Slashdot Mirror
English Researchers Find Extra-Terrestrial Water
Lister of Smeg writes: "Some researchers found water on a meteorite that is about 570 million years older than the oldest terrestrial rocks. The implications are that water isn't as rare as we thought, conditions for life may have existed elsewhere in the solar system before Earth, and from the article ... 'There is this old idea that life on Earth may have been seeded from somewhere else.'"
Iodine has a relatively short half-life of 15.6 Myr, and is generally considered useless for measurement on this time scale (i.e. almost 300x the half-life) After 300 half-lives, you'd expect 1 part in 2x10^90! That's one single atom left from 1.77 x 10^65 kg of I-129 - more than the mass of the universe, much less the mass of the I-29 in the universe (and, I'm willing to wager, more than the mass of the meteorite!)
The WashU Laboratory of Space Sciences has a page on isotope age determination in meteors, geologic formations and other ancient inorganic structures. Here's what they say on this very point:
Iodine-129 is now extinct in nature. Its short half-life, 15.6 million years, means that Iodine-129 has long since decayed away in a solar system that is 4.6 billion years old.
Furthermore, any radioisotope age determination is based on two things: a) a knowledge of the relative prevalence of the isotope; and b) the half-life. [If the original prevalence is not known, you can sometimes make estimates from decay products of multiple unrelated isotopes]
According to the 'standard' half-life, I-129 is not a useful isotope, but to make things worse, this sample was irradiated by the high-energy space environment for a very long time (I'm assuming millions or billions of years). Irradiation can cause accelerated decay, changing the effective half-life.
Bottom line: unknown original prevalence (somewhere in space, at some unknown time), unknown effective half-life, due to unknown but significant irradiation history, and an unsuitable isotope. Ugh. This is Scientology!
You'd get a better estimate by flipping coins for binary bits. Wait! Maybe they did! How else did they get that number at all?
-----------------
Brought to you by the guy who outed Katz as a Scientologist!
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
A psudonym at least is a psudonym for an actual person, but "Anonymous Coward" is shared across many. You can't say, "Oh, that's Anonymous Coward! I saw his post in ______" because you dont know which anonymous coward is doing the posting. With names you have name recognition.
----
Oh my god, Bear is driving! How can this be?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Didn't some researchers find signs of life on mars too? So according to just that statement we can say: Life on Earth could of came from mars!
Some little green men sent all of thier pets to a pathetic planted called Earth, including thier pathetic human pets.
I always thought that thinking that we were the only solar system capible of sustaing life was a little hard to belive, but even further saying that some water molecules on an asteroid could be the answer to life itself! Now that is a new one!
I think it was the age of the salt that suggested water (salt-water) was liquid at particular time relative near the conjectured birth of the solar system. Which is to say: the early solar system had water someplace other than Earth and way out in the fringes and it may have been more common.
Comets have CO2 ice, Methane ice, and water ice (and probably lots of other shtuff). So you're right, but I'm not sure your point should detract from the finding.
either his "sense of humor" is very evil, twisted, and hopelessly confused, or you just didn't read the comment you replied to. We're talking about Pauly Shore.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Still reeling from the absence of the Ten Commandments in public schools, I reached for my news-paper on Monday and saw that they are teaching evolooshun without having the entire fossil record from the first genetic material to the present.
I demand the right to a solid platform upon which I can support my dignity. How can I feel good about myself if I am reminded that I share common ancestry with ape-brutes? I've been to the zoo, and I decline to write of the horrid, disgusting things I have seen the creatures do.
With our sense of self-worth at stake, supporters of science will talk of 'empirical evidence', 'facts', and 'logic'. Take a moment and reflect on the innocence lost the day our world left it's prominent spot at the center of the universe. And now they would have us force feed this, their evil-ution, to our kids.
Does a man who is doing his utmost to get into heaven benefit from filling his head with theories? Do we want our teachers questioning all that is good and decent, twisting things around with their fancy words? We must shift our focus back to something which is never used in an evil fashion: religion.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
"more than the mass of the universe..."
Who knows, maybe the majority of the univers is I-129?
