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Space Lichens
moon_monkey writes "According to a report lichens - a composite of algae and fungi - can survive in space for up to two weeks. An experiment carried out by the European Space Agency saw two species of lichen carried into orbit and then exposed to the vacuum of space for nearly 15 days. These are the most complex form of life now known to have survived prolonged exposure to space. The experiment adds weight to the theory of panspermia - that life could somehow be transported between planets."
If they need more test subjects, my shower walls have plenty of fungus to donate.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
I thought panspermia came from flute playing goats.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
They didn't describe the details of the flight. Was this a mission to the ISS? If so, I wonder how much risk they took by "opening" the box in the presence of the station? Could they have infected it with lichens, or more likely with "tramp mold" spores that may have accompanied the lichens?
John
They needed to go into space to test a vacuum?
Maybe they wanted to test radiation, or is this just a high-profile confirmation of something we already knew?
Cause they're all made of algae and fungi!!! It's the 'greys' that are a myth!
Sounds like a neat theory, but it'd have to be an absolutely killer climax to have it hit escape velocity. I can't usually get more than 7-8 feet of distance even on a pent-up, high-pressure day.
But not much, 2 weeks doesn't even get you to Mars... I thought most of the theories of life coming from other planets were based around elements being embedded inside rocks etc rather than being directly exposed to space.
But it is nice to see Europe continuing to treat Space as a learning experience rather than a PR stunt.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I for one, welcome out new space-faring algae lichens. As a D&D player I've seen what regular lich can do, but I was unaware of their resistances to space. I truely am scared and confused.
Ok so they jumped of Haley's comet and landed on earth?
It took a week to get to the moon via the Apollo missons.
AHHHHH! Wrong answer! Speculate some more.
FTA:
"Lichens have a tough mineral coating that could shield them from UV rays. They are also made from individual organisms layered on top of one another, so outer layers may provide protection for underlying cells. The organisms have already been shown to be capable of withstand high levels of UV radiation on Earth."
This is interesting, I wonder how well they the outer layers could protect things below? Would it be possible to use some lichen in a pinch to make a repair to part of a ship? Could this be the poor mans self-replicating nano robot patch kit?
I have no idea about these things, just an interesting prospect, I think.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seus
"Up to two weeks?"
No, "At *least* two weeks". They were exposed for 15 days and were unchanged.
Lichen and spores are sure durable; I wouldn't be surprised if they could survive basically indefinitely in a cold vacuum.
...how much better can this stuff fare in the thin atmosphere of Mars? Time to start terraforming!
---
Even if a lichen or lower life form could survive for a time in the vacuum of space (with some form of protection from radiation and in hibernation mode), could it really survive the intense heat from the friction of earth's atmosphere? I've heard of extremophiles, but...
Question: How long can a human stay in space without a space suit?
Answer: Almost indefinitely <evil grin>
Everybody Lies. But it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
This space lichen corpse tastes terrible! You finish eating the space lichen corpse.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
From answers.com citing the American Heritage Dictionary,
... no hint of interplanetary relations by the root words.
the etymology of panspermia:
Greek panspermia;, mixture of all seeds : pan-, pan- + sperma, seed
SO how long before they send lichen to mars... ok the fa says they do not metabolize and "suspend" in space... but maybe if ton of lichens were sent to mars, maybe some tiny fraction of it would start surviving and developping...
\u262D = \u5350
And yet the lichens die pretty easily, even with a plain +0 pickaxe or short sword. Their corpses stay good indefinitely though, which is helpful when I'm playing with a vegetarian or vegan #conduct.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
What I get from this is that lichens can survive for an undetermined amount of time in space. Assuming they can survive reentry, a rock from Earth could potentially deliver lichens to Mars or elsewhere.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Now that we know lichens can survive exposed to the harsh conditions of space, how about we try it with Karl Rove?
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I bet it could make it to mars and back....
And you thought some folks were upset about descending from apes, wait till they see this.
