Apparently life on Earth may have started on Mars. The BBC reports new arguments for Mars as the cradle of our life, made at the Goldschmidt Meeting in Florence, Italy by Professor Steven Benner of the the US based Westheimer Institute of Science and Technology.
The idea that life originated on Mars and was then transported to our planet has been mooted before. But Prof Benner’s ideas add another twist to the theory of a Martian origin for the terrestrial biosphere.
Here in Florence, Prof Benner presented results that suggest minerals containing the elements boron and molybdenum are key in assembling atoms into life-forming molecules.
The researcher points out that boron minerals help carbohydrate rings to form from pre-biotic chemicals, and then molybdenum takes that intermediate molecule and rearranges it to form ribose, and hence RNA.