Life On Other Planets in the Solar System
We humans have never accepted the idea that it is only on the Earth that life has occurred. From earliest times when we peopled the heavens with gods, goddesses and supernatural beings, through our space exploration activities of the 20th Century, we are driven to decide the question:
Is there Life on Other Planets?
This website is dedicated to the exploration of that question and to the cataloging of the tremendously rich resources on this topic available through our new "world brain," the Internet.
Earliest Evidence of Life on our own planet
In whichever way life developed, we have fossil traces of it that have been reliably dated at 3.5 billion years old. And there are suggestions from carbon deposit analyses (looking at percentages of the kinds of isotopes that we know are produced by life) that hint at an even earlier animation. The fossil remains, of bacteria, look similar to a modern variety, the Cyanobacteria, which are actually thought of as the most advanced.
We are looking at some two to three hundred million years for the appearance of a form of life on Earth.
Evidence for a common origin for Life on Earth
- DNA and RNA are apparantly the 'universal' basis for all life on Earth.
- Only 20 [known] amino acids are used in all living things on Earth.
- L-amino acids exclusively are used in all living things on Earth.
- ATP* is the 'universal' energy used in all living cells.
- Fermentation is the first step in ALL metabolism.
- Highly efficient oxygen-burning represents a 'last' step in aerobic organisms.