Though I am not up to date on the latest speculations regarding panspermia, I never really considered it such an interesting option. So what that life-ON-EARTH came from another planet, that doesn't answer the question as to how life got started. It just means it got started someplace else in quite probably the same way that we think it might have gotten started on earth (thermal vents + rich molecule soup + anything but the hand of god :-)
geez you guys are supposed to be geeks, right? Well get the details right, that would be a symbiois not a composite! And i thought anything close to "symbiont" would warm the cockles of your geeky trekkie hearts...
Oh wait...
...both interiorlly, and exteriorlly.
Green Slime!
"It's a wonderful idea. But it doesn't work." -- Tad Danielewski
pffft that's nothing, I've survived in space for over 30 years. ohhhhh, OUTERspace
Has a great article, with pertty pictures and diagrams, regarding panspermia
I D=1&articleID=00073A97-5745-1359-94FF83414B7F0000
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&col
"Lichens grow in the leftover spots of the natural world that are too harsh or limited for most other organisms. They are pioneers on bare rock, desert sand, cleared soil , dead wood, animal bones, rusty metal, and living bark. Able to shut down metabolically during periods of unfavorable conditions, they can survive extremes of heat, cold, and drought."
2 0soldier%20lichen.jpg
From: http://www.lichen.com/biology.html
They tend to thrive in unfavorable conditions, maybe there could be Lichen on Mars if it had a more stable atmosphere? They could also survive on a rusty hull of a space ship, so the panspermia theory is not too far off.
British Soldier Lichen is also very beautiful:
http://www.buenavistatownship.org/Photos/British%
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
the lichen touches you!
So, The Terrible Secret of Space is... athlete's foot? That was sort of anticlimactic.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Intelligent Designer adherants!
Well it's never going to die if you keep CHECKING ON IT...15 days in space...shesh.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
Astronaut Dave Bowman must be jealous, I'll bet he thought he lasted longer than anybody else that made it into the vacuum of space back in 2001.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
... er scientist...
... if it's supposed to. The whole thing's planned, y'know.
Of COURSE panspermia is possible. Life can easily travel in space.
The belief that humans came from somewhere else to this planet, rather than descending from species already on this planet, is too improbable to be true. Species can evolve to physically appear like other species, such as an insect evolving to look like a leaf, but their genetic makeup will not evolve toward that of an entirely different species. The fact that chimpanzee DNA is so similar to humans is incontrovertible proof that the two species descended from a common ancestor.
(even though physical theories can never be proven, this is as close as one could get to a mathematical proof of 2+2=4, just as is the geologic record's organization of more primitive species at older timescales-- no matter how old people think the Earth and the life on it, you will never find the fossils of a modern species next to those of a very early species.)
...it goes on forever. And...Oh my God!...It's full of lichens!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The only question is when the sentient ones will arrive:
"The things come from another planet, being able to live in interstellar space and fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of resisting the aether but which are too poor at steering to be of much use in helping them about on earth. I will tell you about this later if you do not dismiss me at once as a madman. They come here to get metals from mines that go deep under the hills, and I think I know where they come from. They will not hurt us if we let them alone, but no one can say what will happen if we get too curious about them. Of course a good army of men could wipe out their mining colony. That is what they are afraid of. But if that happened, more would come from outside - any number of them. They could easily conquer the earth, but have not tried so far because they have not needed to. They would rather leave things as they are to save bother."
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Space Herpes!
Indeed, the Greek adjectives allos or allotrios ("another" and "alien; foreign" respectively) may serve better in this place. Perhaps the meaning has changed due to the context of the conversation. The theory of "panspermia" would deal with how all life was "seeded." An extraterrestrial source is an option of "panspermia" I suppose.
What the hell was that? Hmmm... space herpes!
... This ship has space herpes?
- Reentry heat (need to be inside a big rock or something)
- Boredom. Lichens are fairly uncontemplative creatures, however.
sigs, as if you care.
