Dinosaur asteroid 'sent life to Mars'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25201572

by alexkus • 13 years ago

58 46 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

alexkus• 13 years ago

"Even using conservative, realistic estimates... it's still possible that organisms could be swimming around out there in the oceans of Europa," she said.

    ALL THESE WORLDS
    ARE YOURS EXCEPT
         EUROPA
       ATTEMPT NO
     LANDING THERE

gagege2• 13 years ago

Have you seen the movie Europa Report? I don't want to spoil any part of it for you, but it's really good. If you have Netflix, it's on there.

deletes• 13 years ago

Is it realistic or do they find aliens/god?

Jach• 13 years ago

it's really good

No it's not.

chebucto• 13 years ago

Race to Mars, a 4-part miniseries by the Discovery Channel, is also worth while. The spacecraft and lander are based on existing ideas for trips to Mars. The physics in it are depicted accurately, as far as I could tell. Problems that arise seemed plausible, too. The interactions of the crew are well done, and aren't hammed up for dramatic effect.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

I have this vision of dinosaur astronauts, clinging to the rock that has been ejected into space, on their way to Mars to establish a new life there.

I have always found the pan-spermia theories interesting. It still doesn't answer the 'where first' question but it allows for many places to share similar lifeforms without requiring a recreation of an improbable event in all of them. Of course it would be really weird if the universe was populated in this way with humanoids, and the original Star Trek was closer to the truth than not :-)

jmpe• 13 years ago

  ... without requiring a recreation of an improbable event in all of them

Just to add to your post: the probability of such a spontaneous event (life emerging from a cocktail) increases as you're no longer looking at a restricted area. If panspermia is the mechanism then you don't require life to originate on a suitable planet in a Goldilocks zone. Every square mm of (often porous) rock flying around is a potential point of origin, carrier or seeding station.

dcsommer• 13 years ago

Panspermia only interests me in an intra-solar system context. I imagine the probability of ejected rocks from an asteroid impact in one solar system reaching a body in another solar system is significantly lower.

mathattack4• 13 years ago

And I doubt the math would allow them to span galaxies.

flinty• 13 years ago

So kind of like the stargate SG1 plot line where instead of the ancients spreading life across the universe using stargates you have meteros doing the work

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

I guess that would make planets meteorsexuals.

(sorry I couldn't resist)

mathattack4• 13 years ago

Given the right similar starting conditions in the DNA... It could be interesting.

What surprises me is that life can survive these trips. A rock ejected from the Earth would have to have tremendous heat during the escape velocity. Science is fascinating.

mtdewcmu3• 13 years ago

That's what I was thinking. That piece of rock must be very hot as it's flying out into space from a violent explosion. At least, that's how I picture it. It seems odd that the article was concerned about the danger of space itself, but never mentioned the exit from earth.

Science is very fascinating, but this phenomenon of life successfully leaving earth and arriving on other planets has never been demonstrated, so it's more idle speculation than science.

toblender• 13 years ago

What if life on earth was also just a fragment of another past planet?

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

Even if organisms got ejected with rocks, wouldn't they just die frozen or from radiation on the long journey thru the vacuum?

anExcitedBeast• 13 years ago

Not necessarily. It's worth reading the entire article. We've observed small life surviving raw space exposure before.

rlpb• 13 years ago

TFA: "Three metres is the minimum they think necessary to shield microbes from the Sun's radiation over a journey lasting up to 10 million years."

arbuge• 13 years ago

....or from the rock they're in burning up in reentry.

blacksmith_tb• 13 years ago

Mars' atmosphere is much thinner, I don't think a 3m thick boulder would burn up (impact, though, would be, uh, energetic, however).

curtis2• 13 years ago

The notion that an asteroid impact could launch life-bearing debris to escape velocity is not new. I remember it being mentioned in one of Lester Del Rey's juvenile science fiction books -- possibly "Outpost of Jupiter", which according to Wikipedia was first published in 1963.

icambron• 13 years ago

The difference is that this models a specific impact to see whether it would work. That's a long long way from conclusive, of course, but it's a useful addition.

curtis2• 13 years ago

I agree. I just find it interesting that the base idea has been around so long -- longer in fact than the "asteroid killed the dinosaurs" theory.

ayubskhan3• 13 years ago

I don't believe this story! Why don't we find those rocks ejected during the impact on Moon?

InclinedPlane5• 13 years ago

Are you asking why we never found a small number of Earth rocks scattered over the entire surface of the Moon during a period of only a few hours total of lunar exploration? The answer should be obvious.

josefresco• 13 years ago

To be fair...the surface of Earth's moon has been much more extensive than just physical lunar surface exploration.

It's also a fair question, have we seen evidence from this on our moon? And if not is it really because of the limited exploration or some other factors?

ayubskhan3• 13 years ago

I agree that it could be due to limited lunar exploration. Having said that, my concern or thoughts is that, why we limited our exploration mission to moon? I have been looking for answers for a long time.

pwnna• 13 years ago

Panspermia[1] is not a new theory. This whole article is highly speculative. It might sound compelling, but we just know way too little to make any sort of prediction on this matter. Any real findings must come from actual data provided by probes and landers such as the Mars 2020 Rover[2] and the ExoMars[3] mission.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_2020_rover_mission

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExoMars

omegant• 13 years ago

The only way to confirm it is once the asteroid minimg begins. Then it's a matter of time to find an asteroid from earth. Maybe it'll tale long but eventually they'll be able to analize what's left there.

InclinedPlane5• 13 years ago

This is interesting primarily because we know a decent amount about the nature of the Chicxulub impact event, so we can model it. And in doing so we've found that it should be possible for microbial life deep inside Earth rocks to end up in heliocentric orbits and to be protected from space radiation long enough to have a reasonable chance of surviving until the rock they are in hits another planetary body in our Solar System.

What this actually means, though, is that likely many other impact events in Earth's history could have done the same thing. Even going back billions of years. Which means that the probability of Earth life having landed on Mars, Venus, or Europa in a way which might have seeded locations favorable to life is very much non zero.

This sort of thing has been speculated about before but never modelled so rigorously using real-world impacts as examples.

Houshalter• 13 years ago

How likely is it for these organisms to survive ejection in the first place? I thought asteroid impacts were incredibly hot and violent.

InclinedPlane5• 13 years ago

Rocks make great insulators though, which just leaves acceleration as an issue, though microbes handle high acceleration just fine.

MartinCron• 13 years ago

For anyone who is interested in the Dinosaur asteroid, may I suggest listening to or watching the latest RadioLab, which went into some interesting (speculative) depth about what may have happened.

negamax• 13 years ago

So basically, if a planet has no dominant/intelligent species capable of protecting itself; not only nature resets that planet; it scatters the building blocks of life to other planets as well in the process.

Billions of years forward. Intelligent life on multiple planets from same building blocks. They fight for dominance in a new natural selection. This time to see which planet was conducive for creating better lifeforms.

ZoFreX• 13 years ago

This article is ridiculous. They have a theory and a model that says, for example, that 6 chunks of rock hit Europa. Of course we don't know that they did! This is unfalsifiable twaddle.

Dinosaur asteroid 'sent life to Mars'

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