Hostile terrestrial environments

Solar systems are subjected to a unique set of conditions that may alter their stability and, hence, their performance and life-cycle costs. These conditions include UV radiation, temperature, atmospheric gases and pollutants, the diurnal and annual thermal cycles, and, in concentrating systems, a high-intensity solar flux. In addition, condensation and evaporation of water, rain, hall, dust, wind, thermal expansion mismatches, etc., may impose additional problems for the performance of a solar system. These conditions and problems must be considered not only individually, but also for synergistic degradative effects that may result from their collective action on any part of the system. Since these degradative effects may also reduce the system or component performance, protective encapsulation of sensitive materials from the hostile terrestrial environment is required to provide component durability. 

In Table 1, the consequences of requiring large areas for collection, the cost because of competition with currently available energy forms, materials specificity for performance, and durability (to reduce life-cycle costs) are summarized. These criteria dictate a multilayer stack collector design in which polycrystalline thin film(s) of the active material must be protected from a hostile terrestrial environment. 

An alternative to the terrestrial synthesis of the nucleobases is to invoke interstellar chemistry. Martins has shown, using an analysis of the isotopic abundance of 13C, that a sample of the 4.6 billion year old Murchison meteorite which fell in Australia in 1969 contains traces of uracil and a pyrimidine derivative, xanthine. Samples of soil that surrounded the meteor when it was retrieved were also analyzed. They gave completely different results for uracil, consistent with its expected terrestrial origin, and xanthine was undetectable [48], The isotopic distributions of carbon clearly ruled out terrestrial contamination as a source of the organic compounds present in the meteorite. At 0°C and neutral pH cytosine slowly decomposes to uracil and guanine decomposes to xanthine so both compounds could be the decomposition products of DNA or RNA nucleobases. They must have either travelled with the meteorite from its extraterrestrial origin or been formed from components present in the meteorite and others encountered on its journey to Earth. Either way, delivery of nucleobases to a prebiotic Earth could plausibly have been undertaken by meteors. The conditions that formed the bases need not have been those of an early Earth at all but of a far more hostile environment elsewhere in the Solar System. That environment may have been conducive to the production of individual bases but they may never have been able to form stable DNA or RNA polymers this development may have required the less extreme conditions prevalent on Earth. 

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