AFAIK, the MIR mold was only growing inside the space station. In other words it had a nice atmospherically controlled environment practically identical to the environment that it evolved in. The only oddity that it had to deal with was lack of gravity.
This is much different as the lichen had to survive the vacuum of space, including direct solar radiation and dramatic temperature variations that come with it.
Problem with panspermia is that it shifts the explanation of how life emerged. Where'd it come from? Some other planet. How'd it get on that other planet? Duh, i dunno... intelligent design or something.
Didn't you see the amount of rock shooting off into space after the Death Star blew up Alderaan? Let's not forget all of the test shots they would have done before that.
Also, we can't forget that it could have been on pieces of the ringworld from Halo.
The experiment adds weight to the theory of panspermia - that life could somehow be transported between planets.
Given that the panspermia theory has the weight of a neutrino, that isn't very much. Organisms in small asteroids would be incinerated in earth's atmosphere. Bugs ridding larger ones would have to survive awesome shock forces and intense kinetic heating. Earth is such an ideal organic molecular playground it doesn't seem necessary to invoke some outside agent, like Mars. I think Occam's Razor applies here. I do not doubt that meteor and cometary infall were sources of lots of organic material during the period of heavy bombardment, and that they enhanced conditions for the formation of life.
an ill wind that blows no good
The experiment adds weight to the theory of panspermia - that life could somehow be transported between planets.
I'll believe that as soon as they finish the experiments that show lichen's ability to survive entry into the atmosphere.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Because clearly having it survive in space is not in itself enough for life to migrate from planet to planet. Somehow it must survive reentry or else its a moot point.
I recall reading a short about a future government's determination to stop an experiment in artificial life. The experiment was taking place between the orbits of mars and Jupiter. When the decision was made to end it due to perceived danger to life on earth, the selected strategy was to toss the colony into the Sun.
Of course, as the asteroid containing the engineered fungii passed the orbit of earth it managed to escape out of its enclosure in the asteroid -- as spores. These then were pushed back towards earth by the solar wind.
Fun Stuff!
Survival of the fittest -- and I can't believe that is us.
...can we expect Martians to come up with something better than "Day of the Triffids"?
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Slashdotters don't shower :) ...much
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade
Someone please help me with this theory.
If life came to this planet, from another planet, where did the life come from?
How was life created on another planet?
Forget the question whether it could survive in space.
Answer the question how was life created.
Answers on a postcard please.
---
Troll On!
Better is the enemy of good enough. - Russian proverb.
This made me think of that chapter in "Beyond the Mind's Eye" where the plants shoot their seeds from one planet to another. What a kick ass set of movies Miramar did, The Mind's Eye series.
Considering that most planetary bodies are sepreated by vaste expanses of space, the odds that some bits of lichen are gonna live through the trip are remote. For example, if one was a nutjob that say believed that space lichen came from an ancient civilization on Mars and landed on Earth to create life... Well considering that Mars is about 225 million km (on average) away from Earth and that space lichen has a "floating through space" shelf life of 15 days.... which is 360 hours... carry the one.... Sooooo that bit of lichen would have to be shot off Mars at about 625,000 km per hour. Never mind this doesn't factor in how to avoid being vaporized by Earth's atmosphere, by being a little piece of lichen going 625,000 km per hour. Thats some pretty fast and tough lichen we are talking here. Of course it *IS* Mars lichen, which may be some sort of super lichen, but then explain why we don't have super lichen on Earth? Can't can you?
In conclusion Apple Tarts are crispy and sweet.
That's not its etymology, that's merely what the original meaning for the word components were. The etymology of the word would include its development to its present form.
I for one welcome our outerspace lichen overlords and hold no resentment against their interplanetary bukkake bombardment.
I don't want to know what kind of flute that goat-man is playing.
wondering how this got posted under the comment below the one i clicked 0_o
who didn't shower enough and lichen started growing on his scalp. It like totally took over his brain. Now he has to deal with the ethical dilemas of being sued for trespassing on a rock for thousands of years even though only part of him is guilty.
