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Well that's not exactly true either, since viruses can affect your genes.. and there are probably other things too that I'm not aware of. Food can change how your genes "express" themselves for example. I'm not a biologist either..

http://www.panspermia.org/hoover2.htm

Richard B. Hoover of NASA/NSSTC announced today the discovery of evidence for the detection of a fossilized cyanobacterial mat in a freshly fractured, interior surface of the Orgueil carbonaceous meteorite. Many of the images presented were obtained 21-23 July 2004, using the Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The announcement was made in Denver, Colorado at the "Instruments, Methods, and Missions for Astrobiology VIII" (Conference 5555) at SPIE's International Symposium on Optical Science and Technology (its 49th Annual Meeting).

This is part of the postmodern craze where all views all allowed to be heard with undue respect. We are heading for some serious disaster unless it is halted.

Or you know, there could be many lifeforms that can survive in a vacuum indefinitely, and they have existed for far more than 6 billion years?

No probe needed. All things evolve into other things. Whereas we define ourselves as "evolved from fish", the more accurate term is "our eldest ancestors were single celled organisms".

Also, this:

http://www.panspermia.org/

has a more 'alien' slant to it.

Bacterial infection of lunar landing sites is a serious concern. Here, read this.

Here's an excerpt:

There's a famous account of bacteria surviving on an unmanned probe on the moon. They didn't have to survive reentry, of course, but it demonstrates that bacteria can be surprisingly resilient. On Earth, bacteria can be found thriving in the harshest conditions where the most minuscule traces of liquid water can be found. If the rockets do manage to find a planet with liquid water, I wouldn't bet against the bacteria.

But it's extremely unlikely they'll find one. More likely, they'll go into stable orbit around some object, fall into a star, fall into a gas giant, or float in deep space until the universe dies.

Panspermia, but with Earth as the originator. Sounds like the old chicken and egg to me.

Yes, precisely. It's postulated that RNA was the transitional link between non-living chemicals and living organisms with DNA. Even today, the simplest of organisms (viruses) use only RNA to carry their genetic information.

This article provides a nice overview of how robust bacteriae and their spores can be.

Hate to drop the "intelligent design" bomb, but I still want to know just what theory explains how we got from a chemical soup to a single cell organism? I understand how evolution takes us from single cells to sponges to etc to us, but it doesn't explain how we got from amino acids to single cells...

RNA world I think takes us part of the way, but even an early single celled organism is extremely complex and doesn't explain everything...

Maybe intelligent design fills in this blank?!?!

Not a problem

You can check this for info about some bacteria that survive in vacuum and some bacteria that have actually been declared "living" after 30 million years

The article says about spores,
"In terms of our computer analogy, a bacterial spore is like a handheld calculator that has repackaged itself into its original protective shipping carton and turned itself off."

I would love to have one such calculator

Windbourne, in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

Good point. What you're talking about is the theory of Panspermia - that life originated elsewhere earlier in the universe and has traveled from system to system deeply buried and inert in cometary or asteroidal material.

Actually the only way I can think of that we can prove/falsify the theory of Panspermia is to get out into the deep solar system (or better yet into interstellar space) and start sampling, see if there are microfossils or spores of whatever kind in the materials we find. If we find viable spores (not just organic compounds, they are present all over, we've observed them in pre-stellar nebula and star creches all over the place) that would be pretty damning evidence that panspermia has/is happening.

If we didn't find anything at all, that'd be a pretty huge blow against the theory. The major problem with local planetary observations finding similar life forms is that given similar conditions, the possibility of independent parallel development, especially of very early life, rises sharply. Not saying you are wrong, just pointing out that it's a lot more complicated than that.

SB

This theory is known as panspermia.

I'm afraid what we have here is "I don't understand how this could have come about, so the workers in the field may be overlooking something". It's not that far away from the creationists' logic, which shorn of a lot of verbiage, comes down to "I don't understand how modern forms of life could have resulted from an evolutionary process, therefore they must be the result of an external creative agent."

Looking at the panspermia.org site, I was saddened to see, in one of the recent papers 'Testing Darwinism versus Cosmic Ancestry" the following section:

Where We Disagree With Darwinism

Darwinists are beginning to accept the evidence that horizontal gene transfer can deliver the components of large genetic programs. However, darwinism cannot explain how independently evolving genes would gradually acquire the correct sequences needed to become parts of a large program whose total function could not be performed until all the genes are installed. The necessary mutations would not be neutral, so if the genes were active before the complete installation, natural selection would hinder the process. ...

This is semantically equivalent to the creationist "argument from design" - how could (to take a favourite example) an organ as complex as a vertebrate's eye have arisen by random mutation? This question - and it is a valid one, and an explanation is indeed called for - was dealt with head on a few years ago by Richard Dawkins in his book "Climbing Mount Improbable". To summarise Dawkin's argument, the 'necessary mutations' were indeed not neutral. But they didn't arrive suddenly in their full-blown form, but in small steps, each of which confered a small advantage to organisms which carried them compared with organisms which did not. The individual steps that eventually resulted in an eye don't even need to have been connected with vision, or even sensitivity to light, at the start of the process. All that is needed is that small incremental advantage at the time a mutation occurred and enough time for effects of different mutations and combinations of mutations to affect survival, and time is something that life on Earth has had copious supplies of.

