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?
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That would be fascinating.
Question would be this: Does it match anything in the fossil record?
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The nitrogen content doesn't match living organisms, don't know about the fossil record though.
Re:What If? (Score:5, Informative)
Nah, it's a freshwater contaminated sample, the diatoms found are not fossilized and they are all existing species. Go read the Bad Astronomy blog for details.
BA link (Score:5, Informative)
Here [slate.com]. Interesting stuff.
Re:BA link (Score:5, Funny)
I can't help but laugh at the differences.
Slashdot-linked Register article...
Earth bombarded by interplanetary SLIME MONSTERS
We are not alone' is the message of Invasion of the Hystrichospheres
Invaders from an unknown planet entered Earth's atmosphere on December 29 last year, riding in a fiery comet that burst 10km above Sri Lanka.
Compared with Phil's article...
UPDATE: No, Life Has Still Not Been Found in a Meteorite
Oh boy. Here we go again, again.
In January, I wrote about Chandra Wickramasinghe, who claimed he had found fossilized diatoms (microscopic plant life) in a meteorite. I showed pretty carefully why this claim is very wrong, but apparently it wasn't enough: A new paper from Wickramasinghe's team has been published furthering the claims, and it's getting picked up by mainstream media.
I read the paper, and really it's more of the same as from the first paper. In some ways, it's even shakier;
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It's Junk Science (Score:5, Informative)
Bad Astronomer has done a good hatchet job on this story:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/11/meteorite_life_claims_of_fossils_in_a_meteorite_are_still_wrong.html [slate.com]
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Bad Astronomer has done a good hatchet job on this story
If by "hatchet" you mean bardiche [wikipedia.org] or one of the other candidates in our recent poll.
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Like "more than three ounces of shampoo?"
I'm sure that would clean up the story.
"Panspermia" (Score:1)
Re:"Panspermia" (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't that something that mainly the Germans are into?
You're confusing Germans with satyrs.
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Isn't that something that mainly the Germans are into?
No, it's a meme of the Intelligent Designer retinue: The belief that the seeds of life are spewed throughout the Universe.
You know, like, in the beginning, the Intelligent Designer created the Heavens and the Earth, and then He wanked off all over them.
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".
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Wrong. Panspermia saying "life came from space" is no different than a new isolated lake being formed from meltwater in a frigid environment and over a period of thousands of years being filled with an entire ecosystem as the environment warms. The inhabitants of the lake (if they were intelligent enough) ask how life arose spontaneously in their little world because to them that lake is their world. But to us it's obvious life arrived there from the vast ecosystem that surrounds it -- an ecosystem the i
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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 fr
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Re:"Panspermia" (Score:4, Insightful)
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".
But... technically, space did do it. We are, after all, the example of space doing it.
Question: If we send a probe to Europa, contaminate it with Earth-born bacteria, and 2 billion years from now that moon is crawling with life, does that mean "God did it" too?
Or perhaps panspermia is not the equivalent of 'god dun it' anymore than evolution is.
The idea of panspermia still requires evolution to take place somewhere.
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Why would you assume that life is unlikely on the time- and size-scales of planets, just because we haven't yet seen it in very small lab experiments over very short periods of time? The longest running experiment to examine abiogenesis has been going for 151 years in about a liter of liquid. The lessons learned from this do not apply to whole planets over billions of years.
Why would you assume that life only happened once here on Earth? Once there was an existing bio-system, any newly formed nascent
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You know, like, in the beginning, the Intelligent Designer created the Heavens and the Earth, and then He wanked off all over them.
I'll have you know I just spilled my drink. Thanks for the laugh. =)
No, it's an American version of Bukake (Score:2)
The champaign glass is substituted for a pan.
Why is this not an even bigger story? (Score:1)
Because it's wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
According to this..
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/11/meteorite_life_claims_of_fossils_in_a_meteorite_are_still_wrong.html [slate.com]
Re:Why is this not an even bigger story? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wickramasinghe has been "proving" panspermia for decades. This isn't any bigger a story than the last dozen times.
He once claimed that influenza was from space because it struck everywhere simultaneously - a patently false claim. You can learn more than he knows about it on Wikipedia.
He should give it up and go into creationism, where there's money to be had.
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he is no more likely to be right than he ever was before. Which, without evidence, the chance remains at a firm 0%.
