Dormant ALIEN SLIME LIFE frozen in SPEEDING comet will AWAKEN - boffins Top astrobiologists say that the approaching comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko could be loaded with slumbering alien organisms capable of living on Earth, which will wake up and become active as the frosty spaceball comes nearer and nearer to the Sun. Dr Max Wallace and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe say that data from the …
This of course raises the possibility that the soon-to-active alien slime colonies of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko might find much of our planet to be prime real estate, ripe for a campaign of interplanetary conquest.
Who's to say that something like that isn't what happened ~4 billion years ago during the late heavy bombardment, and that we are not the inevitable result (amongst other organisms which we are doing a great job of trying to get rid of).
I'm struggling to understand the downvotes; this is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis - the LHB occurred between 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago, the earliest evidence we have for life on Earth is from around 3.7 billion years ago. Admittedly 100 million years is a long time, but in geological timescales, there is the blink of an eye between Earth cooling enough to be suited to life, and life cropping up.
Since current theories, and experiments conducted since the '70s suggest that it is rather difficult to get life going on its own, it doesn't seem totally unreasonable to posit that if life can exist in a dormant state inside a frozen astronomical body such as a comet, then it would only take a small fragment of such a body surviving re-entry intact to deliver such life to a planetary environment.
We know primitive life can survive inside such an body, because such life can survive in more extreme environments on earth (frozen for millions of years under polar ice, or inside nuclear reactors). We also know that icy meteorites can survive partially intact when colliding with Earth - superheating of the outer layers 'cushions' the interior so that it does not melt.
Frozen solid inside half a kilometre of ice would also nicely protect any microorganism from the sort of hard radiation found in space, so it is not unreasonable to suppose that if such life found its way into the interior of such a body then it could survive. Of course, the question would then be 'how did it get there', and if we were to find evidence of life in such an environment, this would inevitably suggest that such life is commonplace and abundant in the universe, and raises the further question of its ultimate origin.
Anyway, my point is, that from a hypothetical point of view, none of this is beyond the bounds of reasonable possibility, unless you happen to subscribe to the 'Earth was created in 6 days' rubbish that the less rational amongst us spout.
"I'm struggling to understand the downvotes; this is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis"
I suspect the downvoters are struggling to understand simple logic. I agree with you - it doesn't sound unreasonable, but it does assume that viable lifeforms can survive for a very long time - and that they could tolerate or quickly adapt to the environment they found themselves in following the impact. I'm not saying they can't, BTW.
Or maybe it was pot luck - we can easily extend your hypothesis to posit that multiple impacts took place, and eventually one of them got lucky.
Thanks for a very interesting post. Have a pint and an upvote.
"...experiments....suggest that it is rather difficult to get life going on its own..."
Exactly. And if life couldn't get started on this perfectly habitable planet then where in the solar system did it start?
"Frozen solid inside half a kilometre of ice would also nice..."
You're conflating comets with planetary ejecta (small meteorites).
FWIW I didn't downvote you. That was the downvote bot.
"Since current theories, and experiments conducted since the '70s suggest that it is rather difficult to get life going on its own, it doesn't seem totally unreasonable to posit that if life can exist in a dormant state inside a frozen astronomical body such as a comet, then it would only take a small fragment of such a body surviving re-entry intact to deliver such life to a planetary environment."
But then, how did it get started on the comet? This comet theory solves nothing about the "hard to get life started" thingummy, it just pushed the problem horizon further away.
Plus, shaving with Occam's Razor for a bit tells me that if life can get started on a bleeding comet it can get started oodles easier on a nice warm planet. If there's one thing we can agree about, it should be that getting life started requires energy. Not so much about for the taking on a comet. Lots bombarding the place wantonly on a planet.
"the LHB occurred between 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago, the earliest evidence we have for life on Earth is from around 3.7 billion years ago."
If life had developed prior to the LHB the evidence for it might not have survived - indeed life might not have survived - so it's not surprising that the first evidence comes later.
"current theories, and experiments conducted since the '70s suggest that it is rather difficult to get life going on its own"
It's still difficult to get going even if you suppose it happened elsewhere. I've never found this hypothesis appealing - it smacks of trying to avoid a difficult problem by turning your back on it. I suppose the advantage of the hypothesis is that you can allow a much longer time-span for it to have happened. But as a scientific hypothesis it has the disadvantage of being difficult to falsify - look at a comet & find nothing you have a choice of saying "wrong comet" or "wrong type of comet".
"... experiments conducted since the '70s suggest that it is rather difficult to get life going on its own."
On the contrary, although the processes are subtle and probably quite complex it looks to me as though several promising avenues are opening which explain aspects of abiogenisis; including, for example, the work of Jack Szostack and his team.
http://www.hhmi.org/scientists/jack-w-szostak
The problem with panspermia is that it still doesn't explain how life started. I'm happy enough with the idea that the potential for life and consciousness is everywhere in the universe without needing to dream up all manner of stories that can't easily be disproved.