;)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Hal Clement's Iceworld, 1951. Exploration of an extremely cold planet, so cold that an obscure chemical, H2O, is actually liquid. (If I recall correctly from reading it fifteen years ago.)
Not anymore, bitch!
People always mention about Silicon-based life forms, but in my chemistry classes at university, our Prof. told us about how actually, it is a LOT less probable that Si is a basis of life.
/., people feel OBLIGATED to try to "outsmart" the scientists in the article, or point out how they are smarter.
I don't remember the actual details but it involved low-level electron properties of Carbon that enabled it's intense flexibility and polyerization, something that silicon just doesn't have.
Now, I'm not saying that Si-based life doesn't exist, but form the chemical analysis I've seen, I really think that the whole concept is VERY overrated. I mean EVERY time an aricle comes out like this, people say:
"These scientists are so narrow-minded (or something to this effect). What if carbon-based life is the minority?" Or "Whatr about Si based life".
I mean, once again, don't people think astrophysicists and Chemists THINK about these things? These concpets are NOT new! I'm just tired of people bringing the topics up, like the stupid scientists overlooked this! YES, there is the possibility of non-Carbon based life. and YES there are good reasons to think that carbon is a favored molecule for life forms, and water with it!
Oh well, it's 2AM and I'm probably just tired and ranting. It just seems that every time a science article comes out on
Sincerely,
Kevin Christie
kwchri@wm.edu
-syrinx
(just read my email address in reverse)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Thank you!
I have not laughed like that at an email for ages!!!!!!
Pity me- I go through stages of actually liking the guy!!
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
This is direct evidence against the existence of a god that is both omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving.
;-)
Well, he could be omnipotent, omniscient, or both, but there is no way he could be all-loving.
However you said "both" and listed 3 characteristics. This is an error, albeit a small one. Now since god is perfect and you are created in his image, you can't make errors.
You will please note that we have reached a contradiction.
Therefore God is not perfect either.
QED
---CONFLICT!!---
That's Mr Almighty to you I take you will not forget again. Otherwise we will force feed you the entire contents of L Ron Hubbard's last bowel movements!!!
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
More like oxygen. It's such a reactive material that to early life it was pure poison. It took a lot of evolution for life to be able to withstand the assault of oxygen, contantly combining with fragile chemicals needed for life processes. There are still a lot of organizms that cannot tolerate oxygen. There's probably places in our cells today that require careful segregation from oxygen or else it spoils the chemistry and the cell dies.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
That's a great point. Such macro-calculations based on a small population of occurrances leads to the possibility of a large amount of error. Thinking of the Law of Averages, "more to go on" may skew the data completely.
If you don't like this . . . MOD someone else up.
Problem is, you can't "decide" to believe in God "just in case" he exists .. that makes no sense.
I'm not ridiculing your premises. I'm ridiculing your logic.... that lack of ability to conceive an idea means that ideas is wrong is poor logical form. That is a "logical" construct (and a false one), not a premise.
2 1337 4 u!
To his surprise, Whitby found a large amount of xenon-129 - an element that forms when the isotope iodine-129 decays. Iodine-129 is radioactive and is not found on Earth.
Next, the researchers wanted to know how old the halite was. Luckily, it's already known how long it takes iodine-129 to decay into xenon-129. Using this information, Whitby and colleagues calculated that the salt crystals - and the water - in the meteorite formed only two million years after the birth of the Solar System 4.57 billion years ago.
They found Xenon-129 in the meteorite, not Iodine-129; but since Iodine-129 decays into Xenon-129 they can figure it out from the Xenon-129 available.
the real at&t mix
Water is H20. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. Oxygen is about the third or fourth most common. Anytime it gets cool enough for chemical compounds to form, you are likely to get some water. There is water in large quantities in some form on Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and most of the moons in the outer solar system (but not much on our moon). The meteorites called Carbonacious Chondrites have up to 10% water, as has been known for about a century. According to the most widely accepted theories, comets are mostly water.
It's still a terrible argument.
