Frankenstein’s Comet: Sparks of Life?
Mar 09, 2010

Dr. Frankenstein’s monster is brought back to life in James Whale’s 1931 film adaptation, with the help of a high-voltage electricity discharge passing through his cold lifeless corpse. Today, doctors use electricity to shock a stopped heart back into action too.

In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey at the University of Chicago published a paper entitled “Production of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions”. The pair explain how they sealed a sterile flask containing just four inorganic chemicals, water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen, and then used electrodes to create artificial lightning in the vapour.

After a week of operation, the scientists discovered that a soup of organic compounds, the building blocks of life, were created, including amino acids, sugars and lipids. Five amino acids were originally detected, but a recent reanalysis found a total of 22, the most common being glycine.

Perhaps comets best mimic the Miller-Urey experiment?

The inorganic chemicals in the Miller-Urey experiment have all been detected in comet nuclei, and just recently, so has the amino acid glycine. We know that the Miller-Urey experiment required artificial lightning to produce its amino acids, so perhaps glycine on comets is evidence of electrical activity too – no problem in an Electric Universe.

Further reading:

First Discovery Of Life's Building Block In Comet, Science Daily (August 18, 2009).
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090817143602.htm

The Miller–Urey experiment (on Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment

The Electric Universe: Comet
http://www.thunderboltsproject.com/Thunderbolts/Ebooks.html

Contributed by Ian Tresman
Plasma-Universe.com