Did Meteorites ( and Darwin's Little Warm Ponds) Start Life ?

[Oxytropidoceras]

Evidence suggests life on Earth started after meteorites

splashed into warm little ponds, PhysOrg, October 2, 2017

https://phys.org/news/2017-10-evidence-life-earth-meteorites-splashed.html

 

How did Life Start? Meteorites crashing into Darwin's

Little Warm Ponds May Have been Trigger, by Megham

Bartels, Newsweek.

http://www.newsweek.com/2017/10/27/how-did-life-start-meteorites-crashing-darwins-warm-little-ponds-was-possible-675655.html

 

The paper is:

 

Pearce, B.K., Pudritz, R.E., Semenov, D.A. and Henning, T.K.,

2017. Origin of the RNA world: The fate of nucleobases in

warm little ponds. Proceedings of the National Academy

of Sciences, vol. 114 no. 43, pp. 11327-11332

http://www.pnas.org/content/114/43/11327

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.00434.pdf

 

Yours,

 

Paul H.

[BobWill]

I'm really looking forward to seeing what they can learn from actual experiments that will test this idea. It's taking a long time and some tedious wrong turns as we inch closer to solving the mystery of abiogenisis but the progress is exciting to hear about.  It certainly makes sense that meteorites could be the catalyst since we know they can contain amino acids. Since a strictly panspermian model doesn't tell the whole story maybe this model will give us a more complete answer to the biggest question we haven't yet answered. I sure hope they can make the math work in the test tube.

[Ludwigia]

Very interesting, although I can't for the life of me follow the math, so I guess I just have to give them the benefit of the doubt. What I don't quite get is how are they so sure that the nucleotides or RNA polymers were delivered to the earth and didn't already exist here beforehand?