Of course human life didn't evolve on this planet. A spaceship full of accountants and hairdressers crashed onto this planet. They are our ancestors, not the apes.
"22 astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Stephen Colbert
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... the astronauts who conducted the experiment were found emitting an inhuman scream and pointing at others...
Remember when the cargo ship crashed into Mir, causing partial depressurization they even considered fixing? Michael Foale certainly remembers. Any mold still growing in the Spektr module would have been exposed to vacuum and maybe even some UV if the ruptures were large enough.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
Now that we know lichens can survive exposed to the harsh conditions of space, how about we try it with Karl Rove?
You want to see if the lichens can survive exposed to the harsh conditions of Karl Rove? That's just mean... to the lichens.
PS Eeewwww.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
My biology teacher told me that life was designed by an intelligent designer who can do anything. If he wanted lichen to sprout rocket engines and fly between the stars he could do that too. That's why science is a pointless subject to study and I'll just get back to my cow tipping here in Kansas...
Because they ran out of titanium?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Seriously, folks, did these "researchers" even run this study by an animal welfare group before conducting this cruel experiment? How are we to know if that algae was suffering while in the vaccuum of space? "Expose creature to something and see if it dies" is not a good formula for ethical science.
I mean, what's next? Are we going to try putting humans in space too? See how long they last?
Hasn't anybody hear of Victor Carroon?
So we are all related to some space Lichens that came from Mars? I think NOT!
Oh, great - so my space ship will need anti-fouling to keep space barnacles from growing on it...
Will space barnacles and space weed slow a space ship down? Maybe if it gets stuck in the subspace propeller, or fouls the plasma intake manifold...
Oh well, what the hell...
No, it wasn't: it was an unmanned spacecraft.
More info from ESA.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
Electron microscopic image of the lichen after the flight.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
Terrestrial bacteria were found to have survived for three years of lunar exposure. Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad who retrieved the camera from which these bacteria were cultured thinks this discovery is the, "most significant thing that we ever found," in the entire Apollo program.
p 98_1.htm
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast01se
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
From an earlier post:
"Lichens grow in the leftover spots of the natural world that are too harsh or limited for most other organisms. They are pioneers on bare rock, desert sand, cleared soil, dead wood, animal bones, rusty metal, and living bark. Able to shut down metabolically during periods of unfavorable conditions, they can survive extremes of heat, cold, and drought."
So, they weren't doing any living in space? My guess is they stopped their metabolism and ceased liven for a while. If they weren't active or anything, why do we care? Even if we did send lichens to other planets on big rocks, the rocks would be desrtoyed on impact, incinerating the lichens.
The lichen survived for fifteen days in space, were returned to Earth, and resumed thriving after undergoing a dormant period while exposed to space. This means that the lichen can survive for _at least_ 15 days, it is entirely possible that they can survive much longer but that was outside of the scope of this experiment. Don't be too quick to assume that the scientists running the experiment are so much more obtuse than you apparently consider yourself to be.
the lichens lasted two weeks
assuming you could actually get to 10% of c, it would take 40 years from the nearest star....seems like a bit if problem, but who knows
40 years * 52 weeks = ~ 2,000 weeks
From within Nethack (http://nethack.org/):
M onsterManual/lichen.html#lichen):
* &Database=*&Query=lichen
Pick an object.
F a fungus or mold (lichen)
From the Jubilex monster manual (http://www.juiblex.co.uk/nethack/VernonSpoilers/
Name: lichen
Difficulty: 1
Base level: 0
Base experience: 4
Speed: 1
Base AC: 9
Base MR: 0
Alignment: 0
Frequency: Uncommon
Genocidable: Yes
ATTACK:
Sticks to you
Weight: 20
Nutritional value: 200
Size: small
Resistances: None
Resistances conveyed by eating: None
Due to its unusual body chemistry, A lichen has no need to breathe. It has no eyes, and is therefore impervious to gaze and blindness attacks. It has no mind, and is therefore not detectable via telepathy. It has no limbs and no head. A lichen cannot pick up objects.