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"he is no more likely to be right than he ever was before. Which, without evidence, the chance remains at a firm 0%."
That's even less "science" than Wickramashinge's critics believe he is performing.
Without real evidence either way, the "chance" of his being right is completely indeterminate. And if it could be determined, it would likely not be 0%. A lot closer to 0% than 100%, though.
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he has no evidence. so everything he proposes is explicitly and entirely speculative. he does not deserve any credit for anything as a result of that.
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"he has no evidence. so everything he proposes is explicitly and entirely speculative. he does not deserve any credit for anything as a result of that."
I don't dispute that. But that's not even close to the same thing as 0% chance of being right.
Personally, I think he's full of bull. Because what little evidence I *have* seen would tend to refute his claims. But I wouldn't put it at 0%.
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But despite that, he is still probably right. What is the chance of micro-organisms NOT getting into space?
There's a rather large gap between "there are some microorganisms in space" and "he is probably right".
He's claiming to have found something specific, and he is wrong. Again.
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:Why is this not an even bigger story? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Hint, not everything has to be done in one big explosion.
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But despite that, he is still probably right. What is the chance of micro-organisms NOT getting into space?
Those are separate questions. It makes sense that micro-organisms get into space. He is still (probably) wrong. His argument is that life on this planet came from micro-organisms and that this provides evidence for that (and that Archaeopteryx is a fake [askwhy.co.uk]. )
Water Bears. (Score:3)
Water Bears. Freaky little microscopic animals. They go into a suspended state in unfavorable conditions and ca remain there indefinitely. While in that state they'll survive unshielded exposure to space - radiation, temperature extremes, the whole nine yards. When they encounter a benign environment again and reanimate they're good as new - they can even repair considerable radiation damage to their DNA. If they're not panspermic creatures they're certainly candidates to become such. Now imagine they
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Sure, they survived for a few days or weeks of exposure. They might even survive for years. Perhaps 1000's, maybe even millions. The thing is this isn't enough. The Universe is unimaginably vast. If the target of a projectile carrying life were to be the volume of space occupied by another world capable of sustaining that life then assuredly the odds against any such thing happening are expressible only with very large numbers. Consider, in the 4 billion years that the Solar system has existed the Sun has n
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How often does this happen? If the collision of stars is fantastically rare, then so surely is the collision of planets equally very rare, and the collision and breakup of life-bearing planets even more so. Nor is it in any way assured that should such a cataclysmic event happen that any living organism could survive it. Surely few enough would. You are dealing here with a LARGE number of events, EACH of which is fantastically unlikely.
That would explain why SETI has been less than successful wouldn't it? I've had several 1 in a million things happen to me in 30 years. Anything can happen in 1,000,000,000. Anything you could think of probably WOULD happen in a billion years.
If Panspermia was the cause, either by transporting life or through it's creation by chemical means in the comet (along with cosmic rays), then it would be an extremely rare event. And likely part of the reason we're not picking up Alien sitcoms on TV.
It's not an u
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Well, the Universe is huge, so improbable events DO become probable, in some degree. It isn't a horrible theory, but the question is could it be ubiquitous? SOMEWHERE life has bridged from system to system I'd think, and everything else has happened, once. Of course one could argue that ANY life is one of those one-time things, etc. I think the chances that EARTH was seeded that way is what is remote, or any other specific planet.
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And how exactly would an interstellar meteorite look different than a local one? It's a rock that's been floating in space for billions of years. 1st-gen systems probably wouldn't have any, H and He not being known for their clumpiness, they'd be rare in 2nd-gen systems, and 3rd-gen systems would produce objects not terribly unlike the local ones. At most I'd expect an interstellar asteroid to have a somewhat different mix of elements than the local normal, and possibly some evidence of different radiati
Re:Why is this not an even bigger story? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because there is no proof, and not even any evidence for it.
It's been pretty thoroughly debunked, and at most it seems to be proof of Chandra Wickramasinghe's incompetence as a scientist, lackluster con man abilities, or both.
Oh, and certain slashdot editors accepting bad articles without spending two minutes on Google first.
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So is Cardiff University just a diploma mill with an all-hack staff, or are they a credible uni that happens to tolerate eccentrics like Wickramashinge?
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So is Cardiff University just a diploma mill with an all-hack staff, or are they a credible uni that happens to tolerate eccentrics like Wickramashinge?
