[meteorite-list] Meteorites as hosts for seeds of life

From: MexicoDoug_at_aol.com <MexicoDoug_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Jul 19 15:23:13 2005
Message-ID: <f4.55148ce1.300ead1d_at_aol.com>

Mark Fr. wrote:
>To borrow from Jim Carrey, "Alrighty then!"...a cautionary
>tale about letting your hopes make a fool of your reason.
 
"Until Ace Ventura, no actor had considered talking through his ***."
...Jim Carrey
 
Definitely no further comments (I already promised), let me add another
interesting topic for discussion:
 
_Halosimplex carlsbadense_ " variation 250 million years old" dated to the
age of the "Great Dying", the worst documented extention in the Fossil record
"P/T Boundary". Surviving the breakup of Pangea and riding the plates of
continental drift over 10,000 kilometers? Chicxulub?, a minor event at the K/T
Boundary when they were already 185 million years old...
 
This is an interesting organism. Google it for what is out there. It is not
a living fossil. It was revived. Viable spores were extracted 5-10 years
ago from inside the similar sorts of halite crystals found in certain
meteorites we all know and love. The probability of contamination was claimed to be
less than 1 in a billion using the latest and greatest protocols developed by
NASA. Now, only 5% of the samples, collected in the Permian salt deposits
in the drill samples from the New Mexico caverns 600 meters below actually
contained viable spores in their suspended, basically dead state.
 
Although the news isn't hot off the press, they, in fact, were viable and
live once again today, according to their discoverer, long after going
"extinct". The genomes of these extremophiles and characteristics and requirements
are being/have been studied, and they turn out to be somewhat different,
though related to certain modern _Bacillus_, if my short term memory serves.
 
250 million years is a long time, and we've seen since then exquisite
"bottled water" meteorites being marketed shamelessly. Probability of transfer of
these organisms from a world like Mars that dies during a quarter of a
billion years afterwards? Would a small fraction survive near absolute zero
temperatures if frozen gently? Is there anything magic about 250 million years,
or could it well have been 500 million? I don't know, they probably don't
have souls or other higher order complexities to worry about and are basically
remarkable resilient bubbles formed into spores, but maybe Sterling or Mark
knows the answer.
 
Where life may be found and how it survives is one of the most difficult
questions space scientists are wrestling to the limits. We can be pretty
confident, though, that wherever water once was, and drys, halite crystals are hard
to avoid. A vacuum is only -14.7 pounds/in^2. Could a bacterium survive in
a 'halite crystal' from Mars to Earth? Yes. Exploding bodies and so forth
may happen in the movies, but much greater pressures are routinely experienced
by ocean divers right here on Earth. All that is required for recovery is a
gentle equilibration so they don't get the bends. The pressure under just
10 meters of water is an additional 14.7 psi, the same differential between
the earth and space. Sure vacuum has its challenges, but a normal person
sucking a lollypop can probably get at least half way there (7 pounds per square
inch).
 
Disclaimer: I do not "want" to believe in Panspermia. It is just a theory,
like all the rest of the scientific ideas on origins and proliferation of
life.
 
Best wishes, Doug
 
Received on Tue 19 Jul 2005 03:23:09 PM PDT