The year is still young, but a New York Times article about a NASA probe to the asteroid Bennu includes what could well be the most preposterous speculation about the origin of life of 2025. We’ll have to keep an eye on it. The probe brought back a “pinch of grit.” As Times reporter Carl Zimmer sighs, the “NASA spacecraft holds hints that our planet may not be so special.” 

Of course, stories like this always want to tell us how Earth and life are not “special.” It’s an obsession with science writers, and seemingly with the folks at NASA too. The cost in this case, for that depressing takeaway: almost a billion dollars, $800 million for the probe plus $183.5 million for the launch vehicle. (Hello, DOGE?)

A Variety of Organic Stuff

Our planet with its spectacular array of living species isn’t special because from Bennu they recovered a variety of organic stuff common to terrestrial life.

They found 16,000 kinds of organic molecules. Among the most remarkable were 16 amino acids our cells use to make proteins. Our DNA, on the other hand, is built from four units called nucleobases; Bennu’s rocks contained all four. To make a protein, our cells copy a gene from DNA to a similar molecule called RNA, which uses three of DNA’s nucleobases plus one of its own, called uracil. Bennu contains uracil, too.

Isn’t that practically life itself? Uh, no. There’s a Monty Python sketch for every occasion, and for this one, I thought of the sketch with John Cleese as a fatuous Shakespearean actor, Sir Edwin, explaining his craft to an interviewer:

Interviewer: How many words did you have to say as King Lear at the Aldwych in ’52?

Sir Edwin: Ah, well, I don’t want you to get the impression it’s just a question of the number of words… I mean, getting them in the right order is just as important. Old Peter Hall used to say to me, “They’re all there, Eddie. Now we’ve got to get them in the right order!”

The interviewer concludes by advising Sir Edwin to “get stuffed.” Much the same here, you can have all the organic molecules you want, or that Bennu will supply. For life, you have to get them in the right order. 

It Came from Out Space

The article concludes with a speculation about how that “right order” might have been achieved in outer space. 

Nilton Rennó, a planetary scientist at the University of Michigan who was not involved with the research on Bennu, said that the findings also opened up more exotic possibilities that scientists should explore seriously. “It opens our eye to think more broadly about life,” he said.

If a vast swarm of briny little worlds [like Bennu] produced biological precursors, it could have mixed them together as they crashed into one another. The heat of the impacts could have fueled more chemistry, giving rise to even more complex molecules in their interiors, and perhaps even living cells.

“Could life have started there?” Dr. Rennó asked. “I’m open to it. I like crazy ideas.” [Emphasis added.]

It’s not just a “crazy idea.” It’s completely absurd, a random process if ever there was one. Imagine dumping a tub of Scrabble tiles on a table and getting, in the right order, the opening verses of Genesis. “Biological precursors” mixing and crashing about, getting heated, “fueling chemistry” (what chemistry?), and resulting in “living cells,” potentially for delivery to our planet. He’s talking about panspermia, and see Stephen Meyer in Signature in the Cell for all the problems with that.

It would have been appropriate for Carl Zimmer to tell Dr. Rennó to get stuffed. But he doesn’t. He leaves the interview right there. And I’d like to know why.