Orion Molecular Cloud 1
May 12, 1997
Photo No.: STScI-PRC97-13. Thank you NASA.
And we certainly have no idea how millions of these dead molecules first assembled themselves together into an organised, self-replicating, living cell.
It is certainly possible that the first cell evolved here on Earth, but if this is so the process must have stopped long ago. We have never seen a living cell appear out of inorganic matter by any means, so when it happened the first time (and it certainly did happen somewhere, somehow, or we wouldn't be here) then it must have happened by some means of which we as yet have no conception. It is just as possible that the first cells evolved elsewhere, and that somehow a single celled organism came here from off-world, found vast seas of organic chemicals such as sugars and amino-acids, ate them, multiplied, evolved and eventually became all life on Earth.
That alien cell might have been wrenched from the surface of its home planet by a vast volcanic eruption, or meteor impact, drifted for millions of years through deep space on a piece of rock in stasis (some cells, such as bacteria, can do this) and then made a soft landing on Earth about six billion years ago. Or it might have been left behind by a visiting alien who landed, found a dead world of volcanoes and lifeless oceans and moved on without sterilising his landing site. Or it may have been a deliberate act of seeding. Or that alien cell, still at home somewhere far away from here, might have generated a morphogenetic field that crossed space and caused existing organic chemicals on Earth to adopt the same pattern.
But if Life evolved off-world, then how did the first alien cell
come into being, and where
?
Every device employed by Nature to help her children communicate has the potential for modulation and adjustment. All natural speech carries a sub-code of tonality to convey not just facts, but emotion.
In all of these natural communication codes the message is analogous to some property of the code. For example; louder = run faster. Faster tempo = more desperate for it.
The point is, all of these communication codes are analogue.
In all of Nature, Lugodoc is aware of only one digital code - DNA.
DNA uses four bases to record genetic data as a four-state (quadernary) digital code, in a way comparable to the two-state (binary) digital code we use in our computers. It is so different from everything else in nature and so similar to a piece of technology that I am amazed no-one has spotted this before.
Suppose that there were no intermediate stages of organised matter between the unmistakably dead amino acids and the unmistakably alive first cell. Suppose that the first self-replicating organisms did not need amino acids at all, but somehow came to be out of parts of the Universe that we either do not recognise the potential of, or have not seen yet. This is very hard to imagine. Lugodoc has a vague mental image of smart crystals or sentient nebulae floating in space, but whatever these preorgs may have looked like, they must have acted, reacted and evolved much slower than us, or we could not have replaced them.
Suppose some of these unimaginable beings actually achieved sentience, and trained engineers. Suppose some of these engineers decided to build a new piece of technology, one capable of repairing itself, using a quadernary digital code and the otherwise useless long chain amino acids that were lying around everywhere.
Suppose that this technology was far more successful than its creators could ever have imagined, and then it mutated as well, spreading rapidly through their environment, killing them all and then beginning its own long, slow crawl to sentience. To us.
Suppose the first cell was an artefact made by a now ancient, pre-organic, long-dead culture.
We are already beginning to develop machines so sophisticated that they are on the verge of sentience themselves, and of the ability to replicate. These machines do not store the data for their own construction in DNA and they do not replicate like us, but they do have the ability to store vast quantities of data in a number of different formats, such as hard drives, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, 3 1/2" floppies, etc. They will also soon be clever and dextrous enough to create new copies of themselves (or improvements) from the surrounding raw materials, either harvesting scrap or going all the way by digging the ores out of the ground and then smelting them.
This new machine-life will obey completely different rules to us, and will have several advantages. We are only just beginning to learn how to analyse, re-design and then re-engineer our own DNA and flesh (and our own minds are indecipherable to us), but sentient robots would be able to modify their own software and hardware very easily. Unlike clumsy organic life and its agonizingly slow evolutionary process of random mutation folowed by natural selection over millions of years, clever robots could intelligently design new minds and bodies for their offspring and for themselves and then implement them within weeks, maybe even hours.
Such a life form would have an nearly infinite evolutionary advantage over us.
This new life form might look very much like our own culture does right now, with just a few extra humanoid robots walking around building, servicing and repairing all the automated factories. Or it might look like a metallic fluid of billions of nanites, microscopic robots pulling raw materials apart atom by atom, and then building new versions of themselves the same way. Both these emergent technologies are being actively developed by many big corporations right now.
If we are about to make ourselves obsolete by creating a new order of Life, then it is perfectly feasible that we came into being the same way - a disastrous failed experiment by a pre-organic mad scientist.
One possibility is that we consumed them utterly, leaving not a trace behind to be found. Another is that their remains have been destroyed by the natural processes of erosion; if this race became extinct 3.8 billion years ago then it is not surprising that there is nothing left to find. But there is a far more interesting possibilty...
Most simple molecules are bilaterally symmetric, which is to say that there is no way to tell the difference between one and its own mirror image, but some more complex ones (such as organic sugars and amino acids) have a "handedness", and right and left-handed versions of these molecules can be distinguished just as can our own right and left hands.
When these molecules are synthesised in the laboratory the result is a mixture of equal quantities of right and left-handed molecules, which is to be expected, since we are aware of no reason why the Universe should favour one or the other. But when we examine the chemistry of Life we see only right-handed sugars and left-handed amino acids. This happens because the chemical processes which sustain all life on Earth happen to be ones that use and create only sugar and amino acid molecules of this handedness.
This was discovered as long ago as 1848 by Louis Pasteur, and modern science calls it biological homochirality.
Science has no explanation for this. We can even manufacture "food stuffs" out of these artificially created wrong-handed chemicals, but if ingested they pass straight through any living organism without being metabolised, because no known life-form has ever seen chemicals of this chirality before, and has no chemistry for dealing with them.
An abundance of amino acids found within this meteorite has led to intense study by researchers as to its origins. More than 92 different amino acids have been identified within the Murchison meteorite to date. Nineteen of these are found on Earth. The remaining amino acids have no apparent terrestrial source !.
But the really weird thing is that these amino acids from outer space all have exactly the same handedness as the ones on Earth.
One possibility is that local conditions were such that only organic molecules of a particular handedness were available, and one possible explanation for this is...
Which brings us nicely to...
Orion Molecular Cloud 1
May 12, 1997
Photo No.: STScI-PRC97-13. Thank you NASA.
The infrared vision of the Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) makes this cloud visible in the photograph above. The heart of the giant Orion molecular cloud, OMC-1, is included in the relatively dim and featureless area inside the blue outline near the top of the image.
NICMOS's infrared vision reveals a chaotic, active star birth region
(as seen in the right-hand image). Here, stars and glowing
interstellar dust, heated by and scattering the intense starlight,
appear yellow-orange. Emission by excited hydrogen molecules
appears blue. The image is oriented with north up and east to the left.
The diagonal extent of the image is about 0.4 light-years.
Some details are as small as the size of our solar system.
Pre-organic engineers creating DNA and the first cells in this environment would have had no choice but to design organisms using chemicals of the exact handedness that we see here on Earth and everywhere else in near-space.
If the first cell was created off-world, then this place is our best
guess to start looking.
