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Earth Life Possibly Could Reach Titan
dylanduck writes "New simulations show that big asteroid impacts on Earth could have sent about 600 million boulders flying into space. About 100 have reached Jupiter's moon Europa - but they landed at 24 miles/sec. 'This must be rather frustrating if you're a bacterium that survived launch from Earth,' says a researcher. But 30 boulders from each impact reach Titan - and they land gently." From the article: "'I thought the Titan result was really surprising - how many would get there and how slowly they'd land,' Treiman told New Scientist. 'The thing I don't know about is if there are any bugs on Earth that would be happy living on Titan.' Titan's surface temperature is a very cold -179C and its chemistry is very different from Earth's."
Lawyers.
They can survive anywhere.
liqbase
Leads to the interesting possibility of xenophilic bacteria and algae impacting Jupiter and having their entry slowed greatly by the thick atmosphere. The deeper it goes, the warmer it gets, and there are bands in Jupiter's atmosphere that are comparable to Earth's atmosphere, past and present.
Might be interesting to one day discover man was far from the first Earth-borne species to begin colonizing other planets in the solar system.
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
Is it possible life on earth could have started this way? An astroid destroys a planet in another solar system. Matter is ejected into space (with hearty bacteria buried inside). It just so happens to land on life sustaining primitive earth. Enter in Evolution fast foward to today.
Or rather more likely a COLONY of bacteria can have a few members survive the trip, then I'd say it's highly likely that they are mutating fast enough to adapt to local conditions. The bolders would have been radiating heat the entire way out, so temperature wouldn't bother them. They'd land softly enough. And from there on out, it's just survival of the fittest.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And all along, we were watching Mars as the source of attack...
Government's view of the economy: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving,regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.
How about this:
Named the World's Toughest Bacterium by the Guinness Book of Records, the large red spheres of Deinococcus radiodurans (translation: strange berry that withstands radiation) can not only endure acute radiation doses of up to three million rads but more remarkably, can actually grow when exposed to radiation continuously.
You really don't want to meet this in a dark alley, however with that much radiation, I doubt it would be dark for long.
liqbase
Why not send a bacterium from one of Earth's more extreme climates to Europa or Titan to see if will survive?
Panspermia, but with Earth as the originator. Sounds like the old chicken and egg to me.
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
Ok, I'll bite, how do they know they came from Earth rather than, say were asteroids?
Because they're talking about in the simulation, not in the real world. But, if their simulation models physics exactly, then an asteroid strike exactly like that they simulated would have put about 100 boulders on Titan.
The way Scandinavia is freezing in at the moment, and this close to spring, Titan would be no problem for us! :(
It's all fun & games until someone loses the game.
Bacteria survived several years on the lens cap of a camera left on the moon. It's resilient stuff!
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
"The team ran computer models of such giant impacts, estimating that each would send about 600 million boulders into space to orbit the Sun. Some of those launched at relatively high speeds - faster than 6 kilometres per second - got as far as Jupiter and Saturn in about a million years.
In the simulations, about 100 of the boulders from each impact reached Jupiter's moon Europa. "
UNFOUNDED I TELL YOU!!! They're just pulling these numbers out of thin air!! Ludicrous!!!
The whole thing was a simulated what-if, something made abundantly clear from start to finish. They "Know" these impacts happened and at precisely what speed because IT WAS A FEKKING SIMULATION, DAMN IT!
Sheesh.
There's some more anecdotal evidence that damage to DNA in humans can be repaired, leading to a greatly extended lifespan, I hope. At least it's some kind of proof-of-concept.
Tartigrades, otherwise known as Water Bears might survive such a journey. They're the cutest microscopic animals ever!
'This must be rather frustrating if you're a bacterium that survived launch from Earth'
On behalf of the League of Sentient One-Celled Organisms, I would like to assure you that it is nowhere near as frustrating as your high-handed, primitive, and anthropomorphic notions of bacterium emotion.
Actually in many of our cultures (and I use that term advisedly), being hurtled through a vacuum and smashing into a rock is considered to be a transcendent spiritual experience, and required as an initiation rite into our shamanic traditions.
