[meteorite-list] Did Life Arrive Before the Solar System EvenFormed?
From: Francis Graham <francisgraham_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu May 12 11:28:55 2005 Message-ID: <20050512152853.25525.qmail_at_web54703.mail.yahoo.com> --- Marc Fries <m.fries_at_gl.ciw.edu> wrote: > 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. There are parasites that must pass through as many as 5 hosts to complete their life cycle. The reason they are not extinct or that they evolved at all is because they produce prodigious offspring. If you look at a parasite (I have a slide collection of all sorts of them) most of their anatomy is devoted to reproduction. En masse. Likewise, although the chance of any given organism making it from planet to planet is vanishingly small (as it is for a single parasite egg to make it back to the host as an adult to lay eggs again) there are enormous opportunities. If life was on Mars, anything other than an absolute total unarguable zero chance of transit would mean it made it to Earth, and possibly vice-versa, given the enormous numbers of impacts and microbes in geological time. As I look at my parasite slides I remember that the organism evolved to go through up to 5 hosts because it was actually more advantageous to the survival of the species than remaining free-living. Likewise thermophiles are held to be the most common genetic ancestor of all existing life on Earth (as genetic studies have verified) because they are evolved to be resistant to impact phenomena and transit. Francis Graham Yahoo! Mail Stay connected, organized, and protected. Take the tour: http://tour.mail.yahoo.com/mailtour.html Received on Thu 12 May 2005 11:28:53 AM PDT |
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