The chamber was of unhewn rock, round, as near as might be, eighteen or twenty feet across, and gay with rich variety of fern and moss and lichen. The fern was in its winter still, or coiling for the spring-tide; but moss was in abundant life, some feathering, and some gobleted, and some with fringe of red to it.
Lorna Doone, by R.D. Blackmore
At Dict.org:
http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict1&Strategy=
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
Scientists as of late have been focusing (more than usual) on panspermia as an explanation for life on Earth.
What few of them neglect to realize is that life still had to start someplace. All the facts point to it starting here, on Earth. Life on Earth is unlikely to have been seeded from elsewhere. It most likely began here.
Panspermia seems to be the "solve-all" when we can't explain the exact details of how life started. The problem is that it still leaves us with needing to explain how it started elsewhere...on another planet with an environment we know nothing about.
Life began and evolved here, on Earth.
Another issue is that two-weeks isn't long enough to get anywhere in our solar system. I'd like to see just how long the lichens would last. 9 months to Mars, 5 months to Venus. It's likely there is nothing living on either of those planets and it's light years to anything that might support life.
Lastly, we still have the issue with re-entry.
* Si hoc legere scis numium eruditionis habes *
I would hazard to guess the odds of ejecta striking another planet at much worse than 1:1,000,000. Be that as it may, if I were given a gun that could shoot 1 billion bullets in the stadium, and I fired those bullets randomly while blindfolded, I would be very surprised Not to have hit the target a few decades later when I expended all of my bullets. Just the same with the example of a planet ejecting material over the millenia. It is highly unlikely for any one rock to hit anything, however the odds of one out of an astronomical number of rocks to hit another planet becomes significantly more plausible.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some forms of lichen can be used as a towel in an emergency.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
1. Set free space-resistant lichen on uninhabited nearby planet. 2. Wait several million years. 2. Return, explain the situation, and be worshipped as gods! 3. Profit! oh shit...has this been done before??
eBayDig 1s a typo saerch engien
Cool link you gave there, green slime is also a fairly wellknown/famous creature in in Nethack. I wonder if there might be a connection between the two?
M onsterManual/AMOEBOID.html#green_slime):
l #slime):
From the Juiblex monster manual (http://www.juiblex.co.uk/nethack/VernonSpoilers/
Name: green slime
Difficulty: 8
Base level: 6
Base experience: 164
Speed: 6
Base AC: 6
Base MR: 0
Alignment: 0
Frequency: Very rare, only in Gehennom
Genocidable: Yes
ATTACK:
Touch: Turns you into green slime
Weight: 400
Nutritional value: 150
Size: large
Resistances: cold, electricity, poison, acid, petrification
Resistances conveyed by eating: None
A green slime can flow under doors. Due to its unusual body chemistry, It has no need to breathe. It has no eyes, and is therefore impervious to gaze and blindness attacks. It has no mind, and is therefore not detectable via telepathy. A green slime has no limbs and no head. It is acidic and poisonous if eaten. It is an omnivore.
From the steelypips instadeath spoiler (http://www.steelypips.org/nethack/instadeath.htm
sliming
Green slimes (generally not seen outside certain parts of Gehennom) can slime you with their 'touch' attack. If you're slimed, you will slowly turn into another green slime over the course of several turns.
Preventatives: Always kill green slimes from a distance. Don't let them get close to attack you. (This implies that you should have some way to spot them from a distance) An amulet of unchanging will protect you from being slimed.
