alt Hacker NewsNote that the Bennu asteroid sample had approximately 5 nanomoles of nucleotides per gram, meaning 20,000 moles of nucleotides could be delivered by a single 4 million ton asteroid, which if it were a spherical carbonaceous chondrite would be about 183 meters in diameter. An asteroid about that size impacts earth roughly every 36,000 years, and that mass of meteor material falls to earth each century.
If primordial earth's oceans had nucleotide concentrations comparable to Bennu, then there would be about 10^39 nucleotides in the ocean.
Replies
nkrisc • today at 2:24 AM
If raw materials isn’t the bottle neck for life every where, then what might it further down the line between oceans full of nucleotides and life? The oceans themselves?
I don't see any reason for the source molecules to come from space. We already know that nucleotides will spontaneously form and polymerize in conditions consistent with the early earth, and a meteorite origin just moves the source of those nucleotides elsewhere but doesn't answer how they formed.