The latter, although they fired Wickramashinge [lankaweb.com] a few years ago. He's still working in Cardiff, but not for Cardiff University.
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In other words, Wickramashinge is a more accredited version of Archimedes Plutonium [iw.net].
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In other words, Wickramashinge is a more accredited version of Archimedes Plutonium.
Wickwrackrum isn't nearly as funny as Archie was, though.
He's more like Jack Sarfatti, in that he occasional gets into big press and taken seriously by journalists who really should know better.
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Wow. Now those are some intriguing notions, and I'd subscribe to his newsletter in a heartbeat. Is the DC comics bad guy pseudonym his way of saying, yes, I have gone completely off the deep end, so what?
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So is Cardiff University just a diploma mill with an all-hack staff, or are they a credible uni that happens to tolerate eccentrics like Wickramashinge?
The latter, although they fired Wickramashinge [lankaweb.com] a few years ago. He's still working in Cardiff, but not for Cardiff University.
LoL. The link quotes him as saying that he is the Astrobiology Editor for the Journal of Cosmology, where this article was published.
If this was for real it would be appearing in Nature.
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I would guess that it's a tenure thing.
Universities usually worry whether they'll give tenure to someone who will spend the rest of their career loafing. Perhaps they should be more worried that they'll give tenure to someone who will spend the rest of their career embarrassing them.
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All I've seen is criticism of the analysis techniques involved. No real "proof" either way, just a bunch of opinions...
No real proof either way on Russell's Teapot [wikipedia.org] either, just a bunch of opinions. We should keep an open mind until someone goes and has a look.
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All I've seen is criticism of the analysis techniques involved. No real "proof" either way, just a bunch of opinions...
No real proof either way on Russell's Teapot [wikipedia.org] either, just a bunch of opinions. We should keep an open mind until someone goes and has a look.
Ironically, Russel's teapot is falsifiable, albeit a very large pain in the butt to prove false.
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But this has a lot more proof then Russels Teapot, at the very least there's pictures of something. The disproof comes from the people claiming it is a "rock ejected from earth"
Ok so prove its not a meteor. Haven't seen very good science done here =/
Just a bunch of curmudgeony professorial types demanding that Chandra Wickramasinghe is a heretic. Just because Mr Wickramasinghe's theory postulates its evidence for fossilized life in a meteor doesn't mean it must be tossed out. Add it to your body of "things
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Keep in mind that it's the same professor Wickramsinghe that testified on behalf of creationists in Arkansas, and among other things claimed that the Archaeopteryx never existed and the fossils were all forgeries.
The onus is on those who makes extraordinary claims to provide extraordinary evidence. And doubly so when they have a crackpot history.
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Those indeed are pretty extraordinary claims, thanks for pointing them out.
I wouldn't take anything he said at face value without scrutiny. The discussion section of http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.1845.pdf [arxiv.org] pretty much states the arguments for the samples being meteorites.
There's also quite a few other names on the paper as well. Its not proof, but evidence, maybe.
Who knows, we are definitely still waiting for that extraordinary evidence. In my opinion it'll come from us going to space, digging
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Ok so prove its not a meteor. Haven't seen very good science done here =/
The rock was found on Earth, where there are many Earth rocks and few rocks of recent space origin. Given this context, the rock in question is mostly likely an Earth rock. This is not an exceptional claim. The exceptional claim is that the rock is a meteor, a claim for which the researcher has shown no evidence
Just a bunch of curmudgeony professorial types demanding that Chandra Wickramasinghe is a heretic. Just because Mr Wickramasinghe's theory postulates its evidence for fossilized life in a meteor doesn't mean it must be tossed out. Add it to your body of "things to investigate more fully".
His theory isn't being tossed out because it is 'heretical'. It is being tossed out because he has shown absolutely no evidence for it. I'd wager that eventually, some real evidence will be
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"The exceptional claim is that the rock is a meteor" - I hear you there, that is maybe an exceptional claim, as a lay man I can not really comment there. But it certainly looks like there is good argument for it being a meteorite, and evidence is given in the paper linked to by the article.
But thanks for taking the time to further explain that the scientific community does not believe it is a meteorite. I would like to see more solid proof though. That would require the samples going to other labs and havin
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"Proof of extra-terrestrial life."
It's not a bigger story because it's not new. This particular meteorite may be new, but this has all been done before.
On earth... (Score:2)
We're all illegal aliens.
