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Science

Extraterrestrial Water 62

Posted by Hemos from the it's-out-of-this-world dept.
RumorControl wrote in with the news about the first known capture of water that was extra-terrestrial in origin on earth. It was recovered from a meteorite that hit the Earth last year. Interesting implications for the amount of water to be found on asteriods and their ilk.
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Extraterrestrial Water

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  • The article says that halite is the mineral that makes up table salt. What on earth is this reporter doing?
    Actually being correct about a technical issue.
    Halides are ions of the halogen group, which includes chlorine.
    Yup. Brush up on your Greek: halo-gen: salt-maker. Halite is salt. From www.m-w.com:
    Main Entry: halite
    Pronunciation: 'ha-"lIt, 'hA-
    Function: noun
    Date: 1868
    : ROCK SALT
  • Most likely any "space bacteria" wouldn't be able to function on earth. The conditions on this planet probally would not be comprable to whatever conditions the bacteria evolved under, so an andromeda strain is unlikely. Not to mention most bacteria are not harmful. Bacteria for the most part are parasites, and only a very poorly developed bacteria would kill it's host, because then it would have to find a new host. Besides, if there were bacteria on the rock, that could survive re-entry, and were viable in our atmosphere, and were deadly, and air born, I don't think it would matter much what nasa did, we'd all be s.o.l. anyway.

    Interestingly NASA did have a plan to deal with possible space bacteria when they sent the first things into space that were brought back down to earth: hose them off into the ocean, sure the capsul would be clean, but they would have just infected the source of life on this planet w/ a possibly deadly bacteria. Fortunately this hasn't happened yet. Science is very dangerous, but if we expect to evolve mentally it's a risk we have to take. Also, keep in mind a true scientist will never say anything is impossible, there is always a non-zero chance something will happen, there just might be 1 billion zeros before the 1 though. It's possible that me picking my nose will result in a catastrophic chain reaction that will destroy the universe. What's more likely is that it will end up under my desk though.
  • from www.m-w.com

    Main Entry: halite
    Pronunciation: 'ha-"lIt, 'hA-
    Function: noun
    Date: 1868
    : ROCK SALT

    (insert intelligence questioning comment here)
  • My understanding was that nitrogen was pretty much ignored by our bodies. That we inhale and exhale the exact same ammount. Now it does keep us from getting pretty much pure oxygen into our lungs, which is a very bad thing when it happens for an extended period, but it could probally be replaced with just about any other gas that has no harmful effects on the human body. More likely our lungs would have just evolved to handle the elevated O2 levels and we wouldn't notice any difference.
  • There might not be good viable alternatives, on this planet. But on some other planet there might be a very different alternative. Keep in mind that even life on earth has undergone dramatic change since the begining of the planet. To the initial life forms on earth oxygen was highly toxic and as the atmosphere began containing more and more O2, the situation got really bad for those organizism. Those that could evolve to use O2 grew, while those that could not died. Also, many single celled organisms still alive require no O2 to live. Yeast is an example. Humans only really need O2 in order to power our bodies. We can make energy for ourselves w/o it, O2 just increases the ammount of energy we get dramatically.
  • It wasn't a probe, but meteorites of Martian origin (the Shergotty-Nakhla-Chassigny, or SNC meteorites) found in Antarctica that contained miniscule amounts of water. (The same ones that contain hints of possible life too, in fact!) A single drop (!) of water was extracted from one of the SNC's and analyzed. On the other hand, I'm getting this from a Carl Sagan book, maybe he thought it all up while high... ;)
  • sorry about the redundantcy, bad spelling, and this post, aaahh screw it, it's friday and that means beer around here, have a good weekend.
  • Warp" drive already exists in theory.

    To bad the postulated warp drive require unreasonable amounts of mass or the existence negative mass. Negative mass hasn't been found and there really isn't any reason for it to be around.

