Heather Radke

Yes.

Amino acids, the building blocks of life.

So it was a kind of a...

Almost a meme as an experiment.

It's a beautiful experiment.

Professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College London.

You know, going back to Frankenstein, the idea that you have electricity and lightning and you zap things and they come to life, they spring to life, and all you need is another lightning strike and lo and behold, you know, fast forward four billion years and we've got humans.

You know, if that doesn't persuade a 13-year-old, well, good, because it doesn't persuade me either.

Huh.

Why not?

Like, what's wrong with that?

Well, Nick says, you know, amino acids are great and all, but... It's another 10 or 12 steps to make something living.

This is asking a lot of spontaneous chemistry...

that all of these steps should just happen without anything to direct it.

Yes, Francis Crick proposed what he called directed panspermia.

which is to say some alien civilization put some cells, some bacterial cells on a rocket and crashed it on the Earth.

I mean, my immediate reaction...

is that it's bonkers.

But there's a kind of less extreme but more real version of that, which is that organic molecules can form in space and will be delivered to Earth on meteorites.

And that's definitely true.