This should be of interest to people on this board. I ran into this today at
lunch.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 97, Issue 22, 11864-11868, October 24, 2000
Atmospheric aerosols as prebiotic chemical reactors
Christopher M. Dobson*, G. Barney Ellison , Adrian F. Tuck and Veronica
Vaida
Aerosol particles in the atmosphere have recently been found to contain a
large number of chemical elements and a high content of organic material.
The latter property is explicable by an inverted micelle model. The aerosol
sizes with significant atmospheric lifetimes are the same as those of
single-celled organisms, and they are predicted by the interplay of
aerodynamic drag, surface tension, and gravity. We propose that large
populations of such aerosols could have afforded an environment, by means of
their ability to concentrate molecules in a wide variety of physical
conditions, for key chemical transformations in the prebiotic world. We also
suggest that aerosols could have been precursors to life, since it is
generally agreed that the common ancestor of terrestrial life was a
single-celled organism. The early steps in some of these initial
transformations should be accessible to experimental investigation.
glenn
see http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
for lots of creation/evolution information
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