Time Immortal

…although the idea that an inbound meteorite might have catalyzed the eventual “dominance” of so-called “left-handed” amino acids (a pre-requisite for the evolution of life on Earth) is, if nothing else, interesting.

I could do without the metaphysical leap at the end of the article, though:

“This work is related to the probability that there is life somewhere else,” said Breslow. “Everything that is going on on Earth occurred because the meteorites happened to land here. But they are obviously landing in other places. If there is another planet that has the water and all of the things that are needed for life, you should be able to get the same process rolling.”

I suppose its entirely possible that meteor impacts had the effect that Ronald Breslow (Ph.D., Columbia University) and his team is proposing, and if so it is certainly a most interesting path by which some of the necessary pre-conditions for the emergence of life on Earth were set up. Of course, if it did happen that way, it doesn’t really tell us all that much about the probability of life anywhere else in the galaxy, or the Universe (I’ve said before that in articles such as this, the discussion tends to jump all too quickly to the issue of alien life) — the meteor and the amino acids it brought with it would still have had to land on a planet that had all the other pre-requisites for life already in place (i.e. a certain climate, water, ample light but controlled exposure to harsher radiation spectra, etc.). For all we know there is a scarcity of planets on which such conditions arose (we also lack any assurance that such conditions would persist; for all we know, there may be a very tiny window in a planet’s evolutionary cycle in which the potential for the emergence of life exists).

But as I said, the article ends with Breslow making a bit of a metaphysical leap in claiming that the meteor just “happened to land here.” That’s certainly one interpretation, but an equally valid interpretation would be to observe the somewhat poetic metaphor that exists in the meteor “touching” down on Earth, kindling the first necessary reactions that brought about life on this world (think: finger of God). Either way, it’s a metaphysical leap, not a scientific statement, and seems out of place in the article as a whole.