    It's like the whole "if you're on a train going just under the speed of light, and you run to the front of the train, you traveled faster than the speed of light, but didn't violate reletivity because relative to the train you were going pretty slow

    According to relativity you won't be going faster than the speed of light. Velocity vector additions aren't u+v in relativity rather its more like (u+v)/c(there's a division by c in there, the equation isn't correct however, I need to check a book on special relativity). This means that if the train were going .99c your speed would be .999c relative to an observer stationary with respect to the train.
  • Oxygen managed to kill off a good deal of the life at the time
    But as you said, life here existed before oxygen. Other planets might still harbor life without oxygen.
  • okay, you beat me to it ;-)
  • I'm just wondering what if this meteorite had life on it, but not life as we know it. Something like the andromeda strain. How does nasa verify is something is alive, do they use tests that would find bacteria, or do they do other tests that should find any type of life?
  • The only odd bit here is that the meteoroid was sufficiently massive to make it to the ground. Asteroids fall into two groups: stony (chondrites) and metallic/igneous. There's no reason not to think that significant percentages of chondritic asteroids are water ice.


    Water is common all around the solar system. Saturn's rings are mostly dirty ice. Most comets are primarily dirty snowballs around a chunk of rock. Both of these are potential sources of water for space-based activities.


    The real rarity is water as a liquid. Water ice is common, water gas is common, but liquid water requires just enough heat - not a regular situation in the extremes of space.


  • years of conditioning
    that's why

    -1 off topic
  • What exactly are the ilk of asteroids?
  • We wouldn't necisarally(sp) need a worm hole. "Warp" drive already exists in theory. While matter cannot travel faster than the speed of light, there is nothing preventing space itself from travelling faster than the speed of light, so if you could cause the space behind you to expand at a rate higher than light speed, and the space infront of you to contract at the same speed, you could travel faster than light speed. It's like the whole "if you're on a train going just under the speed of light, and you run to the front of the train, you traveled faster than the speed of light, but didn't violate reletivity because relative to the train you were going pretty slow.

  • Anyone else have the Politically Correct Dictionary?

    "Carbo-centrism: the belief in the sole existence or superiority of carbon-based life forms, thereby unfairly discriminating against silicon-based life forms."

    Now, whether that means extraterrestrial life or machines running on silicon chips, I don't know.

    :)
  • The article suggests that there is some raging debate on the origin of the Earth's water (oceans). There is not. It is long been suspected that an infall of cometary material during the formation of the earth is responsible. The Giotto spacecraft confirmed this by showing that the D/H ratios of ocean water and cometary material are the same. That unbound water was found in a meteorite is very interesting, but is not the leap in understanding that the article suggests.
  • They need a live functioning cell in order to reproduce. As such, they are effectively parasitic and that could be extended so that their needs include the needs of their hosts which include water.
  • Or do you really mean cement?

  • One of the requirements for 'life' is the capability to replicate.
    Viruses can only replicate if they've taken over a cell.
    Cells (and anything more complex) require water to function.
    Without water, virii cannot replicate.

    Therefore, viruses REQUIRE water to live, even if it is indirect. (There is also a considerable argument that virii are NOT alive, but I shan't go into it)

  • Unfortunately, they discovered that the water was flouridated. Now we know what the Soviet space program's real purpose was: to sap and impurify all out precious meteoric fluids!


    ---
    Have a Sloppy day!
  • Some form of alien Perrier that crashed to earth. I'm sure they are covering up the Truth! The horrible fact is... space *is* full of water, but it's all controlled by an evil race of yuppie pandering capitalists!

    The truth is out there. And it's carbonated!
  • >To bad the postulated warp drive require >unreasonable amounts of mass or the existence >negative mass. Negative mass hasn't been found >and there really isn't any reason for it to be >around.

    Actually, no it doesn't. A story appeared on /. actually, stating that a few modifications to the postulated equations reduces the energy requirements by something like 63 orders of magnitude. Mass was reduced to I believe a few kilograms.