I-129 is formed in exploding supernovas (as are all elements heavier than iron) because the iron nucleus is exceptionally stable, and producing heavier elements consumes energy, rather than releasing it. *Trace amounts* may be produced in a 'living star' but not concentrations we could detect, even as Xe-129, billions of years later. The accretion disk of a black hole might have this capacity, too, but it does not affect my argument.
That means that the Iodine 129 was produced in a previous star -- and hence possibly a previous solar system (and almost certainly previous material bodies such as dust clouds and asteroids) I don't think anyone would be surprised to learn that previous solar systems may have contained water.
The age of the metorite is unknown. Even if one accepts the theory advanced in the CNN article (it is plausible, but not much more than that) the meteor is almost certainly much older than 4.6 billion. This meteor probably did not accrete in our solar system. To accrete in our solar system there would have had to have been a supernova in our vicinity within few hundred million years before our solar system accreted
If the nova had been any older, its I-139 would already have decayed before the meteor formed and would not be present in detectable quantities. Such a recent, near nova is inconsistent with the astronomic data (no gas cloud remnants, or visible effect on nearby stars) and is inconsistent with any current model of star formation and planetary accretion -- the supernova would have played hell on the proto-sun and proto-planetary gas disk, and it takes more than a few hundred million years
The English theory is just a goofy hypothesis that would knock many far more established theories out of whack, and offers no basis whatsoever to revise those theories. It is embarrassing.
The meteor is most likely *far older* -- more like 7-10 billion years than 4.6 billion
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
If only we had the power to see into these other solar systems we would most definetly find other life. I'm am firmly convinced that our exisence on this planet is not an accident. If you think about it and the billions of years the universe has been in existence it makes sense to think that life evolved quite a long time before we or this earth came along... and that life evolved to such an advanced level that we probably cannot even comprehend it.
My theory is that these advanced creatures actually seeded our earth and the life on it. In fact, they have probably seeded countless planets. You ask what is the point of all of this, I'm not going to give you that answer, you will have to figure it out yourself. But the point is that life as we know it is only a small part of the big picture really out there. I think these advanced creatures have purposely shielded us from interaction with other planets and forms of life to maintain an environment that essentially protects us and at the same time keeps us ignorant of other worlds.
Anyhow it is just some food for thought.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
Yeh! As if intelligent life would waste their time on a solar system as insignificant as ours.... What's the odds on there being a sign just past Pluto .... DETOUR ...Humanoid Scientists requiring funding
Somebody's got their basic premise wrong. Water is everywhere where hydrogen and oxygen concentrations and pressure/temperature allow and where other competing reactions don't predominate.
It's not rare at all.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
>Just because someone can count to 10, doesn't mean they can necessarily count to 100.
:-)
Er, yes it does. Count to ten, ten times.
I understand what you're trying to say, you just picked a bad example.
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
What, me worry?
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Ahh... The most common argument to explain the existence of a God... "We can't explain how all this stuff got here, so it must be God". I'm sorry, but that's no argument at all. It's "lack of an argument". :-/
I modded the Troll Investigation and I got
You do know that in England their called English people. What the hell else are they supposed to be called? And can you believe that people living in France are called french people, people in Japan are called japanese people, and get this, people in America are called american!?!? This is proof that Americans think that we are the only ones on the planet and that we were the first to create and use everything. The revolution apparently doesnt click with people. (hey wait I really should post this anonymous... ah screw it I'm already -2 from 1st posts...)
Hm. You, personally, cannot conceive of the notion that the world was generated without god, therefore the world was not generated without god. By extension, I cannot believe that flowers can grow without fairies, therefore flowers require fairies. Great logic. At one time people couldn't conceive of the notion of a round earth, a heliocentric solar system or a bunch of other things.... and they, too, were wrong
"random scientific evolution". Uh, random doesn't have anything to do with it. Also, I assume that you're talking about "natural selection" when you say "evolution". You should really look these things up.
than I can attribute it to the boogey man. Only a higher being could have given us a rose, a bald eagle, a rainbow, etc.
