Posted on 12/04/2006 9:59:23 AM PST by FYREDEUS
A meteorite that crashed in northwest Canada almost seven years ago might have been able to host the very earliest life forms, according to NASA researchers, which opens the door to the possibility that life could be present elsewhere in the universe.
Mike Zolensky, a cosmic minerologist at the NASA Space Centre in Texas, told CBC Radio the Tagish Lake meteorite is unlike any they have ever examined.
"We always knew it was a rare, very carbon- and water-rich meteorite - and they hardly ever fall on the Earth," said Zolensky. "But we've found since that it's even more unique than that. It's a totally unique meteorite."
Zolensky said tiny bubbles in the rock are organic globules where the universe's earliest life forms could have been able to live, an astonishing discovery from a meteorite thought to be 4.5 billion years old - older than the Earth.
"Perhaps these are like little condos arriving on earth and biology can move in later on," said Zolensky.
"They've survived somehow, intact on an asteroid for over four and a half billion years and where they come from, we don't know. But it's not from around here. It's from somewhere else."
Scientists have speculated life on earth began somewhere between 3.5 and 3.9 billion years ago.
The meteor first attracted attention when a dramatic fireball lit up the early morning skies of the Yukon, northern British Columbia, parts of Alaska, and the Northwest Territories on Jan. 18, 2000.
Fragments of the meteorite scattered across the Southern Lakes region of the Yukon. A week later, outdoorsman Jim Brook discovered a remnant on Tagish Lake between Atlin, B.C., and Carcross, Yukon.
Brook stored the meteorite in a freezer to keep it intact, a move that helped give researchers a chance to study it before it could be influenced by the environment on earth.
"This meteorite is unique because it was recovered frozen ... and some of these samples came to us still frozen," said Zolensky. "It's never happened before, may never happen again, and will always be a bonanza to science for that reason."
No, The Bible clearly indicates that the creation was about 6000 years ago.
To me, that is also about how old it looks too. Looking at things like landslides and rivers, it doesn't look like it could be much older than that.
If you do a search on "small comets" you will find conclusive evidence that if the Earth were 10,000 years old, it would be completely covered with water by now, based in the numbers of such comets that are daily bombarding the earth. (it's called geoscience)
Roach motels...
As for the rest......"ROFL"
Wow, I have spoken to the dead again today, and they answered! FR is an interesting place.
Or just ask Larry Niven - he figured it out decades ago in "Bigger Than Worlds" - you simply [though simply does not mean easily] constrict the star at the center of your Ringworld into a propulsive jet and once you reach Bussard interstellar ramjet velocities the system becomes self-fueling from interstellar or even intergalactic hydrogen indefinitely...its only limitation is that it's STL but once you've accelerated the system to near the speed of light then time dilation moots that as a practical problem, at least for one way 'emigration' voyages.
Of course you need to be a Kardashev Type II/III civilization to be able to build one of those so it probably wont be THIS millenium, unless Megascale engineering is an unintended consequences of the Kurzweil Singularity if it comes, and presuming the Carter Catastrophe doesnt come first...
...but once you do build one...
A Flying Ringworld could conceivably carry the populations of millions of inhabited worlds [humans, posthumans, A.I.s, aliens et al] across the intergalactic gulfs on a Grand Tour of not only our Local Group but just about anywhere in this Universe and continue to do so for as long as our Universe lasts, even long after all the 'natural' stars succumb to heat death [if that is our Universe's ultimate Fate]...though if proton decay is real then eventually sometime before T+10^36 years even a Flying Ringworld would succumb to Final Entropy's icy grip - Thermodynamics 2 always wins in The End eh?
Furthermore I wouldnt want to disperse Humanity to PLANETS if dispersal WAS a good idea [and imo it is...right now Humanity's biggest danger is that all our eggs are in one planetary basket waiting for some dumb rock or human miscreant with a chimera virus to knock us off]...planets are 'stationary targets' for anything out there that might be 'bigger' than us and nastier than us [if THAT'S possible, lol] that are just too darn easy to find and *in Galaxy Quest alien voice* "hit em with a rock"...
Better imo to play the smart odds and AVOID settling planets - settle SPACE instead...
...with as many ships moving as far and as fast away as we can move em.
Scatter to the four winds and beyond ASAP and ALWAYS KEEP MOVING...if we stay away from planets as much as possible there's a LOT of 'empty' space to not be easily found in; SOME of us are likely to survive that way.
*in movie-Mexican voice*
Planets? Wee doan neeeeeeed noo steenkeen 'planets'...
Agreed - Panspermia is not intrinsically about "Godless origin of life" anymore than Intelligent Design is intrinsically about Godly origin of life...small-minded dichotomous thinking and artificially constrained bivalued 'choices' ignore the wider range of possibilities available.
Not "anything" - this is the common misconception about Omnipotence or Omniscience - Omni means ALL not ANY; God can do/see ALL things that CAN be done/seen, not "anything" which would by definition include things which can't be done/seen - trapping God in paradox.
In other words God is constrained not by physics but by LOGIC - for example God can't sculpt a round square or make 1+1=3 or see what is 1 mile north of the North Pole etc NOT because such things are physically impossible for God to do/see but because they are logically impossible for anyone/anything to do/see.
God's no silly rabbit; trix is for someone else...God doesnt play tricks anymore than He throws dice...
"his most elaborately protected and certified word"
Really? What do you mean by "elaborately protected" and certified to who? Moses? Mohammed? Gautama-Buddha? Lao-Tzu? Kung-Fu Tse?
ALL the Faithful of any Faith will believe that THEIR 'prophet' 'sage' or 'saint' got the 'straight dope' direct from The Source and will stand up and 'certify' it til they are blue in the face...and some will 'elaborately protect' that belief it to the point of killing everyone who thinks some other 'prophet' 'sage' or 'saint' got their own straight dope direct from The Source that they will stand up and certify til they are blue in the face, lol-if-it-wasn't-so-tragic
That kind of "protection" thinking is a prescription for endless crusades, pogroms and jihads that prove NOTHING...
As for "certified"...
Nothing is certain but Universal heat-death and taxes - and some modern physicists think there may be ways around final entropic Heat Death lol...mere biological death will probably be cured SOON...one way or another [though perhaps not soon enough for us now living]...as for taxes, well perhaps no one can help with that ;-)...
CERTITUDE is the last refuge of small weak minds that think they need the reassurance of 'certainty' from 'answers' - but the wise of many faiths have always known life isnt really about answers - its about finding better questions.
REAL Faith afterall is believing in what you DON'T know for certain.
MyKid'sCoolDad is that you??? lol
Just because someone isn't a "One Book" doesnt mean they are dead in/to the Lord...lololol
...along with a host of B movie writers.
That being said, if one conceptualizes the "image" of "in His image" as being not the physical human form but rather, self-aware intelligence - then it's easy to conceptualize God having created the universe "knowing" that self-aware life would spring up everywhere.
Niven was forced to admit that Ringworld is unstable.
Gods word is interlaced with numeric codes and patterns that protect the text from modification of even a single character. These phenomina have been rigorously examined and proven beyond a shadow of doubt, by learned mathematicians. Only God himself could have produced it.
"and certified to who?"
You and me.
And the best examples of those have been found to be where???
So far not a single example of a Type I civilization has been found, nor II nor III. Type 0: that's us.
So... If life on Earth came from little, alien bugs that could have been on that rock, where did the little, alien bugs come from before that?
Exactly.
Dreamers!
We should not discourage daydreamers, but we are right to critique their dreams.
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