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Did Life Begin On Comets?
New Scientist ^ | 8-17-2007 | HazelMuir

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 ...


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: began; comet; crevo; crevolist; life; origins; panspermia; xplanets
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To: DBrow
Bacteria in deep rock core samples.

What was the species of bacteria? Was it known or unknown prior?

Is the conclusion then that non-living substances in the rock combined to produce life?

Has that ever been duplicated in a laboratory?

Has any scientist witnessed non-living substances getting together to bring forth anything living?

61 posted on 08/22/2007 7:22:21 AM PDT by John Leland 1789
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To: DBrow
By the way, I am told by an astronomer that the number of comets known is actually decreasing. Is that correct? How many comets are now observable? How many were observable 50 years ago?
62 posted on 08/22/2007 7:27:33 AM PDT by John Leland 1789
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To: John Leland 1789
The bacterium was unknown prior. We didn’t have access to the substrate until recently.

I don’t think anyone concluded that nonliving rock spontaneously produced the bacteria.

I don’t think anybody has observed nonliving stuff produce living stuff. Remember way back when they thought garbage produced flies? I don’t remember his name but some scientist proved that wrong with a set of experiments.

My point was an aside, isn’t it amazing what turns up when you look in a new place! If we actually could peel a comet or asteroid apart, I bet we’d be surprised, amazed, and astounded at what we’d find there.

63 posted on 08/22/2007 7:33:44 AM PDT by DBrow
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To: Extremely Extreme Extremist

Comet!
It makes your tongue turn green.
Comet!
It tastes like gasoline.
Comet!
It makes you vomit!

So let’s drink Comet
And vomit
Today!

</cub scout>


64 posted on 08/22/2007 7:36:14 AM PDT by freedomlover (Make sure you're in love - before you move in the heavy stuff)
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To: John Leland 1789
Well, I’m not being unkind to you personally to tell you that I firmly believe the Genesis account of Creation, and that whatever conflicts with the Genesis account will be ultimately proven to be false.

So, in other words, you decry scientific speculation as to the presence of clay in comets as something unprovable, yet your view rests on faith.

If you want to believe in Genesis, that's your perogative, but don't turn around and decry scientific theorizing.

65 posted on 08/22/2007 7:41:41 AM PDT by dirtboy (Impeach Chertoff and Gonzales. We can't wait until 2009 for them to be gone.)
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To: John Leland 1789
Since we started observing stuff in detail, lots of comets have been seen hitting the sun, and the famous time that a comet was lost in Jupiter.

Don’t know if there’s a source of “new” comets, so yeah, if one is seen hitting the sun, there’s one less.

Tunguska, if it was a comet, took out one more.

The number of comets discovered, though, is holding about the same since NEO and NEAT and the near-Earth projects started. David Levy had visual the comet discovery title locked up until the US launched the IRAS telescope, and that sat was used to discover scads of them.

Comets move in from Oort and Kuiper belts due to tidal and orbital instabilities, some are detected optically, I’m sure that there are some we don’t see (since IRAS could see lots that we had missed).

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~zs3t-tk/comet_hunter/comet_hunter.htm

Here is an article discussing the hobby of comet hunting, the old way of visually finding a comet and reporting it (and getting your name on it) is being replaced by automation and modern observing techniques.

66 posted on 08/22/2007 7:45:25 AM PDT by DBrow
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To: dirtboy
The problem is not clay on a comet. And nobody, not I, tried to pooh-pooh the idea of there being found clay on a comet. I don’t think that clay on a comet is a problem at all.

But it would be too huge a leap from the existence of clay, to the existence of life. We have a whole lot of clay on planet Earth. Nobody has ever observed life beginning in clay spontaneously.

67 posted on 08/22/2007 7:53:04 AM PDT by John Leland 1789
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To: DBrow

Thank you. I just watched a little thing on comets the other evening, and I’d like to learn more.


68 posted on 08/22/2007 7:55:18 AM PDT by John Leland 1789
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To: Gen-X-Dad
Evolution theory stumbled when it was extended into explaining creation of complex life from complete randomness.

Odd how the theory of evolution managed to stumble on something it doesn't even address.

69 posted on 08/22/2007 7:58:48 AM PDT by atlaw
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To: John Leland 1789
But it would be too huge a leap from the existence of clay, to the existence of life.

Clay shows probable existence of liquid water at some point. Liquid water is believed to be a key precondition for life. Therefore, a scientist sees this as buttressing the THEORY that comets could harbor life. It would still take actual sampling of cometary material to see if life once did exist or still exists in a given comet.