If only a higher being could have given us a rose, then what gave us a higher being? A higher-higher being? Hm. I sense a slippery slope of n(higher) beings. Point two: If only a higher being could have given us a rose, could only said higher being have also given us, say, Anthrax (the disease, not the band... although the band isn't a great example of divine perfection either) or Hitler or cancer? Or is the higher being only responsible for the things you define as good or beutiful?
2 1337 4 u!
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Battlefield Earth really wasn't kidding. Maybe that's the part of BE that didn't suck!
I want my prize, Jon Katz. :)
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
timothy needs to head back to chemistry class. Water is by no means rare in the universe. If you're the astronomer type and look in the right stellar structures you can see interstellar water floating about. Take a quick flight through the Kuiper belt or around most comets and you'll see a bunch of water there too. Humans have been looking up and seeing extra terrestrial water for years.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Only a higher being could have given us a rose, a bald eagle, a rainbow, etc.
Yes, but that would then mean that the "higher being" also gave us Pauly Shore. This is direct evidence against the existence of a god that is both omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
If you've ever read the bible...
Actually, in point of fact, I have... I, like most atheists, was indoctrinated into my parents' religion as a child and, like most atheists, I went through a looong period of "searching" for spiritual meaning before becoming an atheist.
One: Faith doesn't enlighten. I can have faith in dragons, ufo's or Yahweh. Doesn't mean any of them exist. Any proposition that can be considered "true" must be falsifiable either through a) experimentation, b) observation or c) logical inference from either a or b. Insert standard disclaimers on epistemiology and circular inference here.
Two: The fall from grace, if we are to accept the mythology (and I don't), was the result of humans gaining the knowledge of good and evil. If there was no evil prior to apple snack, then how could that knowledge have been exercised or even recognized? The ability to make said discrimination would have been meaningless.
Two B: I disconcurr that all of the things that are "evil" necessarily had to be perpetrated by "man". Firstly there is evil by permission. god is theoretically omnipotent and, thus, all occurrences in the world are at his permission. By allowing evil to ocurr when he is fully capable of stopping it is an evil by permission. Abetting for lack of a better word. Secondly, there are a bunch of things ocurring directly at god's behest or by his hand in the bible that appear to be patently evil. My personal fave, of course, is the one about the children who moke Elisha because he is bald... God summons she-bears to devour them. I don't remember the chapter and verse and I'm too lazy to look it up but I'm pretty sure it's in Kings... The next time you take a swipe at the bible, try a critical eye. Ask some questions of it. Demand internal consistency. You may see it for what it is, a cobbling of folk tales, morality stories and mangled history cobbled together from different and often contradictory sources.... and in bad translation at that.
2 1337 4 u!
I'm glad you appreciate my efforts!
Don't ask why I posted it. It just reflected my end of Friday mood.
Just because someone can count to 10, doesn't mean they can necessarily count to 100. Water is a very simple compount - two molecules of hydrogen, and one of oxygen. A single celled life form, on the other hand, has many many more elements combined together to make a larger whole.
When one thinks about life, and physical materials in general as a whole, it's hard to not see the parallels between it and programming. There are the base elements - atoms and say, assembly. These things build up to make something more complex - but still composed of the smaller elements - say, elements and any construction language.
Makes one wonder if the physical world was programmed by Someone.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Oh, don't tell me now there's some other place with the same name!
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
Who the fuck is steve woston.
There's somewhere between 30 and 200 (depending on who you trust more) oceans-full of water in earth's magmatic layers anyway. 70% of all volcanic output is dear old aqua.
The big mystery in Noah's flood is that it went down again (if earth were perfectly round, you'd be sitting under about 2km of water right now - good luck with breathing), not where all the water came from.
Finding substantial amounts of water in meteoric rock tells us something quite simple, and quite different to the reported quackery: the meteorite wasn't in space long enough for the water to escape.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
They don't exactly explain what the novelty about finding water in a meteorite is. Meteorites are simply matter from outer space that fall to earth and can be commets, which are mostly made out of ice. I believe this has been determined a very long time ago.
It's possible that by meteorite they're actually talking about asteroids, which are usually made out of rock. But still finding water in some object from outer space doesn't seem to be nearly as much of a novelty as the article would have you believe.
