The picture, man, the picture!
Always worth posting, even if it is a fake.
Posted on 04/04/2006 6:13:57 AM PDT by planetesimal
Astrobiology sounds like the stuff of lava lamps and Jetsons reruns.
Yet seven years after NASA launched a formal astrobiology research program, scientists of every stripe — geologists, biologists, chemists, paleontologists, oceanographers and astronomers — have rallied to the quest.
They've spent as much as $65 million a year trying to solve a mystery that has underpinned religion and inspired thinkers from Seneca to Carl Sagan: How did life on the lonely Earth begin? And is Earth really the only source of life in the universe?
With the help of modern tools such as the genome, high-powered computer modeling and robotics, they're finding some out-of-this-world answers, ones that may lead to Mars and beyond.
(Excerpt) Read more at palmbeachpost.com ...
Dam* Chinese reverse engineering.
He, you know how those cartoons came about, dont you?
During the whole UFO craze the gov was getting nervous and wanted to ridicule the UFO movement.
So they went and asked whether entertainment industry could help them out there, and make some nice cartoons which made aliens, UFO's and people that believed in them look so silly that nobody would believe in it anymore.
It worked partially. People mindlessly utter the words 'little green aliens' (cartoon reference) whenever confronted with a 'believer' like a sort of magic incantation that make all those tin foil lunies go away, yet the group that believes in them has increased.
The rocks we have recovered show the isotopic "signature" of Mars origin. Every planet has isotopes in different proportions that indicate the origin of such rocks when they fall on Earth. We determined the Mars signature from the Viking probe and other subsequent missions. The rocks were blasted off Mars by massive impacts by asteroids and comets. Calculations of the speed of ejecta from the impacts show that the rocks could attain escape velocity from Mars and go into orbit around the Sun. The Allen Hills meteorites are almost certainly from Mars. In the center of the one meteorites the NASA team found fossils of nanobacteria. Since Mars was warm and had oceans while the Earth was still above the boiling point of water, the theory is that Mars could easily have had life before Earth. When the Earth cooled down, Martian rocks could have seeded the early Earth with bacteria spores. Sorry about the impact on theology. We just want the truth regardless of whether it offends anyone. When we find life on Mars (and I am willing to bet money on this) the bacteria DNA will tell us whether it has a common ancestor with us. Humans share DNA with more primitive lifeforms including bacteria. Flame away.
"There is even a school of thought which argues that our own moon was made of materials knocked off the earth."
That is the prevailing school of thought, actually. The more accurate statement would be that the Moon is made up of the combined remains of the original impactor and some terrestrial debris. The composition of the moon, its orbit, and Earth's rotational inclination all support this theory.
You're using the assumption that there were Martian microbes to begin with.
We have no evidence that life (of any kind) has ever occured on Mars.
(The "Martian Meteor" found in Antartica notwithstanding, because there is still debate on whether what was found in the rock was actually fossilized bacteria or the result of a simple chemical reaction).
LoL....................
Martians on earth?
Would explain Democrats.
Space aliens are simple demonic manifestations. Nothing more, nothing less.
Did the 'Men in Black' tell you to say that?
'Space Aliens' are the construct of the human minds desire to believe in something "greater than themselves."
Something to say that we're not alone and part of something bigger.
Of all the times Aliens visited our planet, you'd think there would be a mass event that would leave no doubt to their presence, instead of a scattered collection of people with 'dubious' crediblity fixated on anal probes.
Or, on the other hand, God could have just made it as it is, since it is so useful to life on Earth thanks to tidal forces and provision of simple calendric computations.
Since no one was there to see it happen, it really is just a matter of belief. It is impossible for naturalism to "proove" the ejectile origin of the Moon. "Was made" seems right to me.
We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to MAKE so many. Jim said the moon could a LAID them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.
Ping.
"And where do you think "Pet Rocks" originated?"
I feel ashamed now that I didn't think of that... :)
The picture, man, the picture!
Always worth posting, even if it is a fake.
It is about a billion times more likely that life was blasted off earth and colonized mars.
Considering that life has bloomed here non-stop for about 3.5 billion years and mars looks like it has been dead for at least a billion years (if not always.)
I always find it wierd that some people are more willing to believe life on earth must have come from somewhere else considering how hard it is to get started in the first place. Well it would have been just as hard (or more likely a billion times harder) for life to start somewhere else in the first place just as well.
There is however a strain of bacteria (the smallest known forms) that have adapted to survive extremely high radiation levels (levels that would have never existed on earth even in a highest radiation zones of a uranium mine). It would make no sense for a bacteria to develop a biologically- expensive process to withstand extreme radiation levels if those levels never existed on the planet. But those radiation levels just happen to exist in space.
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