Mark Megahan
Nobody is suggesting that these Astrobiologists found intelligent creatures but signs of life have been found, floating in the vastness of interstellar space. Their pre-print study hasn’t been “peer reviewed” yet but it’s expected to pass the sniff test. Every living thing on Earth is made up of cells. Specialized molecules which self-assemble into cell membranes are lurking in the core of the Milky Way.
All precursors for life
Víctor Rivilla and his team at the Astrobiology Centre in Madrid, Spain were astounded to detect “a vital component of the simplest phospholipid in space.” If you wanted to play God, these molecules are like Lego. They practically assemble themselves.
What they spotted are traces of “ethanolamine” which, they note, “indicates that all of the precursors for life could have originated in space.”
There are gaps in what we do know about how we got here but most experts agree that it started with the primal soup surrounding Earth “about 4.5 billion years ago and involved innumerable molecular components.”
They had to come from somewhere. One theory is that Mother Earth was fertilized from space with “all the organic molecules necessary for life.”
This isn’t the first time the building blocks of amino acids have been found. Those are the “precursors of proteins, and molecules that can store information in the form of DNA.” What Rivilla found is another “pivotal component.”
Molecules that “can form membranes capable of encapsulating and protecting the molecules of life in compartments called protocells.” Up until now, “phospholipids have never been observed in space.”
Center of the Milky Way
If you set your warp vectors straight for the black hole in the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, then shift a mere 390 light-years to the side, aiming at Sagittarius B2, you’ll run into photons coming the other way which came through “an interstellar cloud of gas and dust.”
Some of those photons are scattered into a spectrum indicating ethanolamine, which chemists elegantly notate as NH2CH2CH2OH. It means life could be there, too.
On paper, the Spanish researchers calculated the signature they should look for in “the cold temperatures thought to exist in the cloud.” Then they went looking for it. They amazed themselves by finding it. It didn’t take long before they had “clear evidence of this spectrum in light that had passed through the cloud.”
That’s a big deal, they brag. “This has important implications not only for theories of the origin of life on Earth but also on other habitable planets and satellites anywhere in the Universe.”
When astronomers found ethanolamine in meteorites they had no idea how it got there and didn’t trust it being anything other than contamination from here on Earth. Others argued passionately “that it was solely formed through a bizarre set of reactions on a parent asteroid.” Life has its own way of doing things.
Here on Terra, “ethanolamine forms the hydrophilic head of phospholipid molecules that self-assemble into cell membranes.” The same molecules which sparked human beings and every other living creature “could have been transferred from the proto-Solar nebula to planetesimals and minor bodies of the Solar System, and thereafter to our planet.”
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