There's a new, chemical reason to think that the first life on Earth began elsewhere. It now seems that only on Mars were the right chemical elements – specifically boron, molybdenum and oxygen – all present at the right time to produce the RNA molecules widely thought to be the precursor to DNA and therefore life on Earth.
"The evidence seems to be building that we are actually all Martians; that life started on Mars and came to Earth on a rock," says Steve Benner a chemist at the Westheimer Institute of Science and Technology in Gainesville, Florida. He presented the idea at the Goldschmidt conference of geochemists in Florence, Italy, today. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the theory also provides a way for life to arise in a dry environment – which in turn ups the odds that there is still life on Mars today.
Panspermia, the idea that life might be capable of surviving space to move between bodies in the universe, for example, lying dormant in meteorites is not new. But to date it has lacked a chemical cradle for life any more convincing than Earth.
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