From the creation of the universe to the creation of life

There were many random and asymmetric events that led to the creation of life on Earth * Ilan Manolis' lecture at the annual meeting of the Israel Astronomical Society, December 2000

In Southern California there is a national park called "Joshua Tree National Monument", meaning the national site of the Joshua Tree. What is the connection between the national park and the tree, and more in the name of Joshua?

In the park there is a natural phenomenon unique to the area, where a tree grows - a type of tall cactus. It has a trunk that looks like the trunk of a tree and the tips of its branches are like those of a cactus. The nature reserve is at an altitude of 900 meters in the desert area of ​​the state of California. In terms of geographic width, it is very close to our geographic width in Israel. In the park there are also rounded rocks that are placed on top of each other in a way that seems unnatural.

During the month of November, David Levy and his wife Wendy visited Israel, and during their visit to Israel I hosted them. During the conversation I mentioned to Wendy that I visited Joshua Tree Park a lot. Wendy gave me some seeds of the tree and I tried to germinate them. I waited several weeks and in desperation you took out one of the seeds and saw that it had taken out a root. I realized that I just didn't have the patience to wait for the natural processes. Finally, except for the seed I took out, the rest started to sprout. But you don't have to go all the way to the Joshua tree. Take a bean, germinate it with cotton wool and you will see that it sends roots down and a stem up.
How does the plant know that the roots should go down and the stem up?

There is a phenomenon known as tropism that was discovered about 200 years ago. Phototropism happens when the stem "sees" the sun and geotropism when the root knows how to go down. In an experiment conducted back in the 19th century, bean seeds were germinated in a centrifuge and rotated so that it gave a horizontal force identical to gravity. The seed, without knowing mathematics, sent its roots at an angle of 45 degrees. In the space shuttle experiment, the root and stem grew in every possible direction. Hence the seed knows what gravitation is. A few splashes of water touching it are enough to start more complex processes. Let's ignore for a moment the minerals found in them, and it is said that only the water does this miracle. The first processes that take place in it - in those cells that "feel" the water, begin the migration of certain organelles downwards. The pressure of those organelles causes the cells to differentiate downward and eventually the first cell begins to turn into a root.

This process reminded me of a very famous sentence - the watchmaker's sentence formulated by an English theologian named William Paley. "At midnight in a wasteland, let's say my foot leaned towards a stone, and I was asked how the stone got there. One of my possible answers was, despite my conflicting information, that the stone has always been there. In this way it will probably not be easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I found a clock lying on the ground, and the question would be how the clock got to this place. It wouldn't occur to me to answer my previous answer, that is, as far as I know, the clock may have been there all along." And later he says: "Every sign of invention, every expression of a plan, which existed in the clock, exists in the work of nature, with a difference, on the part of nature, being greater or more numerous, and this to a degree that surpasses all calculation."

His message - we need an intentional factor to produce the nature around us. It is so complex and so complicated that it must be created by a divine being. Since then there have been heaps and heaps of arguments on the subject. (Editor's note: There is a logical fallacy in this argument of Paley's, in which he first claims that the clock is more complex than nature, and in the second half of the argument that nature is more complex than the clock, therefore there is no proof of the existence of God here. AB)

This is a somewhat unusual metaphor. Let's go to the source, the book of Genesis and see what God is doing there and throw it at the big bang theory. God had a difficult problem, he had to create a world. In performance research we are taught that when there is a large and complicated problem it can be divided into sub-problems, until we are faced with small enough problems that can be dealt with individually.

God takes the work and distributes it. He also uses a certain tool which is a very powerful and effective tool - symmetry. What do we have as starting conditions - and the country was chaos, meaning chaos. God takes this chaos and with the help of symmetry he builds what is around us - the light and the night, the sea and the land, the right hand and the left hand (except for one case - the creation of man, in which God does what is called in the computer language Patch and duplicates the woman from the human body, under creating a separate creation of her ). However, except for this exceptional case, symmetry stands as the complete opposite of chaos. Where there is symmetry, there is no chaos.

In astronomy, we take for granted today that there was a big bang. We know what the situation was in one-tenth to the 74th power of the first second of the universe's formation. Every time we are asked what was before the big bang, we say the classic answer that the entire universe was at an infinitely small point and at an infinitely large temperature. The universe itself was created in the big bang. Then the dimensions were created as well as the arrow of time, moving forward. It cannot move backwards because the arrow of time is a property of the universe in which we live.

Since then the universe has evolved. As soon as it was created in the big bang it was a night of particles like tachyons, bullions and more. There was no substance then in the sense that we know it today. But within a million years since the Big Bang, matter began to form, atoms formed from the smaller elementary particles. The main element formed was hydrogen and later some helium. From this, stars began to form, and after a long time also galaxies where the stars were concentrated. Within the galaxies was created the order in which our world is given.

