How lightning strikes could explain the origin of life—on Earth and elsewhere - MIT Technology Review

^{( March 17, 2021; MIT Technology Review )}

The search for life on other planets is a lot like cooking. (Bear with me for a second.) You can have all the ingredients in one place—water, a warm climate and thick atmosphere, the proper nutrients, organic material, and a source of energy—but if you don’t have any processes or conditions that can actually do something with those ingredients, you’ve just got a bunch of raw materials going nowhere.

So sometimes, life needs a spark of inspiration—or maybe several trillion of them. A new study published in Nature Communications suggests lightning may have been a key component in making phosphorus available for organisms to use when life on Earth first appeared by about 3.5 billion years ago. Phosphorus is essential for making DNA, RNA, ATP (the energy source of all known life), and other biological components like cell membranes.

This isn't the first time that lightning has been implicated in the formation of life, but the mechanism is new. The idea is that lightning freed phosphorous from ground rocks and converted it into a water soluble material known as schreibersite. Since schreibersite is water soluble, this would have made the phosphorous available for use by nascent organisms.

Read the rest from MIT Technology Review: How lightning strikes could explain the origin of life—on Earth and elsewhere

Reference:

• Lightning strikes as a major facilitator of prebiotic phosphorus reduction on early Earth ( March 16, 2021; Nature Communications )