«It's important work,» says Christopher McKay, a
planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. «This is a move toward more realism in terms of what the
conditions were on
early Earth.»
Instead of approaching the origins - of - life puzzle from a chemistry perspective, Ranjan looked at it from a
planetary perspective, attempting to identify the actual
conditions that might have existed on
early Earth, around the time the first organisms appeared.