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Mars Rock Supports Cross-Seeding Theory
914 writes "Mars rover Opportunity has found a rock (nicknamed 'Bounce') that "provides conclusive evidence not only of Martian meteorites on Earth, but also of the possibility of cross-seeding." Not only that, but according to the UPI article: 'The discovery of Bounce raises the distinct possibility that life arising from a common source could have existed for a time on both worlds.'"
Which was first, Mars or Earth??
And of course if life existed on Mars, this gives the whole SETI thing alot more significance. Next we need to find the ancient alien spacecraft that crashed on Mars and started life there!
Actually, the question is where did it come from to begin with?
I'm not usually much of one for news of outer space, but this particular research I find really interesting. Of course it would be interesting to know if life on Earth evolved from organisms in a Meteorite, or simultaneously evolved and was just cross-pollinated.
The conspiracy theorists and UFO nuts have held beliefs in life starting from anywhere from a single-celled organism on a meteorite, to outright terraforming for a long time.
As for life on Mars... I watched a really good documentary about the moon the other day, which basically explained that without the moon -- a single moon -- to help stabilize our planet, we probably wouldn't have ever been here. It will be interesting to see if life evolved on Mars, perhaps conditions were favourable in the past. Apparently since it has multiple small moons, it wobbles on its axis, which makes the climate really unstable over very long periods of times. Or, that was the gist of it.
This sort of thing is exciting again, since they're got more than just grainy pics giving the illusion of human faces in Cydonia. =)
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
Well, how possible this is depends on, among other things, your interpretion of ALH84001.
And we know that organisms can survive in open space: the found some still-viable critters on one of the Ranger spacecraft when an Apollo mission brought some bits back from the Moon.
There is a large body of research looking into the possibility of panspermia. The impact is likely to destroy organisms on a large impactor (this is not guarenteed), but not necessarily on the rocks that are subsequently ejected into space (those rocks almost certainly DO NOT come from the original impactor). On the subsequent fall to the other planet, the rocks are small enough and moving "slow" enough that, on the whole, they don't actually heat up much (and in fact, parts of them may cool off).
It was Apollo 12 that brought back bits of one of the Surveyor soft-landers. They brought back a piece of insulation, and when they examined it back on earth they found either a spore or a bacterium deep in the middle. So, it wasn't exactly exposed to all the conditions of space, except for the heat, cold and hard radiation.
And of course, there's also the bacterium that withstands high doses of radiation, Deinococcus radiodurans. NASA's been looking at it, apparently:
"Meet Conan the Bacterium"
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Yes, did you read the article?
"Controllers considered Bounce an odd find because it did not resemble any of the other rocks in the crater's vicinity -- nor did it resemble anything seen before on Mars, they said.
Rather more than that. Bounce's chemical composition exactly matches that of a meteorite that hit the ground in Shergotty, India, on Aug. 25, 1865.
Called the Shergotty meteorite -- and the source name for a class of meteorites called shergottites -- its chemical composition is a "matching fingerprint" to Bounce, said David Grinspoon, professor of planetary science at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
The resemblance helps confirm something meteorite specialists and planetary scientists have suspected for more than two decades but until now have been unable to prove: Micro-bubbles of gas trapped in dozens of meteorites found on Earth -- including Shergotty -- match the recipe of Martian atmosphere so closely that they must have originated on Mars.
"There is a striking similarity in spectra," said Christian Schroeder, a rover science-team collaborator from the University of Mainz in Germany, which supplied both Mars rovers with Moessbauer spectrometers -- exceedingly sensitive instruments for identifying chemical compositions."
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Great. I keep hoping that we'll find definitive proof of abiogenesis occuring sponteaneously on another planet, and now look what the gods of chaos have given us: a huge, obvous excuse to give to the creationists. I'm sure we'll see this one crop up on the 700 Club if-and-when they ever find 100%-sure-fire-can't argue-with-that proof that life existed on Mars.
"But God planted the seeds of life in Eden, and he did smith the earth with a big rock, and it did spew forth flotsam into the universe, and it was good."
Grrr.
The high proportion of pyroxene means Bounce not only is unlike any other rock studied by Opportunity or Spirit, but also is unlike the volcanic deposits mapped extensively around Mars...
Personally, I'm inclined to think that this means that Bounce probably did not originate on Mars. It sounds like Bounce is not like any other rock on Mars.
"Some of us think (Bounce) could have been ejected from this crater," Rogers said.
Craters are formed when meteorites smash into planets/moons/etc. To get a crater, you need something that came from another part of the solar system, if not another part of the galaxy. If Bounce came from this crater, as they hypothesize it did, then Bounce may or may not have come from another part of the galaxy, so this theory is starting to fit together well...
On a slightly related note, it should be much easier to find a meteorite on Mars than on Earth - Mars' atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's, so objects are less likely to burn up upon entry into the atmosphere. This explains why Mars has many more craters on it that Earth does. Also, I've read in several places (including a mention in the above quote) that many of the rocks on Mars are quite similar to each other. Thus, any different rocks will stand out rather a lot. This makes meteorite hunting fairly simple. Consequently, it would not surprise me at all if the rovers managed to find a meteorite on Mars.
I do not profess to be at all knowledgeable about Mars geology, but any fool can see that the author of the article knows even less. Not only did they dumb the finding down for laypeople, they have even added some inconsistencies:
Bounce's chemical composition exactly matches that of a meteorite that hit the ground in Shergotty, India, on Aug. 25, 1865.
