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

From: batkol <batkol_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Jul 19 16:11:06 2005
Message-ID: <00d601c58c9d$f6731b20$1124e6ce_at_DJV2WH71>

Melt Through the Ice to Find Life
Jul 19, 2005 - Scientists can tell us what our climate on Earth was like in
past by examining ice cores taken from glaciers. Tiny bubbles of air are
trapped in the ice and maintain a historical record of ancient atmospheres.
The effects of life make their mark in these ice samples as well. What if
you examined the icecaps on Mars, or the layers of ice on Europa? NASA is
considering a proposal for a small spacecraft that would land on Mars or
Europa and melt its way throught the ice, collecting data as it descended,
searching for clues about the presence of life.
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----- 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 04:10:50 PM PDT