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

From: batkol <batkol_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Jul 19 16:08:45 2005
Message-ID: <00c601c58c9d$a8c4a1a0$1124e6ce_at_DJV2WH71>

can't help but think that when it comes to "life", we should appropriate
Pascal's third wager, and always bet on it. in whatever form, wherever we
look, life, like faith, manages.

----- Original Message -----
From: <MexicoDoug_at_aol.com>
To: <meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2005 2:23 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Meteorites as hosts for seeds of life


> 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
>
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Received on Tue 19 Jul 2005 04:08:40 PM PDT