Blow that into your Kleenex.
Hmm... so basically we are inoculating bacterial franchises?
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
At -179C, the bacteria are gonna need parkas.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
So, since we have determined that these things DO HIT EARTH, how about we start PREVENTING this from happening.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
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A while ago on slashdot, someone posted an artical about how fungi could survive in hard vacume and solar radiation on the side of the ISS for.... two weeks. Now, lets give the little buggers credit and say maybe a month and a half in space... and how long did it take our probes to reach jupiter?
yep, thats about it
This bit seems wrong. The escape velocity of jupiter from the surface of Europa is not 24 miles per second. Not even close. IIRC the escape velocity from the surface of Jupiter is less then 60 km/s. Rocks should be able to arrive on elliptical orbits with zero relative velocity at Jupiter.
Even so, without an atmosphere to slow them dowm, rocks will make quite a bang at Europa. Much less on Titan.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It looks like Earth's pecker tracks could be all over the solar system. What if Europa had an atmosphere early in it's life? Was it always relatively airless? So even if we discover life elsewhere in the solar system, there's a good chance it'll resemble Earth's. Even if Europa was airless what about this scenario? Big Earth rock hits Europa, vaporizes millions of tons of ice and creates a temporary atmosphere. Then a second rock hits Europa in this brief interlude. It could have survived. Unlikely, but possible.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Mars probably had live at some point, either transmitted to Earth via ejecta or received from Earth via ejecta. In fact, it might have gone back and forth over the last few billion years.
Finding God in a Dog
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Please input the following earth-impactor parameters for your simulation
Impactor diameter (m): 5000
Impactor velocity (m/s): 12000
Ecliptic Declination (deg): 7.3
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Target diameter (km): 4000
Target solar altitude (AU): 15
System asteroid density (objects/AU^3): 0
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Tough bugs, sure, but traveling through space also means withstanding the full bore radation of Mr. Sun, with no atmosphere to protect you. I'm not sure I want to meet one of these in a dark alley.
You probably already have. There are bacteria that can survive and even grow exposed to levels of radioactivity found in some parts of nuclear reactors. It looks like some of these bacteria also live in the human stomach.
The thing is, harsh environments and to things like drying out can cause DNA damage, and the same incredible repair mechanisms that help some species to survive those allow them to survive intense radiation.
Incidentally, bacteria surviving to reach Titan is not that interesting - far more exciting is the possibility of them reaching another moon of Saturn - Enceladus, which probably has liquid water.
Addressing two points. The reason Mars meteorites can be identified as such is because of the ratios of the elements found within them... they differ from the rest of the meteorites, AND match Mars. Every major rocky body in the solar system has such a unique "signature".
As for surviving hard radiation... we already know of microbes that did it for years when later Apollo crews found them from the exposed exteriors of equipment left behind by the earlier crews. One you stress a microbe into a "spore" state, it's really hard to kill them.
It is proof of possibility, not proof of actuality. The article was quite clear about this.
"Would," "Could," "Possibly," "May Have." PERHAPS they MIGHT be saying that this is POTENTIALLY SPECULATIVE.
... but they landed at 24 miles/sec. 'This must be rather frustrating if you're a bacterium that survived launch from Earth ...
And the decelleration and temperature resulting from the crash landing is substantially different from the acceleration and temperature resulting from an explosion that caused the rock to exceed escape velocity in the first place?
In other news, it is found that on this moon, a loser named MasterTripMonk writes lame ass stories about an Earthling named K'Breel. MasterTripMonk even wrote a lame article about himself for Wikipedia, but it was later deleted as a vanity piece.
If you start with a big rock under the surface close to an impact point on Earth, most of the rock will be damaged while being ejected into space but a few small bits in the centre may survive intact. But these bits won't be able to survive an impact on Europa.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Yes. It has probably been slowed by gravity from various objects, and if they're lucky, they might be moving at a small relative velocity to thier impact site due to orbit directions and such.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
Well, as long as they had an intel processor with them, they've got plenty of heat to survive.