Apologies for the rant: I read physics at university, and get irritated when its practitioners start making ex cathedra pronouncements on topics outside their expertise.

To put a couple of things straight first. Professor Wickramasinghe hasn't said that SARS comes from space. In the Lancet letter (free reg required), he says "With respect to the SARS outbreak, a prima facie case for a possible space incidence can already be made". Note the word "possible". Note the words "prima facie" (roughly="sufficient to warrant further investigation").

This isn't some crackpot who's just heard of SARS, can't understand epidemiology and therefore thinks it must have come from outer space without thinking things through. Along with Fred Hoyle, he's long been a proponent of panspermia - the theory that life originated in space, rather than on Earth.

There is plentiful evidence of complex organic molecules in cometary and interstellar material. The environment on periodically warmed comets is every bit as suitable for the generation of life as the alternative theory of the primordial soup. Organic compounds, quite tightly concentrated, intermittent energy, water. The theory is that life on Earth originated Out There, so it would be no surprise that DNA/RNA from space would fit earthly organisms - they share the same origins.

In his letter, Prof. Wickramasinghe estimates that "a tonne of bacterial material falls to Earth from space daily, which translates into some 10^19 bacteria, or 20 000 bacteria per square metre of the Earth's surface". It would be surprising if none of these found a viable host. On the rare occasion that there is a good match, a pandemic could result. We don't know if SARS started this way or not.

Note that meteors aren't involved. Nothing gets burned up on re-entry. The stuff just drifts in.

I don't know what the answer is, but I know that it's not as clear cut as some would like to think. It's just possible that data from Beagle2 this Christmas might help shed a little more light.

Unmanned gathering of moon rock was carried out back in 1972 by the Russians. It took 7 years after the analysis was published before anyone realized that there were organic patterns in the samples.

Real images of the fossils show bacteria-like shapes. There were claims that these fossils prove existance of life elsewhere in space but it seems more likely to me that they somehow came from Earth.

Reminds me of that Star Trek episode The Chase, in which Dr. Galen, Captain Picards old Archaeology professor, found genetic data-blocks from various species around the galaxy stored in the junk portion of each species DNA, including our own. When a sufficient number of these data blocks were put together it completed a stellar map, identifying the precise location of the original origin of life on out planet and countless others. The jury is still out on the Panspermia Theory, but my own hunch is that there is lots of intelligence out there vastly older and greater than we are.

Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.

Jeff

Just because an astrophysics expert is not an expert on biological contamination does not mean that appropriate measures were not taken to eliminate this possibility. Here is an
article I found using a simple Google search that talks about the techniques that were going to be used. Research trying to prove our cosmic ancestry is nothing new and the experimental preparations done achieve high levels of microbial sterility.

SPIE-The International Society for Optical Engineering captured the bulk of Dr. Hoover's presentation in an interview published in their December '96 magazine. This September 1998 article offers pictures of the fossils found, as does a July 1997 article. Another story announces a fossil find in another meteorite that fell on Murchison, Victoria, Australia.

Many people question the science, but it would seem people should question the scientific community which has held its hands over its eyes when faced with the prospect of life on other planets. The community is just now peeking between its fingers and beginning to accept that there might be life elsewhere. In the presentation I attended, Dr. Hoover noted that NASA set up rules in advance of the Viking missions - that any one of the several (4?) tests coming back positive would be indicative of life on the red planet, but once some of the tests came back positive, they decided that all of the tests had to be positive to confirm the existence of life on Mars. Such has been the distinctly non-scientific approach of the community when confronted with the distinct possibility of life on other planets.

More links:

• Evidence of Biomarkers and Microfossils in Ancient Rocks and Meteorites abstract.
• A collection of NASA (and other) news releases pertaining to evidence of extraterrestrial life.

SPIE-The International Society for Optical Engineering captured the bulk of Dr. Hoover's presentation in an interview published in their December '96 magazine. This September 1998 article offers pictures of the fossils found, as does a July 1997 article. Another story announces a fossil find in another meteorite that fell on Murchison, Victoria, Australia.

Many people question the science, but it would seem people should question the scientific community which has held its hands over its eyes when faced with the prospect of life on other planets. The community is just now peeking between its fingers and beginning to accept that there might be life elsewhere. In the presentation I attended, Dr. Hoover noted that NASA set up rules in advance of the Viking missions - that any one of the several (4?) tests coming back positive would be indicative of life on the red planet, but once some of the tests came back positive, they decided that all of the tests had to be positive to confirm the existence of life on Mars. Such has been the distinctly non-scientific approach of the community when confronted with the distinct possibility of life on other planets.

More links:

• Evidence of Biomarkers and Microfossils in Ancient Rocks and Meteorites abstract.
• A collection of NASA (and other) news releases pertaining to evidence of extraterrestrial life.