If I could catch one of those asteroids. . . there ougt to be enough water for me to take my 30 minute showers again . . .
When I get in a programming mode
Compile and run
It is so much fun
"If I were to ask you a hypothetical question, what would you like it to be about?"
Read the - oh never mind, here"
Ahem! "Next, the researchers wanted to know how old the halite was. Luckily, it's already known how long it takes iodine-129 to decay into xenon-129. Using this information, Whitby and colleagues calculated that the salt crystals - and the water - in the meteorite formed only two million years after the birth of the Solar System 4.57 billion years ago."
Now, as to how ACCURATE that is, I will never know. I'm not a geologist.
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
Scott
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
Sounds a little like Holland. . .
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
These scientific dudes, like, found this rock from space that is like very old because it has like this isotope of iodine and stuff. And every dude and his dog knows that water is made up of iodine. So like fer sure the water MUST be as old as the iodine which is as old as the rock! Holy fsck! Gadzillion years. Way before like the Earth even existed, not to mention the righteous dudes that trod upon it.
What totally blows everyone's mind is that this water stayed in the rock for billions of years. Even when exposed to the scorching sun, and the
awesome blazing heat of entry into the Earth's
atmosphere---but it's true!
There is no frickin' way that water could have gotten into the rock from the surrounding air while it sat in storage for two years waiting for these dudes to crack it open. Rocks are, like, totally water-proof, man. Don't listen to these bullshitting lame-asses who say otherwise.
And--doh--even if Earth water did get in, it wouldn't have the right iodine in its molecules! These dudes with like microscopes and shit can tell the new stuff from the old!
I'd be surprised if these Scientologists even knew how to work with sig figs.
Are all of slashdot's members Scientologists? There seems to be an awful tendency towards this conjecture.
Lars -
I believe the problem lies in (no offense) your understanding of what a physicist means when he states that asteroids and other goodness are made out of frozen rock.
:)
Have you ever handled liquid nitrogen? It freezes object extremely quickly to very low temperatures, but is not water. When an astrophysicist refers to a comet or celestial body as being frozen, he doesn't mean that it contains ice, it simply means they are solid state of (insert composition here).
The formation of water has been thought to be a fairly rare event, one that distinguishes the earth (life-bearing) from virtually every other object in our solar system (non life-bearing).
This has been attributed to many different causes, ranging from the size of our planet to the distance from the sun. Why?
It is believed that the order of formation of the planets was determined by the mass of the particles that make up the planet. Thus Mercury is made of denser stuff than venus, than Earth, than Jupiter, etc. So in order to have the proper ratio of Hydrogen to Oxygen (slightly less than 2-1 for earth), you must be approximately Earth-distanced from the Sun.
The size (mass) of the planet is important because it affects the speed of the reaction. This is important because for a body of water the size of the earth, a simple catalyst wouldn't suffice. (As a side, one of the coolest experiments I've ever seen in Chemistry was where a professor took 2 parts hydrogen and 1 part Oxygen, a little bit of platinum for a catalyst, put it all in a balloon and went on with his lecture. At the end of the class he popped the balloon and water fell out. Kinda cool.)
Anyways, I hope all this crap helps.
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
It's simple: Beowulf was English.
It's often been noted that most of the oxygen on the planet has been breathed in by most every human at one point or another. Each breath you take probably has an oxygen molecule breathed in by Ceasar, the first band of humans, the dinosaurs, etc.
By extrapolation, the same is probably true of water. Water you've drank has passed through the ages as well.
With this in mind, and under the assumption that extraterrestrial life existed billions of years ago, I think we should FUND A MISSION TO RECOVER THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL FISH PEE!
It's Friday. I've said my peice. Don't tell me you aren't stressed out at work too...
As we know it, we live in a symbioses, the earth's climate and all things within is a closed system, why not life evolved in different cirecumstances where water is gas, and other materials are liquids? Can't there be a life form based under different balanced chemical circumstances? Balance is what its all about!
Bizar technology?
Who the hell are you, and why are you called "piku"???
