[meteorite-list] Microbe Experiment Suggests We Could All Be Martians

From: Rob McCafferty <rob_mccafferty_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 01:44:50 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <729446.49923.qm_at_web50903.mail.yahoo.com>

I cannot help but wonder whether there is something
deeply ingrained in the human psyche which requires us
to believe there is life out there. This is a very
clever and compelling theory but ignores the effects
of millions of years in space subject to cosmic rays,
solar flares and so on.

Why is it so difficult to believe that life actually
started here? Even if it did start on mars, the
questions why and how still remain. I can imagine the
headlines, "HUGE SHOCK! LIFE FOUND ON EARTH"

Intelligent??

RMcC
--- Ron Baalke <baalke at zagami.jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:

>
>
http://www.guardian.co.uk/space/article/0,,1989474,00.html
>
> Microbe experiment suggests we could all be Martians
> Ian Sample
> The Guardian (United Kingdom)
> January 13, 2007
>
> Life on Earth may have announced its arrival
> billions of years ago with
> a whistle and a thump, according to planetary
> scientists.
>
> Experiments by an international team of researchers
> back a controversial
> theory that life flourished on Earth after primitive
> organisms arrived
> aboard a meteorite, itself gouged from Mars by a
> giant impact.
>
> The theory supposes that life was able to gain a
> tentative foothold on
> the red planet as it cooled down and became more
> hospitable several
> billion years ago. At the time, the planet's surface
> was regularly
> bombarded with rocky detritus from the asteroid
> belt, knocking clumps of
> rock and the microbes living on them into space,
> where the gravity of
> the sun brought them hurtling towards Earth.
>
> Charles Cockell, at the Open University, who studies
> microbes in extreme
> environments, joined a team of German and Russian
> scientists to test
> whether microbes could survive the enormous shock of
> being blasted into
> space and crash landing on another planet.
>
> They gathered colonies of micro-organisms including
> cyanobacteria, which
> live in rocky fissures, lichen, which smother their
> surfaces, and spores
> of the hardy bacterium Bacillus subtilis, and
> sandwiched them between
> slices of gabbro, a coarse-grained rock similar to
> that known to make up
> Martian meteorites.
>
> The researchers then used high explosives to fire a
> steel plate at the
> sandwiched organisms and after each shot transferred
> the microbes to a
> dish to see if any had survived. The shocks were
> equivalent to those
> suffered by Martian meteorites that have been found
> on Earth, with
> pressures of up to 50 billion pascals. One pascal is
> equivalent to the
> pressure exerted by a ?5 note resting on a surface.
> The pressure in a
> car tyre is equivalent to 200,000 pascals.
>
> To their surprise, the scientists found the lichen
> and bacterial spores
> survived all but the most cataclysmic impacts up to
> 45 billion pascals.
> The cyanobacteria survived shocks of up to 10
> billion pascals.
>
> The findings support the theory of
> "lithopanspermia", which suggests
> life may be spread from one planet to another aboard
> lumps of rock that
> are knocked off the surface.
>
> Writing in the journal Icarus, the scientists state:
> "These results
> strongly confirm the possibility of a 'direct
> transfer' scenario of
> 'lithopanspermia' for the route from Mars to Earth,
> or from any
> Mars-like planet to other habitable planets in the
> same stellar system."
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>




 
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Received on Mon 15 Jan 2007 04:44:50 AM PST