    Also, if I correctly understand warp drive, the idea is that while you are limited to a speed c, you can theoretically get around it by reducing the distance you travel. The conecpt is that if you fold space, so it is curved, then the actual distance between the source and destination decreases. If you fold the two of them closer, but you travel straight (Not along the curve), you may only cover the distance at 0.1c, but you ALSO covered the distance between the source and destination in real space, so relative to real space you may be going faster than c.
  • Not necisarally(sp). Dark matter is a good example of something we can't observe. We know it exists because w/o it the universe would be expanding at such a rate that the formation of anything would be impossible, the universe would just be filled w/ random hydrogen and hellium atoms floating around having a grand olde time. We can't "see" it though. Ether might be another good example (assuming it exists, from what I understand current theory says it most likely does not). Until recently we couldn't detect radiation. Just because we can't detect it now in no way means that it can't exist. Besides matter could possibly be "out of phase" just not in the startrek sense (in startrek you could have people "out of phase" which would have killed them, A) how did they managed to not fall through the floor, B) if they could pass through matter, air would also pass through them, they'd suffocate in a matter of seconds).

    The point I'm trying to make is that humans as a whole are so arrogant that we assume we are the only species of any intelligence on this planet and that any extra-terrestrial life must be similar in nature to terrestrial life. The truth is we just don't know. I'm not saying we should stop looking though, what we don't know today, could revolutionize the world (universe?) tomorrow.
  • HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA...I forgot all about the intro to that game. :)
    Now I have this urge to dig the CD out of my shoebox of discs. :)
  • Imagine making a glass of Tang from this water!
    The person drinking it would turn into a sponge
    and then TAKE OVER THE WORLD with their new powers
    of spongishness.

    I MUST GET THIS WATER.

    [runs away, slams door]
  • As I understand it, one of the big problems with silicon based life is that the bonds between silicon atoms aren't strong enough. Carbon to carbon bonds are the best game in town, and silicon to silicon bonds just aren't up to snuff. The reason this is important is that life as we know it uses lots of long chain molecules, and the backbone of these molecules is always carbon. A lot of these molecules could have their carbon swapped out for silicon (not all of them), but the resulting molecule wouldn't hold together. Brownian motion, or just structural stresses would tear them apart. Of course, there might be all sorts of ways around these problems (very low temperature living, for one), but it does look like carbon has lot going for it.
  • You know, what we really need is a E.T. based Beowolf cluster!
  • Although I've never read this, I wrote a short essay/theory similar. It was meant to prove that the universe is in fact finite.

    In an infinite universe, technically an infinite amount of events are happening every instant. Solar systems and Earths and Human Races evolved very similar to our own, even exactly like our own (an infinite amount, in fact). Somewhere there is an alien race that has contacted humans, an infinite amount of them. Somewhere an asteroid was flung into (our) earth destroying all life, an infinite amount of them. Since these events have clearly not happened, how could you say the universe is infinite?

    To reply to rebuttals beforehand...

    Some people tell me 'well, that could be true, but maybe there hasn't been enough time for all of these infintie events to happen.' The theory of an infinite universe doesn't exactly correspond with the big bang, or a certain starting point for time and the universe. As far as I know, infinite universe theories all claim infinite time. Correct me if I'm wrong.
  • is mini e.t. here yet ?
  • Today water, tomorrow extra-terrestrial life.

    When they eventually come here, they'd better not see any copies of WNT running.
  • I'd say they found the water pretty immediately; it just took this long to verify that it's wasn't contamination from earth. It was the same with alh84001; the verification (if you consider it to be such) took years.
  • So, they finally found extraterrestrial water, _last_ year. And we're finally being able to hear about it this year, and so far they still haven't been able to make any conclusion(s) from the data collected to give us an idea about what this says for us? I find that rather odd.
    Then again, I should assume that analysis of such a discovery _would_ take a long time... so, I should be patient.

    Still, I find it strange that, if they found the meteorite last year, it didn't likely take them a year to discover it had water in it, right? So, why haven't we at least heard of it before now? Or have we, and I missed it.....?