What we see today, about 13 billion years after the big bang, is the universe in a very given state. It is dynamic, because the galaxies keep moving away from each other. We ask what is the line of motion since the big bang in which matter was created, until today that we have life. We see that several random, asymmetric and independent conditions are needed in order to achieve this. The earth, the metals, the silicon found in our computers - all these are heavy elements. All the heavy elements did not form at once with the formation of the stars. They were formed after certain stars reached maturity, shedding layers over them in a cataclysmic explosion, producing heavy metals formed from the melting of iron atoms. The same elements moved in the galaxy, until they met in a very large cloud of interstellar gas and dust in the style of the Orion Nebula or the Pleiades Nebula (Kima group). The same materials caused the great gas cloud to collapse. Rotational processes began within it. While the matter collapsed into the center, a star was formed - our Sun, which began nuclear fusion in its core. As a result of the igniting of the sun, many materials from the original cloud of gas and dust were sent out. The heavier parts remained near the sun and from them the terrestrial planets were formed, and the more distant ones were formed from the gas clouds. A supernova explosion of one or more stars was therefore necessary, which shed the same heavy materials that hit the protostellar cloud from which our solar system was formed.

another example. In 1999, a study by three researchers at the Tel Aviv University was published, showing unequivocally that fifty percent of the water we have here on Earth did not form on its surface, but arrived here by comets. These are the same waters that we use today and they are the ones that make life on earth possible. Apparently something had to bring the water that enables the formation of life to the surface of the earth. Indeed, in the first hundreds of millions of years of its existence, the Earth received many bombardments of matter from space in the solar system, including comets that contain a lot of water. (We can also add the fact that the four elements that living matter is composed of, CHON, are found in the human body in relatively close proportions to the proportions found in comets).

Another factor that helps stabilize life is the moon. Without our moon there would be no life here. The moon with its large relative mass compared to the mass of the earth, helped to stabilize the axis of rotation of the earth. He makes sure that the Earth rotates at a constant tilt relative to the plane of the whip. If this did not happen there would be high deviations - the winters would be harsh, the summers would be hot and it would be difficult for life to survive.

As you can see, a large collection of events that are independent of each other, eventually led to the development of a star, the Sun, and around it developed a life-bearing planet, the Earth. created in the "zone of life" (the strip between Venus and Mars where life is possible).

All these events are prerequisites - mandatory. Without these conditions we would not be here. The conditions are so complex that it can be said that it is a miracle that we are standing and talking here today. And not only life in general is a miracle, but also human existence. If 65 million years ago an asteroid had not hit the Earth and wiped out most of life, an ecological niche would not have been created that allowed mammals to evolve. And that asteroid cannot be accused of being intentional.

The bacteria appear on the stage of the earth's history 200 million years after the end of the "late big bomb", that is, about 3.8 billion years ago. We assume that at the time of the big bombardment life could not have developed, since there were major changes in the climate. But since the bacteria were created, life has not stopped.
Recently, the scientists discovered bacteria inside a freshwater lake, known as Vostok, located at a depth of 3 kilometers in the Russian region of Antarctica. They drilled there and took out samples of the water and in the water they found bacteria. This water has had nothing to do with life elsewhere since the Antarctic ice sheet formed.

Other bacteria caused a sensation two months ago because they were taken from a salt crystal from a mine. There are water bubbles inside the crystal in a liquid state and inside they found bacteria. These bacteria have remained in the water since it formed about 300 thousand years ago. Their DNA is very close to that of contemporary bacteria. (Prof. Brewer from Tel Aviv University said he is ready to sell the house if these are indeed original bacteria from 300 years ago). But if it is still true, we are seeing something very important here.

About four years ago, a meteor was found from Mars that apparently contained bacteria, between one-tenth and one-hundredth the size of the bacteria on Earth, but it turns out that bacteria of a similar size were also found on Earth. The debate about the correctness of the existence of bacteria on the surface of Mars still continues.

By the way, there is a bacterium known as magnetobacteria. Just as the bean knows where it is down and where it is up, this bacterium has a sequence of points - small magnetic spheres, and it knows how to organize itself according to the Earth's magnetic field. If there are so many sophisticated things, according to Paley how did it all get here?

If the meteor really contains life that was once on Mars (and it is agreed that there is none today), if the stone came from Mars, maybe other things came from other sources that brought life. We know that comets have amino acids. These are the basic elements of life, and they are found in several sources in space, but it is still unknown what made them the building blocks of life.

And here were some scientists, who for now are alone in this idea, who invented the theory of panspermia - that is, that life arrived on Earth by a mechanism of convection. The question is where was the original father or mother who started the life process - they had to develop somewhere. And for that there is no answer at this stage.