A less-distinctively named shergottite, EETA79001, found in Antarctica in 1979, has a composition even closer to Bounce's.
I for one am disappointed by the lack of information in the article. Give me a real scientific article with real scientific facts, and hopefully we can then come to real, scientific conclusions. Until then, many different interpretations of this article are equally valid.
"Flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing." - Douglas Adams
I saw it and read it completely differently. Well, except one part I'll get to we agree on.
I guess people are interpretating this according to their pre conceived "religiously held" beliefs.
Think on this, as an exercise taken from a generic macro evolutionist's standpoint. What are the odds of exact species arising at the same time on two different planets? Beyond practical chance? I think so. That indicates either poof simultaneous creation (or real dang close), or purposeful "seeding" or "cultivation".
Wouldn't the huge variance in natural selection come into play if it was true "random chance"? Of course, we still don't have exact "organisms" to compare****, but these preliminary findings over the past little while (the methane gas lately, more indications of water, etc) indicates that perhaps that "life" didn't evolve either place, but was seeded at both. There is good speculation that it-life- started at one or the other and got flung over the space fence, OR simultaneoulsy arrived somehow at both places, OR not just one or the other but both at the same time..
Also, no where in the bible (to become specific) does it preclude the possibility of life on other planets, simple or complex. I think too many have this vague notion that someone told them this as "fact", but it's just not there, basically, it's not addressed much,it's just not,it doesn't say yay or nay on it, the bible is more the allegorical and historical representation of "man's" history "on earth" primarily, not "the universe's" or even "another planet's" history, first by oral traditions, then eventually written down and translated to somewhat but not complete obscurity, IMO, over so many generations so that given it's hard to tell what is accurate, but the kernel of the storiy(ies) is still there, and it's remarkably similar all over our planet in many cultures and writings.
Almost all cultures with a good verifiable ancient record keeping system have stories of "other beings" and of "the whopper dang flood that sucked pretty bad" and of "weird large creatures that roamed the planet" early in *man's" history, and not all mammalian like "ice age" type animals, but pretty good descriptions of what were undoubtly reptile type animals as well. Funny they mostly all have that, unless one is to assume they were seriously advanced archeologists way back then, at least equivalent to 18th century representations that we are familiar with. Me, I am skeptical of that, very skeptical, it assumes a complexity of society there is little evidence of, my best guess is they had direct empirical evidence, because they were so non-chalant and matter of fact in their reportings of it.
Why would all these records have similar if there wasn't a large grain of truth there? Why would dissimilar cultures that had little contact with each other way, way, way back come up with other "life forms" in their own cultures early historical records?
My bottom line is "smoke=fire", as I am a skeptic by nature, and I am *most* skeptical of those who simply insist that "smoke" = "in 100% of the cases, there is absolutely no chance of fire whatsoever".
IMO, there's something to it (yes, I am of the faith most ridiculed here),but I really have found there's a lot to it just applying what science we really have (not what we think we have), and part of that - to me- simply must include the anecdotal testimony of "those that were there",our ancestors and their best attempts to keep some sort of historical and scientific records using the best techniques they had at the time; and as we have no handy time machine for checking other than archaeological records,and translations from ancient scripts, and the ability to look back and realise some times you have no adequate words to describe something just completely outside your capacity or general societal level of comprehension, you are lead to..consider them pretty good pieces of evidence.. You -any culture with designs on communicating with the future- can make an att
Okay, that sure says a lot.
Could it have been a planet located at the position where the current asteroid belt is? Something hit it, blew it up, rocks fell everywhere and so on.
I do not moderate.
"So far, no one has broached the bigger implication: Bounce provides conclusive evidence not only of Martian meteorites on Earth, but also of the possibility of cross-seeding."
How is that supposed to be read -- "...provides conclusive evidence ... of the possibility of cross-seeding"? How can anything provide a conclusive evidence of a possibility of such a thing? It demonstrates one of _prerequisites_ for cross-seeding, but the _possibility_ of cross-seeding does not depend only on the fact that the matter of Martian origin could reach Earth.
This is not the same as making the hypothesis of cross-seeding more plausible (or "possible" as in "possible to consider") -- ceratinly the discovery of matching materials on two planets does that, but "conclusive evidence" of the possibility of cross-seeding will only appear when organic matter similar to Earth organism will be found on Mars or meteorites -- it's beyond silly to call cross-seeding "possible" if there is nothing to cross-seed with.
In fact, this rock isn't even a proof that the origin of the meteorite is Martian -- it doesn't look like other rocks on Mars, so it may be produced by volcanic activity on Mars, or it may be from somewhere else. If anything, it's a good reason to research the Martian "geology", and maybe check the chemical composition of its moons.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
This may be redundant, but find all the evidence you want of cross seeding and you still have the question as to where that life came from and how it was created.
You are right. It is a sticky question. The true origin of the first life may never be known. At the best one might find the earliest known micro-fossil *so far*, but can never tell where its source originated from because many possible sources, such as gas giants, don't preserve any fossil history in rocks.
I suppose if life with a roughly similar genetic code was found in/from another solar system that was older than our solar system, then it might rule out our solar system as the origination point. Thus, we might eliminate some origins some day, but I doubt find the single for-sure *first* source because any source of life you can find could have been seeded. The single originating event probably happened in a tiny spec of real estate that is either long gone or the ultimate needle in a haystack.
Table-ized A.I.