We (the intelligent life) are here and not on another planet because this planet is uniquely suited to us.

An elegant statement of the Weak Anthropic principle.

FWIW my current worldview is

• Life "as we know it" is a lot more common in our region than we think. Due to exobiology as per the Hoyle Wickramasinghe hypothesis. Even if the hypothesis is wrong and life requires a clay matrix to develop DNA, and even though the latest news on Martian Meteors looks like they didn't contain fossil bugs, the mechanism for propagating life pretty much anywhere near where it develops is sound. Bacteria are hardy beasts, and can survive in space quite well. With the latest news on the water on Mars, the odds of life there approach certainty.
• That's the good news. The Bad news is that the step from procaryotes to eucaryotes, that is, going from single-cell to multi-celled organisms is a big one, and probably only a fraction of one percent of life origins ever make it.
• But it's worse than that. Technology requires colonies of multicellular organisms. These can be as complex as as the Portugese Man-O-War which although it looks like a jellyfish is actually a colony of 4 different polyps, more like a multi-species anthill or coral reef than anything else. Or they can be as simple as the US Congress, an organism whose intellect is less than any of its constituent members. In any case, some multicellular genusses may remain in pre-school, and never develop anything as complex as an ant farm. The development of such complexity may require a stable double-planet system, rare as hen's teeth. Earth and its moon would be considered a double planet system if we didn't live on one of em.
• It's worse still. The Dinosaurs were terrifically successful for megayears, but had they landed on the Moon, we'd almost certainly know it. So it's possible to have complex organisms, complex societies (herds), but still no technology for Sagans. Closer to home, Dolphins are unlikely to ever develop a technology. You may need to periodocally hit the planetary reset button with a meteor or super-volcano. But not too hard - or you've got to rebuild from procaryotes again. And not too soft, you only have a limited amount of time before the star you're around goes Ploof.
• Finally, there's the "Goldilocks Zone" that's the subject of the original article. Star too close to galactic centre = bad. Star too far out = bad. And then within that torus, star in spiral arm centre = bad. Don't be too near a supernova. So the quicker you can develop a multi-stellar population, the better. Which reduces the odds even further.

Though we could start right now with Chimpanzees and Gorillas. They'd be considered primitive but undoubtedly intelligent species if they came from another planet. History will judge us harshly if we don't start granting sub-human rights to sub-humans.

Which means that we'd better get our ethics up to scratch.

As explained here, earth bacteria survived on the moon for 2 years.

IIRC, they sterilize some space probes by blasting them with radiation before launch.

How long can electronics last in space? NASA contacted the Pioneer 6 spacecraft after 35 years in space. An even more interesting question is how long LIFE can last in space. The Surveyor III camera brought back from the moon by Apollo 12 had bacteria in it from where somebody had coughed on it. Commenting on this, astronaut Pete Conrad (who died recently in a motorbike accident) said, "I always thought the most significant thing we found on the whole goddamn Moon was that little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever said shit about it..."

I'm not talking about ALH84001 or whatever that asteroid was called. It is quite possible that the most basic postulate of biology (that terrestrial life originated here on Earth) is false. There isn't any convincing evidence that it HAD to have started here, certainly. The panspermia movement has some interesting things to say about this.

um. read the article at panspermia. they would survive, could potentially thrive, and regardless would confuse things.

The fact is that DNA itself is pretty useless. It can't do anything without proteins, and it's the proteins that are actually acting on each other, on the DNA, and on the RNA.

That said, it's probably the proteins that allow these functions in terms of things like splicing out introns (alternate splicing is a form of branching)

I fail to see what the first explanation is not the more reasonable!

This is an old argment - they a whole web site: http://www.panspermia.org/

R.

If there is something about panspermia - and there probably is - we have already contaminated half the System, in typical Earth fashion :-)

Think about it: If a piece of rock from Mars can travel to Antarctica, what prevents a hunk of our continental crust, filled with bacteria - which are very good at surviving in harsh climates - from impacting on Mars? Bacteria have been around for some 100 million years, more than enough time for the occasional dinosaur - killer comet whose impact offers a ride out of the gravity well.

I for one would not be surprised to find some E. coli look-alikes on Mars (I don't know about the possibility of low - energy trajecories to places in the Outer System, though)

how would it get there? I doubt Earth life could have come from rocks, or from an extremely cold lake. It had to arise somewhere where there was lots of water, energy, and nutrients. It is possible that life could have arrived there by meteor, though. (In fact, some argue that life on Earth probably comes from space because it is so difficult for a planet to create life on its own)

Let the war rage again! 8)

The original announcement, in 1996, sparked
almost violent arguments among planetary
scientists. Recent press on it has declared
the subject as "dead". I guess this reopens the
debate.

Personally, I think that the evidence is strong,
despite some inconsistencies in the original work.
I'm waiting for the sample-return mission in 2005
to really have a conclusion, though.
Even then, we'll never be able to prove that there isn't/wasn't
life on Mars, only that we can't find the remains of it.

Check panspermia.org for more info.