Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Learning from life on Earth in the present day
- 2 Essentials of fungal cell biology
- 3 First, make a habitat
- 4 The building blocks of life
- 5 An extraterrestrial origin of life?
- 6 Endogenous synthesis of prebiotic organic compounds on the young Earth
- 7 Cooking the recipe for life
- 8 ‘It’s life, Jim . . .’
- 9 Coming alive: what happened and where?
- 10 My name is LUCA
- 11 Towards eukaryotes
- 12 Rise of the fungi
- 13 Emergence of diversity
- References
- Index
5 - An extraterrestrial origin of life?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Learning from life on Earth in the present day
- 2 Essentials of fungal cell biology
- 3 First, make a habitat
- 4 The building blocks of life
- 5 An extraterrestrial origin of life?
- 6 Endogenous synthesis of prebiotic organic compounds on the young Earth
- 7 Cooking the recipe for life
- 8 ‘It’s life, Jim . . .’
- 9 Coming alive: what happened and where?
- 10 My name is LUCA
- 11 Towards eukaryotes
- 12 Rise of the fungi
- 13 Emergence of diversity
- References
- Index
Summary
In Chapter 4, I stated that ‘interstellar matter provides the raw material for the formation of stars and planets’ and it should now be evident that interstellar matter may well have also been important starting material for the origin of life on Earth (Bernstein, 2006; Chyba et al., 1990; Ehrenfreund & Cami, 2010; Ehrenfreund et al., 2002). In fact, in Hazen’s phrase:
The bottom line is that the prebiotic Earth had an embarrassment of organic riches derived from many likely sources. Carbon-rich molecules emerge from every conceivable environment. Amino acids, sugars, hydrocarbons, bases – all the key molecular species are there.
(Hazen, 2005, p. 127)This being the case, and as there are so many plausible mechanisms for the synthesis of biogenic compounds in situ on planet Earth, it is surprising that so much attention has been given to the possibility that life came to Earth ready formed rather than originating here. The panspermia hypothesis claims that life exists throughout the Universe, with microbes drifting through interstellar and interplanetary space, transmitting life to the next habitable body they encounter. According to this view the Earth of long ago was colonised by microbes that had somehow escaped from their home planets to drift across the vast distances between the stars until they arrived on that primeval and sterile Earth. Panspermia should not be confused with pangenesis; the latter was Charles Darwin’s conjectural mechanism to explain heredity (he argued that inheritance depended on particles produced by each organ being transmitted from parent to offspring).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Fungal Biology in the Origin and Emergence of Life , pp. 62 - 69Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013