Although it’s difficult to say if meteorites or lightning supplied phosphorus for life on Earth, the study identifies a potential source of the element for other planets.
“It’s really nice . . . to be able to say there’s more than one path to generating phosphorous that could be available to a planet that might be able to develop life,” Hilairy Hartnett, an astrobiologist at Arizona State University who was not part of the study, tells NPR.
Could… might… Hey, wait, didn’t the headline say that lighting might have sparked the origin of life? Phosphorus is not alive. It’s an inert chemical element.
But it “might” have served as a “building block” to support life, just like a pebble might have served as a building block of concrete for a skyscraper emerging by chance out of the ground.
This irrational, illogical
proposition was immediately echoed around the internet on the
Smithsonian, the Times of Israel, CNN, and by millions of gullible
webmasters." CEH