It looks like Cpt picard , the "Q" , and the Crew of the Enterprise got it wrong.

We are not the result of a chemical "soup" in an ancient French mud pot.
http://www.scientificcomputing.com/n...43,01291549182
80-year Theory of Primordial Soup Origin of Life Rejected

In rejecting the soup theory, the researchers turned to the Earth's chemistry to identify the energy source that could power the first primitive predecessors of living organisms: geochemical gradients across a honeycomb of microscopic natural caverns at hydrothermal vents. These catalytic cells generated lipids, proteins and nucleotides that may have given rise to the first true cells. Courtesy of Dudley Foster/ RISE expedition/ William R. Normark, USGSFor 80 years, it has been accepted that early life began in a 'primordial soup' of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today, the 'soup' theory has been challenged in a paper in BioEssays that claims it was the Earth's chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life. "Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won't work at all," said team leader Nick Lane from University College London. "We present the alternative that life arose from gases (H2, CO2, N2, and H2S) and that the energy for first life came from harnessing geochemical gradients created by mother Earth at a special kind of deep-sea hydrothermal vent — one that is riddled with tiny interconnected compartments or pores."
The soup theory was proposed in 1929 when J.B.S Haldane published his influential essay on the origin of life in which he argued that UV radiation provided the energy to convert methane, ammonia and water into the first organic compounds in the oceans of the early earth. However, critics of the soup theory point out that there is no sustained driving force to make anything react and, without an energy source, life as we know it can't exist.
"Despite bioenergetic and thermodynamic failings, the 80-year-old concept of primordial soup remains central to mainstream thinking on the origin of life," said senior author, William Martin, an evolutionary biologist from the Insitute of Botany III in Düsseldorf. "But soup has no capacity for producing the energy vital for life."
In rejecting the soup theory the team turned to the Earth's chemistry to identify the energy source that could power the first primitive predecessors of living organisms: geochemical gradients across a honeycomb of microscopic natural caverns at hydrothermal vents. These catalytic cells generated lipids, proteins and nucleotides giving rise to the first true cells.
The team focused on ideas pioneered by geochemist Michael J. Russell, on alkaline deep sea vents, which produce chemical gradients very similar to those used by almost all living organisms today — a gradient of protons over a membrane. Early organisms likely exploited these gradients through a process called chemiosmosis, in which the proton gradient is used to drive synthesis of the universal energy currency, ATP, or simpler equivalents. Later on, cells evolved to generate their own proton gradient by way of electron transfer from a donor to an acceptor. The team argues that the first donor was hydrogen and the first acceptor was CO2.
"Modern living cells have inherited the same size of proton gradient, and, crucially, the same orientation — positive outside and negative inside — as the inorganic vesicles from which they arose," said co-author John Allen, a biochemist at Queen Mary, University of London.
"Thermodynamic constraints mean that chemiosmosis is strictly necessary for carbon and energy metabolism in all organisms that grow from simple chemical ingredients [autotrophy] today, and presumably the first free-living cells," said Lane. "Here we consider how the earliest cells might have harnessed a geochemically created force and then learned to make their own."
This was a vital transition, as chemiosmosis is the only mechanism by which organisms could escape from the vents. "The reason that all organisms are chemiosmotic today is simply that they inherited it from the very time and place that the first cells evolved — and they could not have evolved without it," said Martin.
"Far from being too complex to have powered early life, it is nearly impossible to see how life could have begun without chemiosmosis," concluded Lane. "It is time to cast off the shackles of fermentation in some primordial soup as 'life without oxygen' — an idea that dates back to a time before anybody in biology had any understanding of how ATP is made."





I still maintain the string theory extrapolation that we are but a momentary thought in the brain of a cosmic, cosmic entity with a George Carlin sense of humor.

roadster with a stick

 

For those who don't like to link, I finally got the copy to load.


If you push your thinking a bit, one has to conclude from this that undersea vents could occur elswhere in the galaxy, hell in the solar system, and that life MUST exist elsewhere.

franc

 

Like any other theory it would require some proof of some kind to move the present 'soup' theory off of the blocks & into the dumpster.
Though I prefer this one over the soup! It makes much more sense, given the write-up you presented, than the "lying around for a few million years" ooze that suddenly combines, Frankenstein-like, to form the simple start of life.
We'll probably never know, like many other things out of the grasp of present day human knowledge.
Life on other worlds? Perhaps. It would certainly seem likely given that there are billions of galaxies each with trillions of stars. The odds would seem to be that favor. Unfortunately, we'd probably never meet any other life form since we're bound to our own solar system. Unless we somehow manage to get past the light speed limitation, which is HIGHLY unlikely & impossible with what we know today. With all of our past decades of searching for radio signals of some sort we still haven't found anything artificial beaming around. Then again, we've only been looking for the past what, 30 years? 30 light years is still awfully close to home, radio-wise.
Close encounters is still in the world of sci-fi & is likely to forever remain that way.
But can we, someday soon, get off of our collective keister's & get something started on Mars? Please! All it would take is one small comet or asteroid & all that we've accomplshed, all that we've done, Michelangelo, the Taj Mahal, Einstein, Plato, etc. is lost.

Enough of this philosophical banter............

 

I think either Europa or IO, two of Jupiters moons, may have Ice and Volcanoes. If they have smoker vents, similar to those on earth, I think this theory will have legs.

Keepin mind that scientist have tried for years to prove the muck sop theory. With very limited success. The best they have done is get some choloidial protein chains to link up.


roadster with a stick