  • Water isn't required for life... (Score:3)

    by dirty ( 13560 ) <dirtymatt@@@gmail...com> on Friday August 27, 1999 @06:42AM (#1721918)
    Just because most forms of life that we know of require water, it doesn't mean that ALL forms of life do. Keep in mind that life on this planet most likely didn't evolve because of water, but because of water it evolved to use it. It's the same thing with oxygen. Pretty much every living thing on this plannet requires oxygen to exist, but in the early days of earth there was no oxygen, it wasn't until plants came around that oxygen started existing (at least in present day quantities). Oxygen managed to kill off a good deal of the life at the time because, to them, it was highly toxic. Life then evolved to use oxygen in order to stick around. When you think about it, water seems like it would be very unlikely to be usable by anyform of life, as it has some nasty corrosive properties. Because of the way the atoms are located, H on top w/ two Os hanging off of it, it ends up somewhat like a magnet, positive at one end, negative at the other. Because of this water is very good at breaking apart chemical bonds. That's why so many things disolve into water, it rips them apart into individual molecules.

    Also, how do we know that we aren't surrounded by alien life forms right now, that exist in a state undetectable by us. They might not know we exist either. People always assume all life is somewhat earthlike in nature, which is probally not in the slightest bit true. Life evolving completely separate from earth would probally evolve along a very different path.

    (btw, take all the chemistry here w/ a grain of blue radioactive space salt, it's been a while since I took chem, IOW i'm probally talking out of my ass)

  • Dang, I must have missed it when a probe from Mars containing water returned to Earth.

    They're talking about capturing it on Earth, not spectroscopic analysis from afar.

    George
  • It's not revolutionary - we already know that comet nuclei are rocky and that comets contain substantial quantities of water.

    On the other hand, it's exciting that there was sufficient water in a meteorite to survive the tremendous heating that it must have undergone.

    That must give a clearer indication as to how prevalent water is in the solar system, which is good. That'll give a rough indication as to how much water Mars may have. (MAY being the operative word. We can't know, until we look.)

    As for life needing water - most bacteria and single-cell lifeforms can survive indefinitely without water, by going into a dormant state. Some virii do not need water, although their host usually does. The ONLY =likely= thing to be true (and it's not even certain) is the requirements of the Gaia Hypothesis - that life will hold an ecosystem in a dynamic, unstable state.

  • Is the remnants of Earth from the future after we actually decided to turn on that giant particle accelerator off long island.

    anyhoo...

    and you vegetarians remember...
    plants are living things too. they're just easier to catch.
  • I read somewhere that while a lot of researchers would agree water isn't required for life, nor does life have to be carbon-based, we tend to look for those things because they would probably be easiest for us to recognize. But you're right, it is possible to miss interesting stuff when we stick too closely to our assumptions (there was a recent Discovery article about microbes found deeper under the Earth's surface than expected and they were ignored for a long time because they were smaller than most biologists thought microbes could be).

    Still, I wouldn't be susprised to see water/carbon-based life being the norm. Life on Earth has evolved that exploits seemingly every possible strategy and resource available (apparently there is a species of worms so specialized, it only lives in wooden beer vats!) and yet on a molecular level, all life on this planet is pretty homogenous. If there were good, viable alternatives, you would expect them to have evolved and be competing.

    Dana

    (I may be talking out of my ass too =) )

  • Really exciting news, but the article does make a common error, but more for sensationalisim (they do cover thier ass). Water is necessary . . . but for carbon-based life forms. Us. Fishes. Bugs. And to expect every form of life in the universe to operate with OUR laws and needs is silly. This isn't proof that there may be life, this is proof that there may be OUR kind of life.

    And of course, they do go on to say all KNOWN forms of life need water. Slick move on the journalist's part (staving off attacks by cynical bastards like myself. It's NOT the millenium until 2001 damnit!). But even this is dodgy . . . do viruses need water? I can't imagine they would, but I don't know for sure. Can anyone back me up on this?
  • Er, if there is life, you people need to realize that the chances of them:

    a) caring about coming here
    b) planning on coming here
    c) being ABLE to come here
    or
    d) ever coming here

    are all very, very, very low. especially c :)
    And I doubt that we, or any other race, will ever travel "Star Trek style." Warp 10 wouldn't get us to "there" fast enough, even. Need some sort of wormwhole, I think, which I know very little about, but enough to know that it's the most likely method of ... space travel.