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
I mean, if we ever got there and searched for native life forms, these findings would just add another factor of uncertainty. Say we send up robots or even taikonauts (probably won't be astronauts any way), and they really do find DNA/RNA-based life (except lawyers, as someone else suggested). How would one tell a archaebacterium which hitch-hiked the vessel from an archaebacterium that hitch-hiked an asteroid boulder from a bacterium that has been created there?
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
They just should have and could have kept using "could have" in the rest of the sentences. This is representative of the poor level of journalism today. And since everyone is yelling at you for pointing out this misleading error, which indeed it is, it seems they can't even tell the difference anymore.
I don't want to sound like a tinhat type here; I'm sure their findings are close if not correct. In the interests of truth though, we should mention that they could be wrong in their maths. Simulations aren't much more than computer-assisted thought experiments, after all.
Man, what a load of what-ifs.
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Ok this time we compromised! We converted the 40 km/s of the article into 24 miles/sec, but kept the -179C unconverted.
For our next science article we will do the opposite. When we think you are ready -- but only then -- we won't convert anything and you'll be on your own.
The rocks being ejected from our atmosphere are going to be heated red-hot or more on the way out. How likely is it that bacteria that can survive that can also survive the cold on Titan? It seems like it's asking a bit much for them to be resistant to both red-hot heat and freezing cold. Does anybody know how likely that is?
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As far as life as we know it, there is no evidence that microorganisms could grow at -179C. There is some evidence that hardy spores can survive in extreme conditions (even naked space as is the case for some mold spores that briefly enter the upper atmosphere of Earth and come back down to spread long distance), but I find it difficult to believe that anything could grow and divide at such low temperatures. That seems chemically and thermodynamically impossible with the microorganisms that we know of now. The leaves the possibility of evolution to some type of life we don't know about, but again, evolution requires geological time scales, and the trip from here to Titan, presumably in a dormant state, would not allow sufficient time or for that or the multiple rounds of natural selection. Neat idea none-the-less, but not enough incidents to play the probability game properly.
This has to be one of the most interesting articles I have read on slashdot in a long time. Kudos!
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>chemistry is very different from Earth's.
There are some Earth life forms with some pretty weird chemistry. One example is purple sulphur bacteria. Instead of using water as a reducing agent, they use hydrogen sulfide. This is oxidized to elemental sulphur and sometimes on to sulphuric acid. Heck with this water/oxygen thing. These are a very old group of organisms.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Could there possible be bits of dinosaur DNA orbiting around in the deep freeze of the solar system? or would high energy particles quickly destroy the DNA? Well if anything sounds a like a great mechanism for a movie. Man finds chunks of frozen desiccated dinosaur. Man brings back Dino DNA to earth and splices DNA with that of frogs, Man recreates Dinosaur species, Dinosaur eats Man. Appologies to Ian Malcolm...
And the decelleration and temperature resulting from the crash landing is substantially different from the acceleration and temperature resulting from an explosion that caused the rock to exceed escape velocity in the first place?
Yep.
Not "the explosion" itself, but the environment felt by the launched rock, which could be lifted relatively gently by the rocks and soil under it, as the atmosphere above it is lifted out of the way / along with it by it and the neighboring material.
It isn't the stuff that gets HIT by the asteroid/comet/whatever that get's launched. It's the stuff on and near the top of the ground nearby that gets lifted by the violence spreading out below it.
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They must have run the experiment when Enceladus was on the other side of saturn. :)
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Steven N. Severinghaus
Riiiiight... and by "moon" you mean a soundstage in Nevada. ;-)
...why shouldn't bacteria from Earth be able to grow on Titan? Microbes are amazingly hardy organisms, they can thrive as chemotrophs at the bottom of the ocean near volcanic vents or in other incredibly hot temperatures (one such microbe has an enzyme that lets biologists amplify DNA for legal and research purposes). If they can survive the extremes of air, ocean depth, and heat, why not those of cold and darkness?
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
Maybe this will just help prep religious fundamentalists to have a way to accept life on other planets without losing their belief that life started on earth (6000 years ago, of course...)
