Evidence For Comet-Borne Microfossils Supports Panspermia 169
New submitter onyxruby writes "On December 29th of last year a comet exploded over Sri Lanka. When examined by Cardiff University one of the comet samples was found to contain micro-fossils akin to plankton. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center tested additional samples with similar results. The research paper was published in the Journal of Cosmology. In practice this means that the argument that life did not start on Earth has gained additional evidence."
Update: 03/12 16:59 GMT by S : On the other hand, Phil Plait says the paper is very flawed; the sample rocks the researchers tested may not even be meteorites.
What If? (Score:3, Interesting)
Its just a piece of the earth's ocean that was blasted into space during the theoretical asteroid extinction event?
Re:"Panspermia" (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically, Panspermia solves the issue of the unlikelihood of life developing sporadically on Earth, by saying "Space did it", which is the scientific equivalent of "God did it".
Re:Why is this not an even bigger story? (Score:5, Interesting)
But despite that, he is still probably right.
No, he is almost certainly wrong. It is plausible that a rock containing live microorganisms could be ejected from a planet during an asteroid strike, drift to another planet within the same solar system, land, and survive. But it is implausible that this mechanism could spread life through interstellar space. To eject a rock fragment with enough force to completely escape a solar gravity well would melt it. Once it was ejected from the solar system, it would take eons to reach another star system. Once it reached another system, it would have an infinitesimal chance of hitting a life supporting planet. It would be far more likely to fall into the star, hit a gas giant, or just orbit for a few billion years. The chance of this happening, even once, in the lifetime of the universe, is remote. The chance of it happening repeatedly, in some sort of chain reaction, is as close to zero as anything can get.
Re:"Panspermia" (Score:2, Interesting)
Not exactly.
Arguing that life didn't start here, but instead started somewhere else... simply avoids the issue of how life started. Panspermia advocates have routinely claimed that "DNA from space" gave key adaptations to earth life forms. Instead of the hypothetical new enzyme to digest an odd sugar, they claim such key adaptations as wings and eyes. This is nonsense.
There are plenty of ways in which life could spread from other places/stars. Even at incredibly low odds of surviving the transit from another star system, one origination of life in an otherwise sterile galaxy would quickly result in that life system being found everywhere it could survive... but there is plenty of evidence in our biology that the life system here was formed here. There is plenty of evidence suggesting that the origination of life is, while not trivial, likely to be commonplace in our galaxy. The life that is floating around in space (under the Panspermia model) very likely would get eaten by whatever native life it encounters, because that native life is in better shape for not being mostly dead due to the the long travels. If you sterilized a world with a directed Gamma-Ray-Burst, then that space life might possibly, maybe, have a chance... except that native life will have survived deep under ground and would reclaim the surface in large numbers before the rare space microbe came by.
Re:Why is this not an even bigger story? (Score:4, Interesting)