[meteorite-list] Did Life Arrive Before the Solar SystemEvenFormed?

From: Gerald Flaherty <grf2_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed May 4 19:27:46 2005
Message-ID: <005d01c55100$dd35fd40$2f01a8c0_at_Dell>

What's your idea of life's origin. Earth bound at the throat of an oceanic
fumerole? Just wondering. Jerry
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marc Fries" <m.fries_at_gl.ciw.edu>
To: "Meteorite Mailing List" <meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 04, 2005 5:44 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Did Life Arrive Before the Solar
SystemEvenFormed?


> Howdy
>
> I don't like panspermia; not even a little bit. It does nothing to
> answer the question of where and how life started in the universe. All
> it does is add a few million to billions of years of travel in the
> cold, dry, radiation-hard vacuum of space to the journey. That, plus
> you've got to crush/heat it in a violent, solar-system-ejecting imact
> and then crush/heat it again on the recieving end. Even if you shorten
> that journey to a trans-planetary scale you've still done nothing to
> answer any questions about how it originated, and you're still dealing
> with several physical processes that each alone have the power of
> sterilization. And at the end of all of THAT, you've still dropped any
> surviving (not bloody likely) microbes into a foreign environment that
> they're not adapted to! You can hang "litho" or "nano" or freakin'
> "nuclear-powered" or anything you want to onto the front of
> "panspermia" and it's still useless as a theory. How annoying that it
> still crops up from time to time...
>
> Bah humbug,
> MDF
>
>>
>>
>> http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/lithopanspermia.html
>>
>> Did Life Arrive Before the Solar System Even Formed?
>> Written by Jeff Barbour
>> Universe Today
>> May 4, 2005
>>
>> Summary - (May 4, 2005) The theory of panspermia proposes that life
>> really gets around, jumping fron planet to planet - or even from star to
>> star. Life might be everywhere! Assuming this is true, how do
>> single-celled bacteria make the journey through the vacuum of space?
>> Easy, they use chunks of rock as space ships, in a process called
>> lithopanspermia. And now, researchers from Princeton and the University
>> of Michigan think that life carrying rocks might have been right there
>> at the beginning of our solar system, keeping their tiny astronauts safe
>> and sound, frozen in statis until the planets formed and the right
>> conditions let them thaw out, stretch their proteins, and begin a
>> process leading from microbe to mankind.
>>
>> Full Story - Things seem to start simple then get more complex. Life is
>> like that. And perhaps nowhere is this notion truer than when we
>> investigate the origins of life. Did the earliest single cell
>> life-forms coalesce from organic molecules here on Earth? Or is it
>> possible that - like dandelions wafting spore above spring grass -
>> cosmic winds carry living things from world to world later to take root
>> and flourish? And if this is the case, how precisely does such a
>> "dia-spora" occur?
>>
>> 450 years before the common era, Greek philosopher Anaxagoras of Ionia
>> proposed that all living things sprung from certain ubiquitous "seeds of
>> life". Today's notion of such "seeds" is far more sophisticated than
>> anything Anaxagoras could possibly envision - limited as he was to
>> simple observations of living things such as budding plant & flowering
>> tree, crawling & buzzing insect, loping animal or walking human; not too
>> mention natural phenomena like sound, wind, rainbows, earthquakes,
>> eclipses, Sun, and Moon. Surprisingly modern in thought, Anaxagoras
>> could only guess as to the details...
>>
>> Some 2300 hundreds years later - during the 1830s - Swedish chemist J?ns
>> Jackob Berzelius confirmed that carbon compounds were found in certain
>> meteorites "fallen from the heavens". Berzelius himself however, held
>> that these carbonates were contaminates originating with the Earth
>> itself - but his finding contributed to theories propounded by later
>> thinkers including the physician H.E. Richter and physicist Lord Kelvin.
>>
>> Panspermia received its first real treatment by Hermann von Helmholtz in
>> 1879, but it was another Swedish chemist - 1903 Nobel Prize winning
>> Svante Arrhenius - who popularized the concept of life originating from
>> space in 1908. Perhaps surprisingly, that theory was based on the notion
>> that radiation pressure from the Sun - and other stars - "blew" microbes
>> about like tiny solar sails - and not as the result of finding carbon
>> compounds in stony meteorite.
>>
>> The theory that simple forms of life travel in ejecta from other worlds
>> - embedded in rock blasted from planetary surfaces by the impact of
>> large objects - is the basis for "lithopanspermia". There are numerous
>> advantages to this hypothesis - simple, hardy forms of life are often
>> found in mineral deposits on Earth in forbidding locales. Worlds - such
>> as our own or Mars - are occasionally blasted by asteroids and comets
>> large enough to hurl rock at speeds exceeding escape velocities. Mineral
>> in rocks can shield microbes from shock and radiation (associated with
>> impact craters) as well as hard radiation from the Sun as stony meteors
>> move through space. The hardiest forms of life also have the ability to
>> survive in a cold vacuum by going into stasis - reducing chemical