"The problem with panspermia is that it still doesn't explain how life started"
No, but it explains how it disseminated from its origin point. Which could be in a planet not unlike ours, but placed half a galaxy away, or in places like Europa or Mars in our own solar system, or God knows where.
We should accept that probably we'll never know for sure. This universe of ours is really good at destroying information.
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So, microbes (for which there is *no evidence*) may exist on the comet which is not actually hurtling towards us. And those (non existent) organisms of unknown origin or composition may be able to survive below -40C, exposed to the vacuum of space and the radiation of space ...
Roll of tin foil and copy of 'Milinery for Scaredy Cats' at the ready ...
*ahem* From the article:
"Dr Max Wallace and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe say that data from the Rosetta probe now in orbit about the comet and the small lander Philae deployed to its surface support their theory"
What evidence that is, from the article on the RAS site, appears to be the following:
"Wallis and Wickramasinghe cite further evidence for life in the detection by Philae of abundant complex organic molecules on the surface of the comet and in the infrared images taken by Rosetta."
Not smoking gun proof but hell, they're doing science - On. A. Comet.
how do they know it's not just a load of shit?
Shit basically *is* slimy microbial life. Plus, shit must have been shat by something bigger!
Science for a relative value of [Science]...
Occhams Razor states that complex carbohydrates can, quite easily, be created from some of the more common stuff around in our solar system ( water, methane, ammonia, hydrogen peroxide, nitrous oxide ) as long as you supply energy. And gee-golly, between our sun and Jupiter, that comet gets irradiated hard, so it's really no big surprise it's covered in "organic" goo.
That, however, is still no indication of life ( even as "cosmic goo" ) .. For that we'd need to find carbon-based molecules which can catalise chemical reactions "against" the entropy gradient, which from all data to date picking apart cellular mechanisms on this rock, means either metallic radicals buffered by deoxiriboses (like the heme structures in our red blood cells, or the exchange-Fe-for-Mg chlorophill in plants.), or short-chain RNAs comparable to rybozimes, at least.
The heme structure especially is, besides being crucial for anything chemotrophic or phototrophic, very easy to spot: It absorbs specific wavelengths. It's why blood is red, and plants are green. And why this comet should be anything but black if this stuff was present in any amount needed to give credibility to the idea of "life" being present and active there. By now the conditions should be such that any life form suitable for such an environment would be racing to take advantage of the Big Thaw, and would affect the comet's spectral profile.
> Not smoking gun proof
Not even close. Just some marketing PR puff for the Rosetta/Philae mission.
"Alien slime" is not the scientific definition of anything. "Alien slime becoming awake when the comet warms up" is the half-baked premise of a plot for a B-grade Sci-Fi movie. It is not science.
Complex carbohydrates have been found in deep space ever since the late '60's:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cen-v047n014.p011
That was in 1969, and the URL is from the American Chemical Society, no less.
If you search for 'polyaromatic carbohydrates deep space' in Google, you will find more recent, and much more spectacular results. These results do not prove or suggest the existence of life in deep space. At an average temperature of 5K I'd be very interested in learning how life or metabolic processes would even be possible.
Next Bullshit Topic: let's travel through a black hole and come out on the "other side", intact and still alive.
Formaldehyde is somewhat stretching the definition of 'complex carbohydrate', given that it is actually the MOST chemically simple carbohydrate possible, with the formula CH2O.
What has supposedly been detected on this comet are (amongst other things) polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (which by definition have at least ten carbon atoms in them (the simplest PAH being naphthalene which consists of two fused six-member rings).
Also, blasting something with hard radiation is generally considered to be a better way of making things fall apart than stick together. An analogy might be to consider what happens if you put together a bag of flour, bag of sugar and some eggs and shoot them with a shotgun - you don't generally tend to get a cake.
Admittedly, none of this is anywhere near a remotely definitive proof of extraterrestrial life. However, if we were to find actual complex carbohydrates (the definition of which is generally considered to be multiple sugar molecules chemically linked together), it would be extremely difficult to posit that they have been produced by anything other than life, as we know of no non-life based chemical process which could produce them.
> What has supposedly been detected on this comet are (amongst other things) polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
Old news:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4552-space-molecules-point-to-organic-origins.html
This is from 2004, and after spending exactly 25 seconds searching in Google.
"Alien slime becoming awake when the comet warms up" is the half-baked premise of a plot for a B-grade Sci-Fi movie.
That's no way to talk about The Quatermass Experiment you sacrilegious heathen!
Anyway the chances of anything coming from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko are a million to one, he said.
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... is a crock of alien slime. It doesn't solve the problem of how life first evolved , it just removes it to some vague handwaving "out there" location. Well "out there" isn't particularly conducive to the existence of the complex biological machinery and energy gradients we find on earth and given the temperature in deep space any biochemical precursor chemistry that did happen would probably happen orders of magnitude slower than a on warm wet earth. Life almost certainly evolved on earth.
"doesn't solve the problem of how life first evolved"
Nor does it claim to.
"Life almost certainly evolved on earth."
Indeed it did but that doesn't require that it also began here.
