A terrible specter of global biological catastrophes has always hovered over the history of earthly life. In the shortest possible time, the lion's share of the creatures that had dominated water and land for millions of years disappeared. We are not aware of the reasons for such events. Maybe the "alien" life will help to unravel these earthly secrets?
Today, the ranks of enthusiasts for the search for extraterrestrial life are in deep gloom. More and more complex, more powerful and more perfect are the rovers, stubbornly plowing the vastness of the Red Planet, but it seems that this waterless world does not contain even the simplest microbes. What can we say about the search for the beautiful Aelita …
There remains only one illusory hope for the hypothetical under-ice seas of the huge satellites of the planets, the gas giants - Jupiter and Saturn. However, this will require equipment that is completely different from the Martian rovers.
Call of the cosmos
The tests of the new automatic drill were coming to an end. Over the endless white expanses of Antarctica, the short polar summer was ending, and hurricane winds were increasingly blowing from the central shield, turning into long blizzards. A special NASA expedition was in a hurry to reach a mysterious lake, hidden behind a kilometer-long layer of compressed snow and ice. The newest cryobot - a robot designed to operate on the icy moons of Jupiter - was already approaching the one and a half kilometer depth mark, but there was still no signal of immersion in water.
The head of the research team, William Stone, gazed intently at a monitor on which whitish streaks of ice crystals flickered. Suddenly, a dark shadow ran across the screen, and a few moments later the future space penetrator (penetrating probe) fell into the air cavity.
Slowly turning the laser-illuminated video camera, Stone realized that the camera was in a vast ice grotto. Somewhere below, dark liquid splashed, alarmed by the falling shards of ice. Stone's fingers flickered feverishly over the sensor deck, and the cryobot began a gradual descent, continuously performing rapid environmental analyzes.
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Having descended several tens of meters, the probe cautiously approached the surface of an unknown aquatic world. When the camera touched the water, for a moment it seemed to Stone that myriads of some tiny creatures rushed in all directions, but the next moment the lens was surrounded only by crystal clear liquid.
Having checked the readings of the instruments, Stone did not even have time to be surprised at the strange indicators of chemical samples, when strange microorganisms were drawn from all sides to the cryobot, intertwining in ropes and threads on the go. In the blink of an eye, the device was entwined with giant tentacles, one of which easily cut off the cable with cables. Several tentacles immediately turned into huge "fins", carrying away the cryobot, which has become a living cocoon, somewhere into a dark abyss.
On the surface of the ice sheet, Stone, surrounded by the members of the expedition, over and over again looked in amazement at the last footage captured by the cryobot camera. Finally he raised his head and said in a voice hoarse with excitement:
- You may not believe me, but it looks like we are faced with alien life on our planet …
Riddles of the Living
Surprisingly, among scientists, there is still no generally accepted definition of life. Some believe that life is a special chemical process associated with the extraction of energy from the environment. Others insistently emphasize the obligatory individuality of living objects and believe that the concept of "life" is inseparable from the concept of "organism". Still others endow living matter with mystical properties, like a fantastic biofield.
The first scientist to declare the origin of the living exclusively from the living was the Italian Renaissance naturalist Francesco Redi. Later, the Redi principle was proved by the great physiologist Louis Pasteur.
In a series of elegant experiments with cleverly curved flasks, he showed that the "nucleation" of microorganisms in a sterile broth occurs only if their embryos can get into the broth from the air or in some other way. If you block the path to the "seeds of life", even leaving access to air, no spontaneous generation will occur. So along the way, the method of pasteurization of liquids and products was discovered - heating to a certain temperature that kills germs and bacteria.
Science of the XIX century considered two options: either life existed from the beginning, or it was created by a higher mind. The eminent geochemist V. I. Vernadsky, who for a long time believed that the transition of inorganic matter into organic matter is practically impossible.
Scientists now had to prove the possibility of spontaneous generation for a long time and painfully. At first, the matter seemed hopeless, and the line between living and nonliving matter was insurmountable. However, decades have passed, and biochemists have learned to obtain many organic substances from inorganic ones. It became clear that the boundary between living and nonliving matter at the chemical level is rather blurred. As for Vernadsky's idea of the original basis of life, it now has very few supporters.
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The wonders of panspermia
The explosions of the first stars created heavy elements and scattered them into space. From new clusters of atoms, stars of the second generation were formed, including our Sun. Clouds of scattered particles that were not included in the composition of the central star revolved around it and gradually split into separate clumps - future planets. It was at this stage that the synthesis of the first organic molecules could begin, some of which also fell on the newborn Earth.
Together with the Earth, the circulation of substances in nature also arose. In the atmosphere, on the surface of land and in water bodies, all these substances mixed, entering into chemical reactions with each other, and turned into new compounds, which, in turn, also interacted with each other.
It is known that celestial bodies can exchange matter when colliding with large asteroids and comets. In this case, fragments of rock are knocked out of the surface of the "mother planets", which can fly into space and get to other planets. For example, meteorites from Mars often reach the surface of the Earth. Thanks to this "exchange" of meteorites, substances and catalysts that have arisen in the course of chemical evolution on one of the planets can get to neighboring bodies and even to other stellar systems. Thus, in a few hundred million years, the spread of the building blocks of life can cover our entire Galaxy. Likewise, the scale of the chemical "kitchen" preparing molecular "dishes" for future life may expand from planetary to galactic.
Battle of the worlds
All living organisms are discrete in space and have an outer shell. It is difficult to imagine a living being in the form of a misty cloud or solution, although Fred Hoyle and Stanislav Lem in their novels "Black Cloud" and "Solaris" showed the opposite. Nevertheless, at the very beginning on the young Earth, life most likely existed precisely in the form of solutions. In order not to dissolve in the waves of the protoocean, the first of the first living "liquid entities" had to seek some kind of shelter in caverns and crevices of rocks, just as in billions of years their distant descendants - cavemen - will do.
Such a simple and obvious scheme of the emergence of living things suggests a strange thought: why is the emergence of life on our planet considered only once?
It turns out a very strange picture, in which the first "droplets of life" must constantly spontaneously arise from a vast set of organic and inorganic molecules that have existed since the inception of the Earth's hard shell to our time.
And if the common ancestor of all living things was not one species, but a whole community of the simplest cells, actively exchanging hereditary material? The earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, but from the first several hundred million years of its existence, there are practically no traces left in the earth's crust. The exact time when life appeared on Earth is not known. Fossil organisms are found primarily in sedimentary rocks, with the oldest known rocks being slightly less than 4 billion years old. Traces of life can already be found in them, but it is not entirely clear which one.
But if you think about the "heretical" idea that life appeared from many sources on Earth more than once? Moreover, many times on our planet the "seeds of space crops" of panspermia could also sprout. They could be brought by fragments of asteroids, comets and other bodies of the solar system.
How, in this case, were they supposed to react to each other when a wave of living matter alien in origin met? Most likely, as in the wars of earthly civilizations, everything ended in mutual assimilation. However, there were also tragic pages in the history of mankind, when individual tribes and peoples disappeared. Biological aliens could behave in the same way. After all, we still do not know the true reasons for the disappearance of the ancient animal kingdoms, from trilobites to dinosaurs. Even the causes of strange medieval epidemics like the Black Death are unclear.
Maybe these are traces of "alien" life, constantly emerging in the secluded corners of the earth's biosphere and immediately entering into a mortal battle with the "indigenous population"?
Oleg FAIG