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Alright as another user put it we are thinking with what we know. Which most of the time isn't such a bad thing, but when you are tryint to make a guess at something you do know, with information you have can sometimes lead to stupid results. The whole life on other planets gig, do I think there is life on other planets? Yes, I certainly do, but when I talk about life I'm not talking soupy worms that came from water and a heated environment. I belive that just because this is what scientists think we came from doesn't mean its the only life sustaining enviorment. I think that if we are going to think about life, why don't we think about organisims comming from a harshly cold enviorment without water. Hell, maybe water is deadly to the foreign life. Maybe they melt like that wicked witch in the wizard of oz. My point is that these super smart scientist aren't even sure this is how we were made, and they are making assumptions that this is the /only/ or most likely way that life can happen. I think everyone needs to rethink their thinking, I am always one to think they less loved side when it comes to things like this.
I hope I have atleast used your time wisely.
Need karma, I crave sustenance. Moderate Well =)
----------------------
58.0% slashdot corrupt
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
and not a drop to drink. Cause it's frozen. Solid. Welcome to Outer Space, where a hot sun is good for the growing season, and meteors polinate class M planets to the tune of one per billion*.
*approximately
--
+&x
She will dump Anakin Skywalker for Jar Jar Binks in episode two, making an audience sympathetic to Darth Vader's quest to destroy the cruel universe.
This is my sig.
...I can claim credit for the 'water'. I forgot to use the toilet before I went out to investigate the meteor, and then this all got blown way out of proportion. Oops.
slashdot researchers, working from a hidden base, have discovered this lost post in the slashdot story submission queue. this discovery overturns slashdotter theories that the staff was simply unaware of natalie portman's 19th birthday.
natalie portman is slashdot's girl. it's her birthday. once again, slashdot "doesn't get it." we cannot rest until our deepest needs, wants and addictions are addressed.
for nearly a year, the natalie portman obsessive sub-culture of slashdot (a quickly growing segment of the slashdot, indeed the entire open-source, community) have suffered ridicule, persecution, and denial of civil liberties on our favorite tech-savvy message board. today we rested in honor of our beloved's day of birth. tomorrow we bring natalie's message of purity and open-source goodness to the slashdot masses.
thank you.
-osm
i took a bitchslapping for natalie portman!!
A meteorite was found in Texas a year or so ago that had water trapped inside a crystal of salt as well. the link to the artice on that can be found here: http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNe ws/meteorite990826.html What's new here (I guess) is the dating of the meteorite to within 2 million years after the birth of the solar system. I'm rather skeptical of that claim and would be very interested in how they conducted their tests. A quick check at webelements reveals I 129's half life to be 17 Million years which means that the Iodine in that sample MUST have gone through at least 265 or so half lives!! That should leave practically no I 129 at all in a sample so tiny!! And definitly not enough to obtain an accurate measurement to within 2 million years. Am I missing something or is this bad science?
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Following a period of popularization and dropping prices, exotic bottled water is about to get really expensive again.
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
BTW, Here's the link to CNN's article on the same topic.
To get their number, they added the current best guess of the Solar system's age to a reasonable guess about the crystal's life before that. The important point is that the crystal is very old -- it crystallized from liquid a few hundred million years after the supernova that formed the solar system.
Here's how they figured that out. First of all, it's generally assumed that the solar system was formed from the debris of a supernova. Supernovae are incredibly energetic explosions of huge stars -- by comparison, the core of the sun is an ice cube. The violence and energy creates pretty much every possible atom: iron, zirconium, uranium, and even weirdies like iodine-129.
Second, from laboratory experiments, we know that iodine-129 is radioactive, and that it decays at a certain rate. After a few hundred million years, it will almost all decay into xenon-129. On cosmic time scales, that's fast.
Third, xenon is a "noble gas", in the same family as helium, neon, argon, etc. Noble gases are very chemically stable: except for a few exotic compounds, they don't form molecules with other atoms. Therefore they are very flighty, and diffuse right out of liquids. (Helium is so diffusive that it can be separated from other gases by diffusing it through solid metal!) So if you find xenon atoms inside a crystal, they had to be put there *after* the crystal became solid.