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It doesn't seem hugely different from me posting a story about how waterfalls can power 90% of a large city, occording to my last game of SimCity :-/
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People are also only pointing out animals we know exist being on those boulders. It's entirely possible there were many more species hundreds of millions of years ago that were as resiliant as the "Water Bear" towards harsh conditions, but suffered some other short coming that lead to their extinction on Earth.
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So, if one is going to hit, we probably, and should not, know in advance.
Something much smaller, but terrifying nonetheless, was Katrina. I remember seeing grandmothers, children fleeing up the highway the next day, knowing from the looks of them that they would not last another mile without dropping in their tracks. Their transportation that got them here ran out of gas, apparently, and they got out and started walking. Power was out, all I had working was my scanner, hooked to a car battery. Several men had been swept off their roofs during the storm, trying to fix roofs damaged by falling trees. Broken backs. Much worse further south toward the Coast. The only bright side: Good thing we had bicycles, no gasoline anymore.
Knowing in advance would not be good, from what I have seen, if we are to be hit with a giant asteroid.
If another Katrina comes around, we are going to have a lot of problems based on what Forbes.com discusses here:
Victims who are rescued from the horrors of the flood-ravaged city of New Orleans may have frequent and intense psychological problems similar to those that plague troops returning from Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam--problems that could spread to the rescuers as well. Up to a third of the victims of the Gulf Coast catastrophe might be affected
(Sorry I did not link to the story, they had an advertisement page ahead of it.)
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Could the bugs not hide INSIDE the meteor? Who needs an atmosphere when you're surrounded by solid rock? And can't spores survive some pretty harsh conditions?
1. Just because the escape velocity at Europe might be less than 24 km/s doesn't mean that's your orbital velocity at that altitude above Jupiter; such would only be the case if the object's initial velocity (w/ respect to Jupiter) was 0 at the edge of Jupiter's sphere of influence.
2. It's possible their simulation was for a retrograde impact on Europa, which would enable a much higher impact velocity (Europa's mean orbital speed is over 13 km/s).
I just found the box to change my sig. Um.... [timeless witticism].
(Given that gigantic, green tentacled monsters haven't been stalking NASA bases recently, we can also assume that not only were they not killed off, they did not suffer significant mutation from the radiation. Actually, the study indicated that no obvious mutations had occured of any kind, implying that the DNA was highly resiliant to the effects of ionizing radiation.)
On the basis of Mir and the NASA experiment, it can reasonably be concluded that microbes can survive interplanetary travel, more-or-less intact, at least within the solar system. Deep space is far, far nastier and the present experiments don't show that interstellar microbial travel is possible... but it doesn't rule it out, either.
We believe that microbes can remain in a suspended state for tens of thousands of year (or perhaps millions), on the basis of studies of microbes discovered in ice core samples. It's not easy to rule out contamination, but the experiments seem repeatable. It is possible to imagine that microbes may be present in some geodes. They would certainly be present inside rocks that have fissures caused by flowing water or ice cracking.
Once you're talking of microbes on the inside of rock, then impact velocities would be much less important. The rock would absorb much of the impact, and the shattering of the rock would be a very useful way for the microbes to be released. In the case of interstellar travel, it would also provide better shielding. Ideally, you'd want rock from the Peak District in the UK - some places have a nice mix of galena (lead ore), calcite and blue feldspar. I could easily imagine a meteorite with such a mix containing microbes in amongst the calcite, and lead casing would improve the odds of surviving the millions - if not billions - of years needed to travel between systems.
(This is not to say this has happened, and I'm sure I'm going to get my wrist slapped by a geologist who will point out all the flaws in my reasoning. However, if in the year 3000 we finally reach Alpha Centauri and find a planetoid with bird flu on it, they'd better damn well name the planetoid after me.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Then it's entirely plausible that life on Earth came from places other than earth.
Of course this plays right into the hands of the fundamentalists. In their view we were put here by their God. But I'm not one of His people - I'm one of the others mentioned in the good book. But I'm talking extraterrestrial here, not metaphysical.
The rocks will be arriving on elliptical orbits with considerable velocity relative to Jupiter. Their motion around the Sun is much, much less than Jupiter's, which is why Jupiter has enough centripetal acceleration to stay in orbit at that distance, while the rocks are going to turn around and drop back through Earth's orbit.