>> interactions to zero while maintaining biological structure well enough
>> to later thaw and multiply in more salubrious environs.
>>
>> In fact several examples of such ejecta are now available on earth for
>> scientific analysis. Stony meteors can include some very sophisticated
>> forms of organic materials (carbonaceous chondrites have been found that
>> include amino and carboxylic acids). Fossilized remnants from Mars in
>> particular - though subject to various non-organic interpretations - are
>> in the possession of institutions such as NASA. The theory and practice
>> of "lithopanspermia" looks very promising - although such a theory can
>> only explain where the simplest forms of life come from - and not how it
>> originated to begin with.
>>
>> In a paper entitled "Lithopanspermia in Star Forming Clusters" published
>> April 29, 2005, cosmologists Fred C. Adams of the University of Michigan
>> Center for Theoretical Physics and David Spergel of the Department of
>> Astrophysical Sciences of Princeton University discuss the probability
>> of carbonaceous chondrite distribution of microbial life within early
>> star clusters. According to the duo, "the chances of biological material
>> spreading from one system to another is greatly enhanced ... due to the
>> close proximity of the systems and low relative velocities."
>>
>> According to the authors, previous studies have looked into the
>> likelihood that life-bearing rocks (typically exceeding 10 kgs in
>> weight) play a role in the spread of life within isolated planetary
>> systems and found "the odds of both meteroid and biological transfer are
>> exceedingly low." However "odds of transfer increase in more crowded
>> environments" and "Since the time scale for planet formation and the
>> time that young stars are expected to live in birth clusters are roughly
>> comparable, about 10 - 30 million years, debris from planet formation
>> has a good chance of being transferred from one solar system to another."
>>
>> Ultimately Fred and David conclude "young star clusters provide an
>> efficient means of transferring rocky material from solar system to
>> solar system. If any system in the birth aggregate supports life, then
>> many other systems in the cluster can capture life bearing rocks."
>>
>> To arrive at this conclusion, the duo performed "a series of numerical
>> calculations to estimate the distribution of ejection speeds for rocks"
>> based on size and mass. They also considered the dynamics of early star
>> forming groups and clusters. This was essential to help determine rock
>> recapture rates by planets in neighboring systems. Finally they had to
>> make certain assumptions about the frequency of life-encapsulated
>> materials and the survivability of life-forms embedded within them. All
>> this led up to a sense of "the expected number of successful
>> lithopanspermia events per cluster."
>>
>> Based on methods used to arrive at this conclusion and thinking only in
>> terms of present distances between solar systems, the duo estimated the
>> probability that Earth has exported life to other systems. Over the age
>> of life on Earth (some 4.0 Byr) Fred and David estimate that the Earth
>> has ejected some 40 billion life-bearing stones. Of the estimated 10
>> bio-stones per annum, nearly 1 (0.9) will land on a planet suitable for
>> further growth and proliferation.
>>
>> Most cosmologists tend to address the "hard-science questions" of the
>> origin of the Universe as a whole. Fred says that "exobiology is
>> intrinsically interesting" to him and that he and "David were summer
>> students together in New York in 1981" where they worked on "issues
>> related to planetary atmospheres and climate, issues that are close to
>> questions of exobiology." Fred also says that he "spends a healthy
>> fraction of research time on problems associated with star and planet
>> formation." Fred acknowledges David's special role in thinking "up the
>> idea of looking at panspermia in clusters; when we talked about it, it
>> became clear that we had all the pieces of the puzzle. We just had to
>> put them together."
>>
>> This interdisciplinary approach to cosmology and exobiology also led
>> Fred and David to look at the question of lithopanspermia between
>> clusters themselves. Again using methods developed to explore the
>> proliferation of life within clusters, and later applied to the
>> exportation of life from the Earth itself to other non-solar system
>> planets, Fred and David were able to conclude that "a young cluster is
>> more likely to capture life from outside than to give rise to life
>> spontaneously." And "Once seeded, the cluster provides an effective
>> amplification mechanism to infect other members" within that cluster
>> itself.
>>
>> Ultimately however, Fred and David can not answer the question of where
>> and under what conditions the first seeds of life took form. In fact,
>> they are willing to admit that "if the spontaneous origin of life were
>> sufficiently common, there would be no need for any panspermia mechanism
>> to explain the presence of life."
>>
>> But according to Fred and David, once life gets a foothold somewhere, it
>> manages to get around quite handily.
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>
>
> --
> Marc Fries
> Postdoctoral Research Associate
> Carnegie Institution of Washington
> Geophysical Laboratory
> 5251 Broad Branch Rd. NW
> Washington, DC 20015
> PH: 202 478 7970
> FAX: 202 478 8901
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Received on Wed 04 May 2005 07:27:39 PM PDT