Posts Tagged ‘astrobiology’

Life originated in “a warm little pond” was Charles Darwin private answer to the larger challenge of how did life began in a letter to Joseph J. Hooker. How, where and when did the first species get started? A defendable natural process to the origin of life question, however, completely escaped Darwin.

Without a natural process, Darwin was forced to embrace a supernatural process for the origin of life. On this issue, Darwin was forced to reject atheism. In his autobiography, Darwin explains why the “mystery of the beginning” was his reason for becoming an agnostic – Continue Reading

NASA astrobiology scientists In December 2010 announced the discovery of molecular evidence for life in an arsenic-rich environment.

Geomicrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA funded astrobiology fellow in residence at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, discovered a bacterium in 2009 from arsenic-rich sediments collected at the bottom of Mono Lake, California, U.S.A. Continue Reading

Charles Darwin in a letter Joseph D. Hooker in February 1871 speculated that life might have originated in “some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes”. The search for the origin and essence of life continues.

Central to the origin of life issue is the question, what is life? The journal Astrobiology in December 2010 featured a collection of essays on the topic “What is Life?” organized by David Deamer of the University of California, Santa Cruz, by asking the question, “Can life be defined?” Continue Reading

Charles Darwin in a letter Joseph D. Hooker in February 1871 speculated that life might have originated in “some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes”. The search for the origin of life continues.

Felisa Wolfe-Simon (shown on the left), supported by NASA’s Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology (Exo/Evo) Program and the NASA Astrobiology Institute, is a researcher working with programs to determining the evolution of genes, metabolic pathways, and microbial species on Earth in order to understand the potential for life on other worlds. Continue Reading