You still believe in spontaneous generation, I take it.

You have extremely little time, if any, for your non-existent
nucleotides and amino acids to happen to come together to form life.

John Wilkins wrote in "Re: Evidence for a frozen sea on Mars":

Harlequin <usenet@sdc.cox.net> wrote:

John Wilkins wrote in "Re: Evidence for a frozen sea on Mars":

Harlequin <usenet@sdc.cox.net> wrote:

Look at this file before it is deleted:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2005/pdf/1741.pdf

Basically the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter
has found evidence of a frozen sea of water near the Martian
equator. The size is 800 km x 900 km with an average 45 m depth.
They say this is similiar to the size and depth of the North Sea.

The reason they believe it has not sublimed away is that it got
covered with volcanic ash shortly after forming.

Oh gosh, I hope so. It would make a Mars expedition almost a

Now, if they can just find an available carbonaceous chondritic

I'm reminded of the Chyba & Sagan article cited below.

Yockey, Hubert P. January 1995. Correspondence
"Information in bits and bytes: Reply to Lifson's Review of
[Yockey's] 'Information Theory and Molecular Biology'" _BioEssays_
17(1): 85-88. On 87, two paragraphs:
According to the standard model of the origin of life, there are
two paths the carbon would follow in the primeval soup. The

is toward forming the ancient protobiont, the remains of which
would go to kerogen. The second, and the much more abundant
amount, is the tarry material generated in all origin-of-life
simulation experiments. No kerogen from the tarry material left
over from the generation of the 'building blocks' of life is

This is extremely good confirmation that there never were the

quantities of dissolved amino acids, or other 'building blocks',
that could be called a primeval soup. The significance of the

old kerogen in the Isua rocks in Greenland is that there never

a primeval soup and that living matter must have existed

on earth before 3.8 billion years ago.

Even the true believers Stanley Miller^19 and Carl Sagan^20 have
estimated an extremely dilute primeval soup. Miller's latest
(1992) estimate of the concentration of the primeval soup is

M. Chyba and Sagan^20 estimated the concentration of organic
compounds in the primeval ocean as 0.1% if the atmosphere had

reducing (it was not), or 0.0001% if it had been neutral (it

That is as far as a true believer has gone towards admitting that
no primeval soup ever existed. So much for prebiotic synthesis

organic compounds and chemical evolution! _The absence of

is evidence of absence!_

You still believe in spontaneous generation, I take it.

probability, the fabled organic soup never existed. The early

atmosphere was _not_ highly-reducing, as is required if one is to get
anywhere close to a reasonable number and variety of amino acids.

Instead, the atmosphere was for the most part nitrogen, carbon

and carbon dioxide, with volcanoes spewing out CO_2 and N.[1] With

an atmosphere, experimenters report getting only glycine. With some
reactions, one can obtain an additional 4 amino acids, but then

it.[2]

About the amount of time available for spontaneous generation:

Schidlowski of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry reports from
studying carbon 12 and carbon 13 isotopes that he's found, in the

of his article's title, "A 3,800-million-year isotopic record of life
from carbon in sedimentary rocks" (_Nature_ 333: 313-318 (1988)).
That's on the lower end.

At the upper end, it's reported in _Nature_ 342: 139-42 (1989) that
early earth suffered much bombardment by asteroids, bombardments that
may have sterilized the earth, with the latest sterilizing

most likely occurring 3.8 billion years ago. (For something not
requiring light, i.e., living near an ocean vent, it could have

as early as 4.44 bya.)

So, in the words of Christopher Chyba and Carl Sagan, "The

origins of life must therefore have coincided with the final stages

the heavy bombardment of the inner Solar System..."(_Nature_ 355:
125-132 (1992), 125.)

You have extremely little time, if any, for your non-existent
nucleotides and amino acids to happen to come together to form life.

Basically the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter
has found evidence of a frozen sea of water near the Martian
equator. The size is 800 km x 900 km with an average 45 m depth.
They say this is similiar to the size and depth of the North Sea.

The reason they believe it has not sublimed away is that it got
covered with volcanic ash shortly after forming.

Oh gosh, I hope so. It would make a Mars expedition almost a
certainty. Now, if they can just find an available carbonaceous
chondritic impact,