Physics, Earth & Space Icon Physics, Earth & Space

Astrobiology: Searching for the Origin of Life, In All the Wrong Places

origin of life

Astrobiologists think they may have found where life came from — cyanide in meteorites! From Live Science:

Cyanide-Laced Meteorites May Have Seeded Earth’s First Life

Cyanide isn’t just the last resort for the captured spies of Hollywood film. It’s also a crucial component of the early chemistry of life. And now, new research finds that cyanide might have ridden to Earth on meteorites.

Samples of a particular group of primitive meteorites — including a large one that fell near Murchison, Australia, in 1969 — all contain cyanide, bound in a stable configuration with iron and carbon monoxide. These same sorts of structures are found in enzymes called hydrogenases in modern bacteria and archaea, which could suggest that early life either borrowed from meteorites or that early Earth’s geology formed the same kind of cyanide compounds, said study co-author Michael Callahan, an analytical chemist Boise State University.

You can predict the rest — breathless excitement in the astrobiology community! Perhaps the mystery of life has finally been unraveled!

Materialist “astrobiology” is a parody of itself. Imagine a computer scientist trying to understand the origin of — that is, reverse-engineer — a software program of unknown provenance. He would be a fool to chemically analyze the computer’s chip or chassis. The origin of the program is in the information encoded in it. He would study the program as a designed artifact, and only by that approach would the scientist be able to understand its origin. 

The Essence of Life

The same reasoning applies to origin of life research. Life isn’t characterized by cyanide, or even nucleotides or lipids or proteins or the host of substrates in living things. The essence of life is information — the gigabytes of information in the genetic code in DNA, the astonishingly complex molecular machinery of cellular metabolism, the intricate orchestration of the physiology of higher organisms, and the immaterial power of rational thought and free will in man. The material components of living things are merely the substrate in which this elegant information is stored and expressed. And information always originates in a mind. 

“Astrobiologists” who search for life’s origin in cyanide in meteorites or in any material substrate are fools blinded by materialist ideology.

The origin of life is intelligence — intelligence from a Mind of astonishing power and beauty. To the extent that “astrobiology” ignores this basic scientific truth, it is a pseudoscience, devoted not to the truth about life, but to the protection of the materialist creation myth. 

Photo: Examining a shard from a meteorite found in Murchison, Australia; is this where life came from? By United States Department of Energy; uploaded en wikipedia by en:User:Carl Henderson. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.