Well, they found xenon-129 inside their meteorite salt crystal. Putting the above theorems together, they deduced that there was *liquid water* present shortly (shortly in a cosmic sense) after the supernova that formed the solar system (the think the crystal formed in water solution).
Further evidence of the great age of the salt crystal is its purple color. It probably started off as a colorless, translucent crystal, just like everyday table salt. But over time, radiation knocks atoms out of the crystal lattice, leaving "defects" that have color. It's also seen here on Earth, in salt crystals that have been buried without recrystallizing for enormous periods of time.
I'm not sure I buy their hypothesis that the crystal was deposited by water. It is possible to melt salt by itself at reasonable temperatures. Of course, IANAG (I am not a geologist). And even if it wasn't water, the crystal is still fabulously old.
Assuming it was deposited by liquid water, it's a wonderful discovery. It means that life could possibly exist between the stars, without need for a stable system of planets, since all known life requires liquid water. And supernovae are fairly common through the universe, so there's a lot of possible life out there. I'm sure the science fiction writers are already thinking up how to work this into a story...
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
It talks about ways to move around the solar system using either solar energy to make steam rockets(!), or nuclear powered steam rockets!
Rather than use solar panels, they suggest big mirrors (much lighter and more efficient.)
Turns out its a) really easy to collect water b) steam rockets are really efficient in the sense that it minimises the amount of mirrors/nuclear material. c) they get you to your destination pretty fast
Those big hydrogen-oxygen jobs are good for leaving the earth but once you are in orbit, steam rockets are much better than ion drives or H-OX- assuming large quantities of water are available.
Basically this is space opening technology- travelling to mars would be pretty simple for example.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"..a somewhat dated article on Europa (a moon of Jupiter), and the probable existance of liquid water beneath it's surface .
Whatever you come across in life.. as long as there's no money in it,... it'll probably be alright.
Stolen from The Onion. If you want to post something funny, try originality.
OK, I'll bite. Maybe there is no other explaination other than a supreme being. What makes you think she is anything like the one described in your Bible? Even if you prove the existance of God you hardly prove the existance of YOUR God.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
It means: In Other words, I'm not the only Martian here.
...although why water should be considered a necessary precursor to life is a mystery, since its strongly polar molecules rip into anything organic (but not, as life now is, structured to cope with water) with great enthusiasm. One of the key parts of the methane-and-sparks experiments was a carefully designed trap to rescue any organic molecules before they were ripped apart again by the spark or dissolved and destroyed by any water that the spark formed.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
That is indeed a very lame argument, so how about this one:
There are many showstopper arguments for God in chemistry and biology. Almost as many as in geology (e.g. Gentry's "tiny mysteries", turbidites), astronomy (quantum redshifts, titanic stellar structures), physics (too-neat constants, Sansbury's "subtrons"), history (Solomon, Jesus), archaeology (Nimrod, Hittites), paleontology (vertebrates in Cambrian, polystrates)...
Drop that prejudice, we've got you covered! (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I reached for my news-paper on Monday and saw that they are teaching evolooshun without having the entire fossil record from the first genetic material to the present.
Actually, the better we understand the fossil record, the worse it looks for evolution. Recently, fish (and lampreys as well) were discovered in the Cambrian. Other (previously-) "index" fossils have had their range extended by up to an order of magnitude. Lucy is looking less and less human as time goes on. And still no missing links (worse, the link-candidates are steadily and thoroughly being disqualified faster than they turn up).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I wonder why people could ever think water must be rare outside earth. Besides the obvious limitations on temperature, it seems to be logical to find water in other places on the universe. Let us see: water is very stable, and is composed of very simple elements. Hydrogen is abundant - the most common element in the universe, and oxygen must not be so rare, because is such a 'light' atom.
What does matter is the relationship of water and life. Several properties of water are fundamental to the development of life as we know. There is some chance that other forms of life exist elsewhere based on something else. However, we dont know about other molecule as flexible as water.