Remedies: If you get yourself slimed, you can pray to your god for help, if they're happy with you. Don't pray to your god, though, if you're beneath the Valley of the Dead (Vlad's tower doesn't count as being beneath the Valley of the Dead) or they'll become angry with you, so if you're beneath the Valley of the Dead, you'll need to teleport out of Gehennom in order for your deity to heal you. Additionally, putting on an amulet of unchanging will halt the sliming process. Reading a scroll of fire, casting 'Fireball' on yourself, zapping a wand of fire at yourself, stepping on a fire trap, lighting a potion of oil and throwing it upwards, and other methods of setting oneself on fire will burn the slime away (but will also hurt you and probably destroy many carried scrolls and potions at the same time). Casting 'Cure Sickness' on yourself or #invoking the Staff of Aesculapius will heal sliming more safely. Additionally, polymorphing yourself will heal you of sliming. Applying a unicorn horn will NOT stop sliming!
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
Lichen are tough. We all knew that. What we didn't know was how tough - this is incredible news. 15 days exposed in LEO and the samples were still viable? That indicates, to me, that lichen not only "happen" to be able to survive in space, but that the base organism evolved in space and transported to Earth continually until conditions allowed it to survive here. The description of lichen as protected by minerals in exo would indicate that they are capable of forming protected mats and still photosynthesize. The abstract didn't cover it all, did the lichen hibernate or photosynthesize? I'm not sure, but the basic survival fact is huge evidence in support of panspermia, universal left-handed chirality and biology as a basic element of the universe.
Photos from Mars show patches of greenish-brown and blue-green on rocks, cliffs and in low-lying (higher pressure) regions. The Deep Impact mission showed almost 1/3rd the mass of the comet as carbonaceous material, the researchers claim it is prebiotic. Photos from both Viking I (Gil Levin photo) and both MER rovers show "fuzzy" greenish rocks and fine filamented structures. If lichen survive in open space, they would be that much more at home in a fluffy growing medium that contains lots of water, and with a few archaea in the mix would produce exactly the compounds found in comet Tempel 1.
I've always agreed with the tenets of panspermia, the last few months of space science has convinced me. There is life out there, and a lot of it.
Josh
Fun note: the craft that flew the BIOPAN experiment is a Foton capsule, a direct decendant of the capsule Yuri Gagarin flew in. It is a round metal ball with a donut of equipment on the back and some antennae, same layout with somewhat newer gear.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
Only an intelligent designer could have calculated the trajectories and orbits necessary to spread life between planets. Especially given the limited computers available at the time of creation.
Vuja De: That sinking feeling that this is going to happen again. Often occurs in meetings with Product Managers.
We also have the problem of entry. For a rock to be knocked off a planet, and out of its orbit, it has to be subjected to tremendous energy - which translates into tremendous heat.
Another problem with panspermia is the impropability - a planet evovled life within a narrow set of specifications - chemistry, temperature, radiation levels. A peice is knocked off with a life form robust enough to survive the violent ejection into space, the millenia of cold, vacuum, and radiation. It then has to survive the thermal and mechanical shock of reentry. Then, the new planet has to have similar charecteristics to the original - chemistry, temperature, radiation levels. How anyone can riducule intelligent design while indulging in fantasies like this is beyond belief.
Apparently, there aren't many real biologists here, so the volcanic-vent-living bacteria is taken as proof of something it's not. what it proves is that life in hospitable environments can GRADUALLY adapt to hostile environments. It does not mean that life can originate in hostile environments, or that life thrust into hostile environments can spontaneously adapt.
Panspermia is like the old lady who tells the astronomer that he's got it all wrong: the world rests on the back of a giant elephant. He patiently explains that that doesn't solve anything - what does the elephant stand on. Triumphantly she exclaims - "You can't catch me up, it's elephants all the way down".
Well, duh!
We still have the same problem, though. Where are they going to find water?
The first thing you're going to have to find to have Earth organisms on another planet will be a bacteria (or complex of them) that can produce water. There is plenty of material in just about any rock to make water(H2O), but it would take a lot of energy. On the other hand, the sun provides a lot of energy.
So, God created life on another planet and then had to blast it to Earth on an asteroid or comet????
I'm so confused!