FWIW, I tend to agree with you that I think life probably began here without the involvement of panspermia. However, I don't have very much to base that on, other than "seems right" and certainly cannot rule out the possibility that we originated somewhere else.
Do either of you have any particular reason for believing that life "almost certainly" originated on earth?
I would have thought that with the current state of knowledge we have no good evidence either way. It would presumably help if we could find habitable environments elsewhere in the solar system and discover whether they are (a) uninhabited, (b) inhabited by organisms that are related to earth organisms, or (c) inhabited by organisms that are unrelated to earth organisms.
Its not just 'out there' but 'out when'. A couple of star system generations to evolve the precursor biological processes, interspersed with periods of stasis while the next system is formed and 'colonized'. This give's far more time and scope for the initial processes to establish.
The more we understand about extremophiles in our own enviroment and the spread of organic molecules through the local system and beyond, gives weight that it's a feasible extension of the evolution theory.
Organic compounds are turning up every where we look. What's the odds that New Horizons picks up some indications as it piles through the Pluto system in the next few weeks.
" A couple of star system generations to evolve the precursor biological processes, interspersed with periods of stasis while the next system is formed and 'colonized'. This give's far more time and scope for the initial processes to establish."
The universe is "only" 14 billion years old. Thats actually not a long time for life to evolve somewhere else, hitch a ride on some convenient rock blasted off its planet (or out of its nebula) by some massive event that gives it enough energy to escape the gravitation pull of its local star, and just happen to travel through interseller space and conveniently land on a nice habitable planet (having avoided getting cooked on atmospheric entry). The odds against that happening are pretty damn high.
Occams razor - life started here.
Indeed. He has plenty of form when it comes to over-hyping things in an alien-life-on-comets direction, not to say bending the evidence a bit to fit on occasion. Organic molecules on comets have been known for many years, but that doesn't equate to life. It's probably best not to jump to any conclusions about the latter without pretty firm evidence.
The alien slime results in horny alien hybrids bent on breeding a new species of life on the planet. They tend to kill those that get in their way.
Nuke them from orbit its the only way to be sure*...
I'm aware that quote is from a different 'Alien' film ;o).
...given enough time.
Less time if the right temperature, or if there is liquid water. But any mathematical model of evolution processes will show you once you can make any molecular copy with random interactions, even a low probability of fidelity it will rapidly converge onto an improving solution.
The issue of alien life, is not whether it exists, as we know life exists somewhere (here!). We might not even recognise it...
But whether it exists within our time-space event horizon...given how much of the universe we can not observe.
P.
PS We do of course we need supernovae to make the heavy atoms, but I am arguing that the evolutionary process is very powerful and therefore life of some form is inevitable.
'PS We do of course we need supernovae to make the heavy atoms, but I am arguing that the evolutionary process is very powerful and therefore life of some form is inevitable.'
Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned.
The chances of anything coming from mars stars are a million to one he said.
On the fourteenth day I went into the kitchen, and I was surprised to find that the fronds of the red weed had grown right across the hole in the wall, turning the half-light of the place into a crimson-coloured obscurity.
Chandra Wickramasinghe is well-known as a supporter of Fred Hoyle's theories about panspermia, which have not yet won general acceptance in the scientific community. Thus, this news item is not likely to fill too many scientists with dread about the possibility of a looming plague. None the less, the Universe is a big place, and while contamination by alien life is unlikely to be a common thing, it's still a real possibility, so some degree of caution is reasonable.
"This of course raises the possibility that the soon-to-active alien slime colonies of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko might find much of our planet to be prime real estate, ripe for a campaign of interplanetary conquest."
Um... Nope.
You see, Earth has one really big obstacle to overcome for simple life forms that didn't evolve here - free oxygen.
It simply doesn't exist normally in nature, the pesky gas is just too reactive, it bonds with damn near anything.
We breath it because some prehistoric organism started farting it out as a metabolic byproduct on our World, and for the rest, it was adapt or die.*
Seeing as how Oxygen is not of the free gasses detected on the comet, any lifeform that somehow migrates to Earth from there will simply not be able to survive our corrosive atmosphere.
*As a side note, adapting to metabolize oxygen really speeds up the old metabolism, and gives you the competitive edge on those sluggish methane and sulphur dioxide breathers**.
**Not to be taken as a slur against methane and/or sulphur dioxide breathers. Many of my best friends are anaerobic!
This of course raises the possibility that the soon-to-active alien slime colonies of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko might find much of our planet to be prime real estate, ripe for a campaign of interplanetary conquest. … Lewis Page
A pint or two and a chat on the parallel reality of a savvy IT campaign registering an interplanetary conquest and unstoppable virtual defeat of all and/or any earlier established globalised alienating practices would not be a cock and bull tale to report on with future information, after a Clerk and Well visit this coming Friday afternoon, Lewis, be that the localised watering hole/nearest field office for sensitive communications?
Advanced IntelAIgents be in the area then, testing fields and searching out forces familiarised and constantly upgrading performance parameters with proper preparations preventing piss poor performance/sub-prime continuity of politically inept progress.
There a lot going on out there and all of it, and especially so in IT circles, far from normal.
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