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

From: Marc Fries <m.fries_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed Jul 20 09:35:30 2005
Message-ID: <1106.10.17.14.1.1121866521.squirrel_at_webmail.ciw.edu>

The horse has been led to water - I'm done with this one.

Cheers,
MDF

>>Ah yes - Hollywood; ever the source of wit. Half of it, anyway.
>
>> ...and vacuum is a gift that keeps on giving. It doesn't just give us
>>a lack of air - it boils water, leaving dessicated wreckage where cells
>>used to be. Hardly comparable with a scuba diver's environment.
>
> Right, sweat "boils" right here on earth if you want to put it that way,
> and
> lips get chapped if you don't remember the chapstick, so what.
>
> The original post discusses halite crystals found in meteorites and
> produced
> in evaporative environments. These crystals are naturally bottled
> water/ice
> in space. They appear to be quite effective natural space capsules
> (especially if a hardened spores were inside, like those found in the New
> Mexican
> Caverns). Further, halite crystals have been shown to hitchhike
> protected on
> meteorites like Zag, among others. The pressure comparison I make is
> fine and
> relevant when discussing the integrity of the crystals. A vacuum isn't
> much
> of a hurdle pressurewise given these capsules. If you wish to discuss
> scuba
> diving or other obvious situations on how to kill organisms, you've
> missed
> the point, have a different point to make, just want to be disagreeable,
> or
> some combination of the three.
>
> Common halite crystals could be an ideal vector for the interplanetary
> transport of bacterial spores. The pressures of a vacuum is weak enough
> that a
> standard bottle of Evian mineral water, properly twisted shut would have
> no
> problem with reasonable headspace(i.e., not filled to the top), to float
> around
> space near the Earth's orbit, and be no where near its burst point. That
> is
> another example of pressure as was the 10 meter sea depth, to make a
> point
> that the stresses caused by vacuum pressures are not always the problem
> Hollywood makes them to be, and just fine for bottle water in salt
> capsules.
> Saludos, Doug
>

-- 
Marc Fries
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Carnegie Institution of Washington
Geophysical Laboratory
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Washington, DC 20015
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FAX: 202 478 8901
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Received on Wed 20 Jul 2005 09:35:21 AM PDT