It's been know for some time that water is found off earth. Ice on the Moon, Mars, Europa, even Mercury. It's probably on every planet and moon in the solar system, only in small quanties making hard to find. More an more evidence of planets outside our solar system suggest that solar systems (as opposed to suns-only systems) are the norm. Note it is all ice, and that is problem for most life. Liquid water seems to be required for life. So Ice is just not that exciting. Now if someone where to conclusivly prove that Europa's core was liquid water, or Mars had underground lakes and rivers of liquid water, or tides of liquid water were witnessed on one of those other planets outside our system, then that would be exciting news.
...the language the researchers speak have to do with anything??? :)
"English Researchers Find Extra-Terrestrial Water"
And of course, there's the obligatory:
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
Anyone got a top ten list happening yet?
I used to have a cool sig.
But can they share the exact same name? Zero Cool, ZeroCool, Zer0Cool, and Zero-Cool are all different, you know.
----
Oh my god, Bear is driving! How can this be?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
I think what the poster above you was saying was that we arnt 100% sure that water is essential for life. I mean, its PROBIBLE, but we dont know that that rock on mars isnt thinking just because it doesnt show the signs of life to us
The implications about life elsewhere in the universe from a bit of water on a meteorite are obviously a bit of nonsense. But scientists need to make statements like this in order to get funding. Drawing the conclusion that this is evidence that life evolved elsewhere is quite patently nonsense and the scientists involved know it. We have known for a long time now that there is water - and far more complex molecules - all over the universe.
--
-- SIGFPE
The article, reaching its ends, says:
"If more do turn up, it suggests water isn't as rare in the Solar System as previously thought. And if water did actually exist elsewhere before it did on Earth, it could have played a key role in the evolution of life on this planet."
Who said that?
"In the evolution of life" as WE mean IT. There are some necessities, I think, to guarantee "life" in a planet surface's environment. In my humble opinion these scientists are still making the old mistake that brings me back to the time when man believed the Earth was flat. They're still earth-centric in considering this discovery.
See you.
This sounds like an interesting development but I doubt its significance. I mean, the bacteria and the organisms on earth started in water, but is that really the only way to generate life? We are a carbon-based organism and to think that that is the only type of organism is being pretty close minded, in addition to inaccurate. Also, not to be a pessimest, but I don't see how big a deal it is to discover alien bacteria. It probably exists somewhere, it's just a matter of where. What would really interest me would be to see an intelligent life form (although I guess if we have to go one step at a time then that's just what we'll have to do).
Just one crazy humanoid's opinion.
-MathJMendl
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
Erm... are you sure you didn't mean to go to this thread instead?
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
These scientists are no pioneers in their discovery.
a ily/aug99/water27.htm
Read THIS, it's dated AUGUST 1999!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/d
Part of the reason that carbon based life forms such as those living on Earth exist is due to the fact that the sp orbitals hybridize. This doesn't happen with silicon, so the existance of a silicon based life form probabalistically slim.
GOT RAINED ON A FEW MILLION TIMES?!?!?!?!
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Maybe you should have tried mailing it in?
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
My major thought on this is the fact that space is very near absolute zero temperatures. Thus, it would seem that any water would be frozen into ice unless there was something to melt it. This would include(though I'm sure there may be more), some sort of atmosphere to maintain the heat, or an internal heat source. Provided either one of these are there, then that's one heck of a meteor. Also, someone brought to my attention the fact that there must be some sort of gravity to hold the water to the meteor. I donno, what's anyone else's take on that?
The people who gave you Pauly Shore are Mr. and Mrs. Shore.
Are you saying the Shores are your idea of a divine being?
!!
It's an interesting idea, but even if it were true, we'd still be asking the same question -- how did life evolve in the first place? Knowing WHERE life originated would be great, but that still wouldn't tell us HOW life began.
There's probably some race of silicon-based extraterrestrials out there, looking at all these planets, thinking, "We must be the only life in the Universe... ours is the only planet we've found without an abundance of that horrible, poisonous, life-quenching water!"
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
For pissing off Steve and constantly telling him his ideas (like julius games) were fucking stupid and would never work.
and
he couldn't manage a freakin' 7-11, never mind a software company
Looks like he started learning when he fired you.