Materialists Say that Life Stinks

Secular scientists look to stinky poisons to explain where life came from.

A sign that aliens could stink (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Ever smell phosphine? Don’t. It stinks.

Phosphine is among the stinkiest, most toxic gases on Earth, found in some of the foulest of places, including penguin dung heaps, the depths of swamps and bogs, and even in the bowels of some badgers and fish. This putrid “swamp gas” is also highly flammable and reactive with particles in our atmosphere.

Most life on Earth, specifically all aerobic, oxygen-breathing life, wants nothing to do with phosphine, neither producing it nor relying on it for survival.

But this is a molecule the MIT wizards think might indicate the presence of life on other planets. “A molecule that’s known for its smelly and poisonous nature on Earth may be a sure-fire sign of extraterrestrial life,” writes press agent Jennifer Chu. Apparently she thinks that’s funny, not stupid. The article claims that no other known process makes phosphine than some bacteria. “Still, not much was known about phosphine,” the experts confess.

Mono Lake (David Coppedge).

Early ‘soda lakes’ may have provided missing ingredient key to the origin of life (Live Science). The odor next to Mono Lake in California is not particularly pleasant, with its salty water nourishing little more than brine flies. But since it has phosphorus, materialists get all excited. “No one knew how phosphorus, one of the six main chemical elements of life, became plentiful enough on early Earth for life to burst forth,” Laura Geggel writes. Phosphorus is needed for cell membranes, nucleic acids and in ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the energy currency for all life.

The finding explains how this scarce mineral became abundant in Earth’s primordial soup. Put more plainly, it helps scientists understand how life likely arose. “For 50 years, what’s called ‘the phosphate problem,’ has plagued studies on the origin of life,” study co-researcher Jonathan Toner, a research assistant professor of Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, said in a statement.

Soda lakes can carry a million times more phosphate than sea water. If OOL (origin-of-life) scientists now turn to soda lakes to solve their problems, they are tossing out all the oceanic sources, including hydrothermal vents. What will proponents of those theories think about that? It also vastly decreases the space where the proposed activity could take place as a natural experiment, making a chance origin of life even more improbable. (It’s already impossible; see “The Amoeba’s Journey” video clip from Illustra Media’s film Origin.)

The stink of soda lakes, though, is not the only yuck factor in this hypothesis.

This study complements another paper the two researchers published in 2019, which shows that soda lakes can also supply ample cyanide, a chemical that is deadly to humans but not to primitive microbes. Cyanide could have supported the formation of amino acids and nucleotides, the building blocks of proteins, DNA and RNA — in essence, the key ingredients of life, the researchers said.

This theory could be called, “To create life, you have to kill it first,” or “If it stinks, it must be alive!”