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Frankenstein’s Comet: Sparks of
Life?
Aug 21, 2009
Perhaps Dr. Frankenstein was on
to something.
Dr. Frankenstein’s
monster is brought back to life in
James Whale’s 1931 film adaptation,
with the help of a high-voltage
electricity discharge passing
through his cold lifeless corpse.
Today, doctors use electricity to
shock a stopped heart back into
action too.
In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold
Urey at the University of Chicago
published a paper entitled
“Production of Amino Acids Under
Possible Primitive Earth
Conditions”. The pair explain how
they sealed a sterile flask
containing just four inorganic
chemicals, water, methane, ammonia,
and hydrogen, and then used
electrodes to create artificial
lightning in the vapour.
After a week of operation, the
scientists discovered that a soup of
organic compounds, the building
blocks of life, were created,
including amino acids, sugars and
lipids. Five amino acids were
originally detected, but a recent
reanalysis found a total of 22, the
most common being glycine.
Perhaps comets best mimic the
Miller-Urey experiment?
The inorganic chemicals in the
Miller-Urey experiment have all been
detected in comet nuclei, and just
recently, so has the amino acid
glycine. We know that the Miller-Urey
experiment required artificial
lightning to produce its amino
acids, so perhaps glycine on comets
is evidence of electrical activity
too – no problem in an Electric
Universe.
Further reading:
First Discovery Of Life's Building
Block In Comet, Science Daily
(August 18, 2009).
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090817143602.htm
The Miller–Urey
experiment (on Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment
The Electric
Universe: Comet
Contributed by Ian
Tresman
Plasma-Universe.com
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