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What do you mean illegal? I think the immigration laws at that time consisted of "gravity" -- you're not suggesting the cometary debris disobeyed that law, are you?
On Bad-Ass Tronomer (Score:2)
Phil Plait rips the paper to shreds. Wickramasinghe is a crank, and that Journal publishes all kinds of nonsense.
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"Phil Plait rips the paper to shreds. Wickramasinghe is a crank, and that Journal publishes all kinds of nonsense."
This deserves more than a short mention. I do not always agree with Phil Plait, but I think he nailed it pretty solidly here.
First, Plait points out [slate.com] that the diatoms are (A) all known Earthly varieties, and (B) almost certainly not "fossilized".
Then, he gives us other good reasons to question whether the "fragment" is a meteorite at all.
Phil Plait says no... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/11/meteorite_life_claims_of_fossils_in_a_meteorite_are_still_wrong.html [slate.com]
Re:Phil Plait says no... (Score:4)
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A few seconds reading JOC or about JOC reveals it's a complete farce of a "journal".
More to the point, the Executive Editor of the Journal of Cosmology is none other than Chandra Wickramasinghe himself [journalofcosmology.com].
Not a meteorite nor fossilized diatoms (Score:2, Informative)
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Bill Plait's take on this story. [slate.com]
Is that Phil's big brother?
Chicken or egg? (Score:2)
If the best way to populate the galaxy is to seed it with primitive, unicellular life, perhaps the ultimate function of multicellular life is to help scatter and feed bacteria (and the like) all over the world, so when something big finally hits us, enough of the well-distributed, well-fed spores might survive on blasted chunks of rock to colonize the next world.
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We think we're so advanced evolutionarily, but really we're one of the least adapted species on the planet, in terms of survivability.
We'd be better off than any other large animal (say using the arbitrary floor of 45 kg, which apparently is sometimes used to define the minimum size of "megafauna") on Earth. So I wouldn't call us the "least adapted". And we've since learned the trick of adapting the environment to us rather than vice versa, which puts us in a unique place as far as large animals go.
Comet? (Score:2)
Must have been a very small comet, I didn't hear of a mass die-off near Sri Lanka.
Diatomaceous BS (Score:2)
Isn't the big story "extra-terrestiral life found" (Score:2)
If true, isn't the big story that "Non-earth life has been discovered"?
The question as to whether non-earth life seeded earth is of secondary importance, it seems to me.
Miller–Urey experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
Miller–Urey experiment created amino acids in the lab with lightning. This is the most likely source of life on earth. Not Mars, not comets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
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Miller–Urey experiment created amino acids in the lab with lightning. This is the most likely source of life on earth.
The Miller-Urey experiments are the source of life on earth? Those experiments were more successful than I thought!
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Yeah, it's too bad the flux capacitor in the next lab malfunctioned and apparently disintegrated the evidence.
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All that Miller–Urey showed was that it's really pretty easy to get the basic ingredients to life, heck, more recently we've found huge clouds of amino acids floating free in space. There are a lot of open questions about how you go from amino acids to self replicating bacteria though, enough so that it doesn't necessarily make sense to dismiss panspermia out of hand, to do so would limit our thinking to only those conditions that could existed on primordial earth.
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Panspermia doesn't really answear the question of how life started. If panspermia is found to be true, then the question just changes from "how life started on earth" to "how life started".
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Well, it's a very likely source of life, but not necessarily on Earth. At present we have absolutely no idea what the odds might be proto-life could spontaneously arise in the organic slime. On the other hand we know that some earthbound animals (water bears - they get their own phylum and are not closely related to any other species on earth) are capable of drying up and entering a suspended state in which they can surviving unshielded in space for prolonged periods, even repairing most genetic damage t
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Sure, lots of smart people have their favorite back-of-the-napkin models for things like this, it makes for good conversation at cocktail parties. Get five of them in a room and you'll get five perfectly reasonable and well thought out answers that completely disagree with each other.
Order from disorder is no big deal - that's what the universe *does*. The question is, what are the odds of randomly stumbling across an *imperfectly self-replicating* system. It appears to have taken at least a half-billion
Where life started (Score:2)
I'm neutral on whether this is good or bad news, however while it's evidence some life may have an extraterrestrial origin it is not evidence life may not have started right here on earth. I have no problem with both being true, terrestrial and extraterrestrial origins of life. The odds may be astronomically high but without proof ruling out one or the other I won't ignore it.