Read any good sonnets lately?
...and go for bull tipping :)
They would liken this atmosphere? :) It still may be too cold, its something like -260 degrees at night on Mars.
So somehow life traveled through the continuum of space in 15 days? =P
the lichen was found to be resistant to cosmic rays. if this resistance is by way of reflection or absorbtion it might be used as a skin on space capsuls to protect the human cargo inside.
alternativly, it can be used as a replacement for a tinfoil hat
What about dolphins. They can hold their breath for a real long time. Probably could do it in space too! We should really start releasing dolphins into space to see how long they can survive, because maybe they evolved on another planet which got destroyed - but they traveled to our planet through space. Maybe.
...I welcome our new Space Lichen Overlords!
The lichen touches you! The lichen hits! You die.
Do you want your possessions identified?
Photosynthesis?
Doesn't that require a carbon source (CO2) as well as an energy source?
I don't see how the lichen could photosynthesize in a vacuum. Unless you're suggesting they created their own pressurized capsule.
The standard evolutionary model says that Earth had a bunch of Primordial Soup that cooked for hundreds of millions of years until some of it did stuff that was interesting enough to photosynthesize, which started radically changing the chemistry of the planet's atmosphere and the Soup until more of it started doing more interesting stuff and eventually it was interesting enough that we can declare that "It's Alive!" The probability that stars will have planets, and that they'll have the right conditions to let this happen (temperature, available atomic mixtures, gravity, etc.) are pretty low, and people who like to speculate about how heavily populated the universe is and when we'll find aliens come up with estimates like Drake's Equation to try to guess how rare we are.
Interplanetary Panspermia suggests that not only did Earth have to have the right mixture of chemicals and temperature/pressure conditions in the Primordial Soup for all this to happen, but that Mars or maybe Venus also had to have a (presumably different) batch of soup cooking that had either become Alive or else pretty close, and something had to cause a Big Splash to get some Martian Soup mixed in with the Earth Soup at a time that both of them were in the right conditions. If the Earth had been running too far ahead or behind in time, or the Big Splash hadn't happened at the right time or hadn't been big enough, then the Martians would have been told No Soup For You, Next Billion Years , Earth wouldn't have been alive, and Mars would have done the Cosmic Wimpout without us evolving to see it today. Drake's Equation looks much more dodgy under those assumptions. If that's what it takes for life to evolve, I don't expect any space aliens to show up any time soon.
Interplanetary Panspermia doesn't really solve any problems about how life could have evolved, though I suppose it *could* have happened, but it seems much less likely than Earth's Primordial Soup doing the job on its own. Interstellar Panspermia seems much much less likely to me, for reasons I noted above. There's a huge amount of stellar evolution that had to happen just to get the right elements into the Solar System, since some of them only get formed inside supernovae or similar stars. Friendly Space Aliens deliberately seeding the place begs the question of how *they* evolved, but strikes me as no less likely than Interstellar Panspermia happening by accident. You'd think they'd have also left a message, but maybe they were just shooting stuff out at likely stars on spec, hoping that something would work even if they weren't around four billion years later when we were ready to Phone Home, or maybe they really *are* hanging around on the Dark Side of the Moon working on the next chapter of their cookbook before they drop in for a visit.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I love how they then threw the blobs at earth, and let them cook through the atmosphere, and land in a martian like (non life) environment.
In a humans mind, they imagine life being started by a ball of lovely alive things, floating to the surface which is already teeming with an alive ecosystem, nitrogen cycle, water, o2 and co2.
People are so blinkered. Anything from 'FAR FAR AWAY' must be true, for any sufficiently large value of FAR or AWAY (on in some cases 'LONG TIME AGO').
ooooh scarey unimaginable things from space!!! wooooo woooo woooooohohohoowowowowowow fucking hypocritical darwinist bastard monkeys.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
why dont you read more books, you might like some of the sci fi written in the last hundred years, say like, "Ringworld"?!!!1111