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 ...
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?
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.
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>
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.
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.
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.
Thank you. I just watched a little thing on comets the other evening, and I’d like to learn more.
Odd how the theory of evolution managed to stumble on something it doesn't even address.
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.
Leap and leap again. Misquote and abuse of language. Hermeneuticists would be interested in this but they are looking for intended meaning not nonsense.
Many do that, mostly in the Creationist camp. It is a strawman.
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!
No.
Now go back to playing with your Barbies and leave me alone.
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.
Still no life. That’s my theory, and it is just as observable as any other.
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...
egad.....
Is it just me, or is everyone slightly repulsed by the image formed in your brain of your parents having sex....
IT BURNS!!!!!!
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