    If we find aliens, it'll simply be...
    "We found aliens. They're out there. Yeppers. Can't get to 'em, though. They can't get to us, either. wh00p."

    Anyone watch Farscape? That's kinda how I think it'd happen (travel-wise, not alien-wise, though the translator microbes sound likely for something *we* might do eventually).

    -Velox
  • Good, that should mean that all of the necessary components to manufacture cement are available in space.

  • It's difficult to crawl into the mindset of NASA circa 1969, but wouldn't re-entry burn do as good a job of cleaning bacteria from the outer wall of a spacecraft as would a quick plunging into the Indian?

    Another point - to be worried about infection from space, we have to establish the existence of extraterrestrial life. We haven't done that yet.

    That being said, I wouldn't worry about potential contamination of the ocean.
  • Proving that the water is extraterrestrial sounds easier that it is. Sure, they've found water (in solution) inside irradiated salt. This rock became superheated during its trip through the atmosphere. Superheating a salt is exactly the way you would 'dry' it in a lab. Any amount left on the meteorite would be absolutely diminutive. The cooling metorite could have well picked up the moisture as a result of cooling in a water-rich environment (earth). Salts will suck moisture out of anything! You can observe this yourself. Take some coarse salt, rinse it (to remove the anticaking agent), bake it dry, and pour it in a dish. Wait a few days. The salt will change appearance and clump as a result of absorbed moisture.
  • Sure, they've found water (in solution) inside irradiated salt. This rock became superheated during its trip through the atmosphere.
    Contrary to your expectations, many meteorites are so cold they collect frost after landing. This is probably how the "cold iron" legend of nickel-iron meterorites got started; someone observed a meteor fall, and found the rock covered with an unseasonable layer of rime.

    Only the outer extremes are heated very much (the "fusion crust", as meteoriticists call it). Just how hot would you expect the bulk of something to become during a 15-second drop from space to the stratosphere? The innards of the rock are going to be right around the 250 K equilibrium temperature of a blackbody near earth, perhaps colder if it fell in through Earth's shadow.

  • On the other hand, Earth has 1/2 of the solar system's known nitrogen (including Jupiter and the like).
    If I recall correctly, Venus (about the same size as Earth) has about 2 atmosphere's worth of nitrogen, or about 2.5 times as much as exists in gas form on Earth. Titan apparently has enormous amounts of N2 as well, in a very cold, dense soup of an atmosphere.
    Nitrogen makes up 3/4 of the atmosphere
    78%, more or less. 21% oxygen, 1% other (including 365 ppm of CO2 or thereabouts).
    So far, I haven't heard of a suitable replacement.
    Nitrogen is an essential component of amino acids, but the bacteria which fix N2 into nitrate ion would probably do just fine with 7% in the air instead of 78%. Neon would do just fine for the rest, though it's much less common in the universe. People also do quite well breathing helium with their oxygen, but it takes a giant planet to hold onto helium for long.
  • The main reason that water is thought of as a necessity for life is the attraction the molecules have to each other. This ability makes them retain heat very well. This is thought of as important for life because it will keep temperatures constant. There are planets without water, these planets tend to have a hot side fasing the sun and a cold side that dissapates heat into space quickly.
    There are other polar molecules such as H3N, HF, and other complex molecules. The more complex ones are not as easy to make, so unless an abundance of them are created or delivered to a localized place they would not be used in creating life. The other two simple molecules are probably thought as toxic and unsafe for most life here on Earth. The usual thought that if it is bad for us, then it bad for everyone is wrong. They have discovered bacteria that uses sulfur to live, something they would not have thought possible.
    Life is thought to be carbon based because of the ability to bond to itself and the number of bonds it can make. Another atom that can do this is silicon, but this is a more complex atom and would take more time to develop an adbundence to support life.

    The big probelm here is we can only speculate on life on other planets. It would be incredebly useful to actually travel to other planets and systems and actually see other ways that life developed.

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