I have a feeling that, over the next 50 years, we are going to find out that life is a whole lot tougher and can exist in far more places than we currently envision. Plus, the comet theory gets around the notion that life arose spontaneously on Earth - it instead was seeded here.

70 posted on 08/22/2007 7:58:55 AM PDT by dirtboy (Impeach Chertoff and Gonzales. We can't wait until 2009 for them to be gone.)
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To: John Leland 1789
Religion: all life came from a rock !

Leap and leap again. Misquote and abuse of language. Hermeneuticists would be interested in this but they are looking for intended meaning not nonsense.

71 posted on 08/22/2007 7:59:00 AM PDT by RightWhale (It's Brecht's donkey, not mine)
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To: Gen-X-Dad
explaining creation of complex life from complete randomness

Many do that, mostly in the Creationist camp. It is a strawman.

72 posted on 08/22/2007 8:06:48 AM PDT by RightWhale (It's Brecht's donkey, not mine)
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To: John Leland 1789
“But it would be too huge a leap from the existence of clay, to the existence of life.”

Well, start with hydrogen gravitationally collapsing into a star, then work up by very little steps from there.

A big star or two must supernova to spread “heavy elements” that were made in the original star- carbon, iron, oxygen, and so forth.

And all of these processes have a beginning!

73 posted on 08/22/2007 8:11:17 AM PDT by DBrow
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To: blam
Did Life Begin On Comets?

No.

Now go back to playing with your Barbies and leave me alone.

74 posted on 08/22/2007 8:12:55 AM PDT by TChris (Has anyone under Mitt Romney's leadership ever been worse off because he is Mormon?)
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To: dirtboy

I understand the progression of thought: clay requires water, etc. But we also have a whole lot of water on the Earth, and nobody has ever observed life beginning spontaneously in water.

I believe that in the next 50 years we will see a real dismantling of evolutionary theories. If it can go one way, it can go the other.


75 posted on 08/22/2007 8:13:29 AM PDT by John Leland 1789
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To: DBrow
“A big star or two must supernova to spread “heavy elements” that were made in the original star- carbon, iron, oxygen, and so forth.”

Still no life. That’s my theory, and it is just as observable as any other.

76 posted on 08/22/2007 8:17:34 AM PDT by John Leland 1789
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To: John Leland 1789
http://biology.clc.uc.edu/courses/bio114/spontgen.htm

Here’s the story I was looking for- it was Pasteur who zotted the idea of spontaneous generation (abiogenesis).

Looking at other web sites, I was surprised to see that “life arising spontaneously from nonliving matter” was commonly accepted even as late as the late 1700s. People accepted as fact that mice, flies, fleas, rats and other “lesser” organisms could arise from mud and garbage, and apparently only higher organisms like people and horses had a more divine beginning.

So maybe I’ll finally open that Tupperware container I found way back in the cabinet, now that I’m sure there are no mutant creatures in there...

77 posted on 08/22/2007 9:02:12 AM PDT by DBrow
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To: atlaw
Evolution theory stumbled when it was extended into explaining creation of complex life from complete randomness.

Odd how the theory of evolution managed to stumble on something it doesn't even address.

----

Yes, it is. Considering this is the main reason why evolutionists and creationists have spent the last few decades beating each other over the head. It makes sense if you do not believe in God or intelligent design to extend evolution into somehow randomly creating the DNA molecule out of liquid soup which then happily spits out a human being a few billion years later through the process of evolution. That was what I was taught in school growing up. Evolution as an adaptive process is great, evolution as a creation process is over extending it and causes it to run into so many problems. I wonder why they never taught that to me in school along with the fish rising up out of the ocean into a monkey and then into a man?
78 posted on 08/22/2007 5:22:36 PM PDT by Gen-X-Dad
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To: RightWhale
explaining creation of complex life from complete randomness

Many do that, mostly in the Creationist camp. It is a strawman.

----

I see, so when the DNA molecule pulled itself together from the aminio acids sloshing around in the primordial sea and somehow got jumpstarted to start cranking out single cell organisms, that was deterministic, planned, and not a random event?
79 posted on 08/22/2007 5:28:15 PM PDT by Gen-X-Dad
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To: GraniteStateConservative

egad.....

Is it just me, or is everyone slightly repulsed by the image formed in your brain of your parents having sex....

IT BURNS!!!!!!


80 posted on 08/22/2007 6:50:53 PM PDT by PAMadMax (Islam is a disease....)
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