Posted on 08/21/2007 3:56:55 PM PDT by blam
Did life begin on comets?
18:17 17 August 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Hazel Muir
Clay particles seen in Comet Tempel 1 suggest comets once had warm, liquid interiors that could have spawned life, a controversial new study argues (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD)Tools
If you buy a lottery ticket this week, what are the odds that you'll win the grand prize then get struck by lightning as you pop open the champagne? Vanishingly small, but still much higher than the odds that life on Earth first evolved on our planet, according to an ardent proponent of the notion that life came from space.
Chandra Wickramasinghe from Cardiff University, UK, has long argued the case for cometary panspermia, the idea that comets are infected with primitive life forms and delivered life to the early Earth. That would explain why life on Earth arose so quickly after our planet formed around 4.5 billion years ago.
Wickramasinghe says the case has been bolstered by NASA's Deep Impact probe, which blasted Comet Tempel 1 with a projectile in July 2005. Scientists reported seeing clay particles spewing out from the interior.
Because clay needs liquid water to form, Wickramasinghe says that suggests comets once had warm, liquid interiors due to heating from radioactive isotopes. Clay is also a favoured catalyst for converting simple organic molecules into complex biopolymers on the early Earth.
Now, Wickramasinghe and his colleagues argue that the sheer volume of watery clay environments on comets makes them a far more likely site for the origin of life than our home planet.
The team estimates that the volume of these environments on the early Earth would have been about 10,000 cubic kilometres. A single 20-kilometre-wide comet could offer about a tenth of that, but when you include all the comets in
(Excerpt) Read more at space.newscientist.com ...
if comets came from earth we would be able to expect to find life, as well as clay, inside.
Check out Heart of the Comet by Gregory Benford and David Brin.
The people there did indeed eat the guts of a comet for lunch, with rather odd results.
“Trying to dodge the whole God thing is a difficult business.”
God made comets.
Save for South Park.
Can you clue me in on the reference?
As for my comet reference, I recall an article that was titled "Cory, The Comet, and Bandwidth" or similar.
The comet was SL-9 crashing into Jupiter, and the interest choked NASA's servers.
Cory was a college student that posed naked for her boyfriend, and they posted the pictures in a usenet group. The interest, well the guys dreaming of trying to create life with her, because of the pictures, choked her school's internet bandwidth.
Hey, it was the early 1990s...
My favorite Comet was Rin Tin Tin.
He was the first Star with a tail on it.
First of all, Freedom of Speech is between Government and the Citizen. There is no freedom of speech on any privately owned message board.
Second, how can a scientific theory be a belief system?
lol
You were conceived on the kitchen table. Just imagine all the meals you ate there.
We ara all part of the ort cloud.
While claiming to be science, propagated to school children as truth, but having no way to test it as science. Children will believe it not as mere theory, but as fact and truth. This will not be discouraged by the science in-club. The word “theory” will take a back seat, and the more children will believe it just on suggestion (clay on a comet “suggests” . . .), it takes on the force and affect of a religious belief, because there is no way to test it as science. If seriously questioned by studious children, they will be ridiculed by the “science union” for not going along with the crowd. I qualified my statement on “free speech” to mean exactly what you said, and I was using sarcasm. There is no free speech outside the criteria of the moderators. You know that I understood that. But you felt threatened anyway by my remarks.
I hope you're not going down that "anything that conflicts with Genesis is atheist leftist propaganda" path.
I didn't mean that at all.
Speak for yourself.
Evolution theory stumbled when it was extended into explaining creation of complex life from complete randomness. Fifty years of lab experiments have failed to reproduce this article of faith for the scientific secular humanist community, so they now rely on various computer models and new theories to escape having painted themselves into a corner. Some of these new theories are cosmic rays kicking off the process on Earth or comets air dropping in the complex life or aliens bioengineering us or ... on and on.
The problem is, experimental results don’t back them up, probability theory doesn’t back them up, complex systems theory doesn’t back them up, and the laws of thermodynamics don’t back them up. Abstracting the creation of complex life to an external random event (like cosmic rays jumpstarting the liquid jello to create DNA) to start the process just further makes it less probable to happen. If complex life did come from an external source, now you have to believe it could survive transversing through space and somehow survive coming through our atmosphere without burning up. Given all that, the external source of complex life would still have to overcome the same hurdles that complex life starting on Earth does. Just because it supposedly originates from somewhere besides Earth, does not solve the problem of complex life being created from complete randomness. This new comet theory leaves those who want to believe in evolutionary creation theory in worse shape than just sticking with it all starting on planet Earth.
LOL
“...because there is no way to test it as science.”
Yes there is. Go to a comet and take a sample, bring it back, and analyze it. Or test it in situ. Do this to a bunch of comets, publish the results.
The current concept of clay particles from comets comes directly from a visit to a comet by a spacecraft, not from an untestable hypothesis.
If you had access to a comet, or samples, what sorts of things would you look for to see if it’s the sort of environmnet where life could exist?
I was surprised several years ago when they started finding bacteria in deep rock core samples.
What a wonderful universe God gave us!
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