Falcon
Simply no. (Score:2)
It does not mean by any length that life was forming only once, and every other
21st Century Slashdot (Score:2)
Bringing Discover Channel-quality science to geeks everywhere...
Thanks for making me just a wee bit stupider, editors! You can probably crank up your hits by getting a comment from Kim Kardashian with a nice fake-boobs cleavage shot in the summary.
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But the discovery of extra-terrestrial plankton would be a huge deal.
Yeah, it would mean whales can live in space.
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Didn't you see Star Trek: The Voyage Home [imdb.com]? Whales have giant Grogan-looking spaceships, for Pete's sake.
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It is only anthropocentric if you believe that live began only on Earth.
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Perhaps I'm not being anthropocentric enough, but does anyone really think that life began on Earth? Perhaps there's no evidence yet to prove otherwise, but just on an intellectual level, it seems roughly similar to claiming that the universe revolves around us
There's a difference between thinking that life began on earth vs. thinking that life could *only* begin on earth.
The observable universe contains something like 100,000,000,000 galaxies with an average(?) of 100,000,000,000 stars each, and heaven knows what's beyond our observability horizon. I would be utterly astonished if we somehow proved that life has never existed in any of those systems. Yet I suspect that life really did begin here on earth, independent of any of the others.
Besides, if you claim
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and heaven knows what's beyond our observability horizon.
BTW, if physicists are right even God doesn't know, because the information can't be transferred. Or, if God is everywhere, the part of him that's "here" doesn't know what the part of him that is "there" knows, due to to the whole speed of light thingy.
Pardon the mental/theological masturbation...
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Of course God for this universe, by definition (mine) is omnipotent and omniscient for this universe, and so not really subject to the laws of physics in this universe....
Which, if indeed true, has the interesting consequence that supernatural mechanisms exist that can make an end run around the laws of nature.
If you want to invent a warp drive, get a research position at a seminary.
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To borrow a phrase I just read in Plait's rebuttal, I'm not sure life began here, but I think it's the way to bet.
Why? Because it's been demonstrated to be chemically possible given the environment here billions of years ago. Because the panspermia theory strikes me as people trying to answer the question "how did life arise?" merely by postulating that it came from somewhere else, which doesn't answer the question how it arose there.
Right now, we don't have any evidence life exists anywhere else in the u
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Life had to begin somewhere. What's anthropocentric about assuming that life began in the only place it's ever shown to exist? Until there's evidence to suggest otherwise, it's the only sensible hypothesis.
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> what is more probable?
Correct answer: We don't know. We have absolutely zero idea what the odds of protolife spontaneously arising in the organic slime might be, except that if that is what happened on Earth then it took somewhere north of a billion years to happen in a planet-sized petri dish teeming with amino acids, so probably pretty low. Then again maybe Earth was just spectacularly (un)lucky. You can't really tell much from one data point.
Meanwhile we also have Water Bears - freaky little inde
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S1) Actually the amino acids are the easy part, the Miller-Urey experiment combined with what we know of Earths geologic history suggests that the entire planet was awash in them for over a billion of years before life appeared. And we could probably work out a decent estimate for reaction rate. What we *can't* estimate is the likelyhood that a reaction (or more likely a long complicated sequence of reactions) results in a complex proto-life molecule capable of self replication and almost by extension e
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I don't think anyone is saying "there could never be biological organisms on a meteorite". Rather, they're saying that this specific claim is bad science.
NASA made essentially the same claim a while back. The difference is that the debunking wasn't quite as trivial.
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I don't think anyone is saying "there could never be biological organisms on a meteorite". Rather, they're saying that this specific claim is bad science.
This. A scientific theory and evidence gains credence through surviving stringent attempts to discredit it. Bad science is still Bad science even if it's technically correct in it's conclusion: The goal is to develop iron-clad theories and evidence that can't be trivially disproven.
Meteor(asteroid/comet) life evidence (either live or fossilized) would indeed be a game changer, but the best form of evidence in this case would be a properly isolated sample being collected while still in space and analyzed.
No evidence = no reason to believe (Score:2)
But do assume that because its bad science on every point, there is no reason to believe that its true. Sure, the conclusion might be true -- just as much as it might have been true without the "research". But this paper does nothing to justify any greater belief in its conclusion than there would be with no evidence at all, because it is no evidence at all.