“Life is peculiar,” said Jeremy.
“Compared to what?” asked the spider.
-- Men Who Play God (1968), by Norman Moss.
The recent discovery by NASA of the amino acid Glycine in dust from a comet in the outer Solar System has been a shot in the arm to the idea that life here was seeded by organic matter in meteorites, about 3.8 billion years ago. The technical term for this is Panspermia (meaning “seed everywhere”), of which no less a scientist than Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, was an ardent supporter, arguing that the time interval between the formation of our planet and the appearance of life (in the shape of microscopic fossils) was too short for the genetic code to have evolved de novo (to use the biochemical terminology). Thus, the raw materials must have arrived here from elsewhere in the Galaxy. Many scientists remain unconvinced; and hot on the tail of the aforementioned discovery came the latest hypothesis on life's terrestrial origins in transparent Zinc Sulfide 'bubbles' which would have allowed access to the energy of sunlight for early replicating matter.
