[comet dust] origins of life - same old assumptions

During its seven-year, 2.9 billion-mile voyage, the Stardust spacecraft flew within 150 miles of Comet Wild 2 (pronounced Vilt). Dust surrounding the comet's nucleus was captured in a low-density material called aerogel. The mission marks the first time extraterrestrial material has been brought to Earth since the Apollo moon landings.

Since the return capsule parachuted to the Utah desert in January, nearly 200 researchers have employed some of the world's most powerful scientific tools to probe the particles. Their findings are laid out in seven reports in today's issue of the journal Science.

1] Organic molecules were found, very similar to amino acids, as well as a biologically useful form of nitrogen, which would have been important to early microbes.

2] The second particle, less than one-fifth the diameter of a human hair, was made up of unusual minerals that were created at blistering temperatures - higher than 2,000 degrees F. But that contradicts the standard view that comets formed on the fringes of the solar system, where temperatures average around minus 400 degrees. Scientists dubbed the super-high-temperature particle Inti, after the Incan sun god.

3] Though they weren't forged in such a fiery furnace, crystalline mineral grains in the comet dust also support the notion that there was a lot of mixing in the cloud of dust that coalesced into the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. It looks like about 10 percent of the material came from the inner disc.

Those are the facts. Now to the theories. Some science-journos have immediately leapt to the conclusion that the particles bolster the theory that a rain of comet dust may have delivered the basic ingredients of life to the early Earth, that the solar system exploded rather than imploded and other minor conclusions as well. The conclusions are fine but the implications behind them, the tacit assumptions behind them, are anything but fine.

Again people are arguing along the same old lines. Those who refuse to accept that there is an intelligent force see the scenario as new specks of explosively spread life-giving debris strewn across the universe and afain, there’s nothing wrong with going that far.

But the most glaringly obvious question fails to be asked – how did the life-giving aminos come about in the first place? No one wants to ask this question because they’re more comfortable in the omnipotence of scientific a-theistic theory and they don’t want to ask any question which might lend support to a theistic theory.

And yet, even in these very findings, scientists who have studied the particles have admitted they were previously wrong. Galileo and Copernicus both had the same problem of entrenched scientific thought and the populace as a whole lapped up what the scientists gave out in learned journals and accepted fallible men’s theories as unassailable fact.

And so it is again here. Such insupportable assumptions have absolutely nothing to do with the scientific method but with philosophy.

To start out with the premise that there can be no intelligent force and to build your argument from there is highly suspect empiricism. Whatever happened to the open mind? And what of the counter-theory that this explosion of amino carrying particles was the method used by the Intelligence [for which there is more than enough literary reference to support the existence of] to carry out the operation?

I mean – why not? It’s just as scientifically valid as assuming there is no Intelligence.

Again, it’s not the findings which are in dispute but their interpretation and the swiftness with which the voices who made it into print seized on the findings as evidence of non-Intelligence is stunning in its lack of logic and its clear agenda.