Life Came to Mars
By Babu G. Ranganathan
Recently, the headlines are filled with statements from NASA that soil on Mars may contain microbial life. There's a good explanation for why life may exist on Mars. In the Earth's past there was powerful volcanic activity which could have easily spewed dirt containing microbes into outer space which eventually could have reached Mars. A Newsweek article of September 21, 1998, p.12 mentions exactly this possibility. "We think there's about 7 million tons of earth soil sitting on Mars", says scientist and evolutionist Kenneth Nealson. "You have to consider the possibility that if we find life on Mars, it could have come from the Earth" [Weingarten, T., Newsweek, September 21, 1998, p.12].
MIT scientist Dr. Walt Brown (a creationist) in his book In "The Beginning " points out that during the great Genesis flood, as recorded in the Bible, the fountains of the deep that were let loose could have easily spewed out meteors and meteorites into space that very well may have contained micro-organisms such as bacteria. One thing for sure is that life requires intelligent creation and doesn't come by chance. NASA knows all this but looking for life on other planets is a powerful way to motivate people to want their government to give more and more money to NASA. NASA, after all, is a business with hefty salaries at stake.
All the scientific evidence only supports the possibility of life coming from previously existing life. It is not scientific to believe that life can arise from non-living matter, at least not spontaneously (by chance). It was once thought by evolutionists that life arose spontaneously from garbage until it was shown that the reason for this is because of insects having previously laid their eggs in the garbage. Thus, the belief that life arose by chance (spontaneously) from chemicals in garbage was successfully refuted. But, evolutionists didn't give up. They just got more sophisticated.
Stanley Miller, in his famous experiment in 1953, showed that individual amino acids (the building blocks of life) could come into existence by chance. But, it's not enough just to have amino acids. The various amino acids that make-up life must link together in a precise sequence, just like the letters in a sentence, to form functioning protein molecules. If they're not in the right sequence the protein molecules won't work. It has never been shown that various amino acids can bind together into a sequence by chance to form protein molecules. Even the simplest cell is made up of many millions of various protein molecules.
Also, what many don't realize is that Miller had a laboratory apparatus that shielded and protected the individual amino acids the moment they were formed, otherwise the amino acids would have quickly disintegrated and been destroyed in the mix of random energy and forces involved in Miller's experiment.
In Nature there are what scientists call right-handed and left-handed amino acids. However, life requires that all proteins be left-handed. So, not only do millions of amino acids have to be in the correct sequence, they also all have to be left-handed. If a right-handed amino acid gets mixed in then the protein molecules won't function. There won't be any life!
Similarly, the nucleic acids in DNA and RNA must be in a precise sequence. The sugar molecules that make-up the various nucleic acids in DNA and RNA must be right-handed. If a nucleic acid with a left-handed sugar molecule gets into the mix then nothing will work.
In the midst of all the arguments over evolution and intelligent design, it is amazing how many in society, including the very educated, believe that scientists had already created life in the laboratory. No such thing has ever happened.
All that scientists have done is genetically engineer already existing forms of life in the laboratory, and by doing this scientists have been able to produce new forms of life, but they did not produce these new life forms from non-living matter. Even if scientists ever do produce life from non-living matter it will only be through intelligent design or planning so it still wouldn't help support any theory of life originating by chance or evolution.
Even in the case involving synthetic (artificial) life, scientists don't actually create or produce life itself from non-living matter. What scientists do in this case is create (by intelligent design) artificial DNA (genetic instructions and code) which is then implanted into an already existing living cell and, thereby, changing that cell into a new form of life. And, again, even if scientists ever do create a whole living cell from scratch (and not just its DNA) it still would not be by chance but by intelligent design. Synthetic life is just another form of genetic engineering. But God was the first genetic engineer. Remember that always!
If the cell had evolved it would have had to be all at once. A partially evolved cell cannot wait millions of years to become complete because it would be highly unstable and quickly disintegrate in the open environment, especially without the protection of a complete and fully functioning cell membrane.
