by Academician Valentin PARMON, Director of the G. K. Boreskov Institute of Catalysis, Siberian Branch, RAS What with the scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, one of the greatest puzzles of being - the origin of life on earth-is still there. A good many hypotheses have been advanced to this effect. Here's how Siberian scientists approach the problem. According to the conventional, household view, the planets of the solar system are believed to have originated from the primary cloud of gas and dust which must have come into being about 5 billion years ago in consequence of some stellar cataclysms. But, as recent findings indicate, that cloud also doubled as a giant catalytic reactor containing iron, nickel and silicon (present in dust particles) as well as the key components of interplanetary gas-hydrogen and carbon monoxide... This family of chemical elements had to be implicated in the synthesis of organic compounds, a process triggered by cosmic particles. Our colleagues, upon a numerical modeling of astrophysical processes, have concluded that no planets could have come into being without such interactions. Solid particles of cosmic dust could not coagulate into larger concretions in the absence of "glue", the surface sticky layer of synthesized organic molecules. That layer caused the colliding dust particles of solid matter to conglomerate. Growing in size, such conglomerations gave rise to protoplanets from which the earth and other objects of the solar system were formed. In fact, many of the essential hypothetical characteristics of the global cosmic reactor were known to chemists before. First, this reactor functioned by the same principles as its analogs with a catalyst's "pseudo-Hquefied layer". Second, the pressure of gaseous reagents in the zone of nascent planets must have been commensurate with the atmospheric pressure, i.e. quite typical of processes already known to specialists. Many other parameters, such as the composition of a reactio ... Читать далее