Slashdot Mirror
Plankton in the Clouds
An anonymous reader writes "NASA is reporting that the September 1997 Pacific hurricane, Nora, was able to deliver sea salt and plankton as far inland as Oklahoma. The tale-tell signs of prismatic light halos around cirrus clouds pointed to ice crystals with nucleated hexagons and sea-salted clouds. Various proposals have been made previously about such 'life in the clouds' proposals on other planets like Jupiter and Venus."
Is now only a few billion years of evolution away...
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
when you have sea salt and plankton.
... or plankton in the sky with diamonds?
So they found some dead plankton. I'd be much more impressed about the connection with Venus if they were still alive while in the clouds some how.
Means I can be the first to get the crabby patty recipe
Based on this article, I have to ask: Could saltwater have been a better explanation for this beautiful phenomenon? Does anybody here know?
life as we know it is possible anywhere there is water. At this point, simple life forms like algea and bacteria on an extra-terrestrial world wouldn't excite me more than a "that's damn cool" type reaction. I'm to the point now that I'd expect there to be simple life on some of the other worlds in our solar system. I'd be a lot more surprised of all the planets and moons around us were completely dead. Now if they found concrete proof of extinct complex organisms on mars, or a sea full of life on Europa, It'd be a very exciting day. Jupiter's natural radiation could heat Europa's innards enough for life to thrive. Some say that the amount of radiation from jupiter would kill everything off; but life has a tendency to find a way to overcome obstacles. After all, despite all our efforts, spammers exist, trolls keep posting and the Saddams of the world keep on having their way.
p r m t h s
Up in the clouds the conditions are too violent and volatile and material transfer is past, so life may land up there, but it is difficult for it to develop from there, unless the whole cloud is made of primodial soup, like the depths of jupiter where there is thich murky cloud where scientists think life is possible.
But life forming in clouds like venus has, sorry i dont bite.My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
There have been reports of dogs, people and farm animals to name a few in the clouds during several tornados! This must say alot about the possibility of life on Jupiter!!!
maybe, but would you have gps ? weather satellites ? Hubble ? Vegetables in little bags, that taste fresh until 2099 ? ...
Plankton in the sky with algea?
I seem to remember someone finding spiders and vaious bacteria way up before, and as soon as they brought them back down to eath they came back alive. Curse my bad memory.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Where the plankton comes sweeping down the plains!!!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Plankton, pffft I want fish to rain down from the sky.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I always kind of thought the term was tell-tale.
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I guess once the FAA gets word of this, they'll require algae impact testing on airliner windshields
...
Hey this plankton came from cloud No 9, came with a tiny harp.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Have we learnt ANYTHING about the moon, which we couldn't have done, sitting here?
Absolutely. Here's one shining example -- the so-called genesis rock, a piece of anorthosite which formed part of the moon's priomordial crust, was a critical piece in unlocking the moon's early history.
It was recoverd by the crew of Apollo 15, the first of the J-missions, where the objectives focused on science and not just seeing if the Apollo hardware worked (e.g. landing on 11, precision landing on 12).
This crew had been trained as pretty good field geologists by the legendary Lee Silver. Without their eye for geological context this rock would probably never have been spotted, and certainly not had it's recovery site as well characterised.
Even geologists who had been previously opposed to the manned missions to the moon acknowledged the value of their contribution, and those of Apollo 16 and 17.
To quote geologist Dale Jackson, who said at the time: "Did you see those guys today? They got up there on the side of that mountain and found that bolder and they sampled the soil around the rock, and then they knocked a piece off it, and then they rolled it over and got some of the soil underneath it! Why, they did everything but fuck that rock!"
If you think this material could have been recovered by, say, remotely controlled machine, well, I invite you to place the best robot and robot team you can find in the Arizona desert and match them up against a single geology grad student and search for, say, fossils, for a day.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
If you find this concept interesting, and enjoy Sci-Fi, try the book Wheelers by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. It's a neat book that fleshes out this concept in intricate detail. I picked it up in a clearance sale at my local book store, and was glad of the purchase!
-Ben
by Freeman Dyson talks about this in his wonderful book published in 1999. Specifically he talks about the chances of finding lifeforms on Mars and Europa (a satellite of Jupiter). He suggests looking into the space around Europa instead of on the surface for "freeze dried fish".
From the final chapter: "Every time there is a major impact on Europa, a vast quantity of water will be splashed from the ocean into the space around Jupiter. The water will partly evaporate and partly condense into snow. Any creatures living in the water not too close to the impact (meteor impacts) will have a chance of being splashed intact into space with the water and quickly freeze dried."
I'm not sure if this book has been reviewed in slashdot, but it deserves another shot since so much here is relevant especially after the last shuttle disaster. Dyson is dead on track here.
Okie Stereotypes "Yes, I'm from the Sooner State, I tell them -- land of wheat fields, Indian reservations, TV evangelists, and country music; and who could forget the setting of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma: 'O-o-o-oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain.'
A state shaped like a kitchen utensil, as if the founders who drew the boundary lines had consigned it to serve as a perpetual building block of the Southwest, an essential part of the meal that no one sees, all glamour and strength hidden from view, what remains on the stove after servers carry away entrees on fancy china plates and lace napkins -- a part of the United States that everyone knows instinctively, but which few can place on a map."
By the way, there are more than 700 National Merit/Achievement/Hispanic Scholars at the University of Oklahoma. How does your state university compare?