"Thomas A. Easton - Life is in the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

all—strong enough, in fact, to win a prize offered by the French Academy of Sciences for a solution to
the argument. By drawing the neck of an ordinary round-bottomed flask out into an S-shape long enough
to keep the dust in the air from drifting through the neck to a supply of nutrients in the flask, he
demonstrated that even microorganisms always arise from others like themselves. Unfortunately, this was
the beginning of the dogma, “Life always and only arises from life.” This “law” of nature hampered the
serious investigation of the origins of life for many decades, reducing the status of any scientist who even
thought of the question to that of a dilettante.

But the question was and is real. Because the Earth has not always been, there could not always have
been life on Earth. So how did it get here? Arrhenius, in 1908, begged the question with the concept of
panspermia, according to which life reaches any world as tiny drifting spores arising elsewhere in the
universe. He ignored the question of how the first spores arose, and he failed to recognize—unlike
Charles Darwin, Aleksandr I. Oparin, and others —that a necessary prerequisite of the origin of life
anywhere is its absence. Darwin even went so far as to suggest that perhaps the then-current disbelief in
spontaneous generation was not justified and that it might indeed occur. In an 1871 letter to a friend, he
remarked,

“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which
could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond,
with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, et cetera, present, that a protein
compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such
matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which could not have been the case before living
creatures were formed.“

Spontaneous generation, then, might still occur, but it would not be detectable and it would scarcely
matter to the world.

The question is real, and it cannot be put off by appealing either to panspermia or to the intervention of
some alien astronaut. It cannot even be left in the lap of God, for divine intervention is the last resort of
the ignorant, and the origin of life is a problem we can hope to ‘solve by ourselves. Indeed, scientists
have been finding recently that it is possible, and even likely, that under the conditions presumed to hold
on the primordial Earth, the basic chemicals of life would have been formed solely from the laws of
chemistry and would then have evolved into more complex compounds which would have given rise to
structures extremely reminiscent of cells.

All elements are produced by the “cooking” of hydrogen in the enormous fusion reactors we call the
stars, and the physics of the fusion reactions is such that the formation of the lighter elements—the
so-called bioelements—is vastly more probable than that of the heavier ones. Released into space by
novae, flares, and stellar winds, these elements and a few others, such as silicon, magnesium, calcium,
and iron, form the basic material from which the planets are built. These raw materials form vast clouds of
gas and dust in space, and there they undergo chemical reactions which produce many compounds—
including amino acids —once thought to be produced only by living things. Occasionally, as has been
reported for formaldehyde, such compounds occur in concentrations as high as one thousand molecules
per cubic centimeter, which, though it is only one ten-million-billionth as many molecules as there are in a
cubic centimeter of air, is a high concentration indeed for the vacuum of interstellar space.



Figure 1: A very schematic representation of the primordial Earth. The atmosphere contains
many gases, only a few of which are at all common today. The seas contain these same gases in