crucial for life might have come late after accretion from an external source, Mars being a good candidate. But other elements equally crucial for life had to either already be there or come from other sources for early life to assemble. In the end, the only place to which we can trace back the source of all life unequivocally is the stars.

P.S. Fuck religion :)