I'm wondering how your story led you to this conclusion.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
Combine all this with being able to digest unconventional materials - your example was sulpher - and you've the makings of a beastie that would consider Titan the ultimate in luxury resorts.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Now I know that everyone and his dog likes to point out how hardy bacteria are. They turn into spores and can survive insane periods of time, etc. However the article said that 100 rocks arrive at Titan in a million years.
A million years.
That's long enough for some really slow chemical processes to become significant. Like the ones that cause replacement of organic tissue with minerals - aka fossilization.
OK, if they arrive at that rate, the first one is likely to arrive in 5-15,000 years or so. Go bugs! You have a chance!
But these aren't rocks that just flew straight to Jupiter and landed on Titan. They are ones that went into an elliptical orbit that touches Jupiter's orbit and stayed there for a while. So those rocks are going to be going out to Jupiter (nice and cold) then coming in close to the Sun. How close? Venus? Mercury? I don't know (though I could probably work it out). But regardless, it is going to be a lot closer than Earth. Which means that it will be pretty toasty. Think autoclave.
Oh, let's add hard radiation. Solar storms produce enough radiation that it was a real concern that the Apollo astronauts might encounter one. And here we are, experiencing half of every solar storm for thousands of years. (Depends which way the rock was facing whether a bug gets hit or protected.) That's going to add up.
I'd put pretty dim odds on the bacteria surviving to land on Titan.
Imagine a impact in a frozen tundra ejecting a chuck of ice containing, yup you guessed it, a frozen Caveman. Caveman makes the trip to Titan and remains frozen. The earth sends bots to terra form the moon and then astronauts. Upon landing and exiting their space craft they meet Brendan Fraiser after he thawed out do to the terraforming. Hilarity insues...
Lawyers..
It's worse than that, he's dead, Jim, dead, Jim, dead, Jim;
it's worse than that, he's dead, Jim, dead, Jim, dead.
Horns are really just a broken halo.
I saw a movie about that. Ripley escaped with the cat, but none of the other did. ;-)
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I wonder what super powers you'd develop if you were bitten by one.
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It's not just journalism but Slashdot itself, a once "alternative" website coming full circle to new levels of unprecedented hypocrisy.
Much as they condemn religious faith for its non-science, "could have" suddenly applies to everything they hope for towards their own political values -- from global warming to life on other planets.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Expending billions of joules of energy just so that your pet could drop a lump on a rock....
You'd think that such an advanced culture would have invented the self-cleaning litter box by now....
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Deliberately contaminating the environments of our neighboring celestial objects with our mutagenic biomatter might be considered an unfriendly greeting by the local populations.
But we'll keep doing it anyway. It seems unlikely that human spacefaring will be found in the long term to be a significant vector for the spread of life -- not because we don't do it but because life has been littering the solar system for much longer than we've been exploring it.
In addition to the rocks that smote the dinosaurs which might have spread life to other planets there are:
The better question is not "does life exist elsewhere?" but rather "if not, why?" We just have to probe around as best we can to get some preliminary results on the first question before we explore the second.
The question I want answered involves the asteroids -- who will be the 49'er to figure out how to capitalize on that unimaginable wealth? The investment is significant, but if you could get a reasonable amount of water, a nuclear power plant and about 50 people to the asteroids, in thirty years you could own everything outside the moon's orbit. Of course at that point closing the deal on the rest of _everything_ would be trivial.
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Howdy,
.NET and marketing crap. I develope .NET for a living, and 95% of what is out there IS marketing crap.
Can some mod who has extra points please mod parent up. He got slammed on his first post by one down mod. Thanks to the wisdom of the powers that be, and their wonderful algorithms, he is now qualified to post at 0 for the rest of his existence.
Look at the post that caused the problem. He asked about
No reason for this guy to have been down modded. No reason for him to be in the 0 realm. If you want to mod this offtopic too, great. I left my karma bonus on so you could take an extra swipe at me.
Thanks,
Have a nice day.
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Put a bitch in heat on Titan, and I guarantee a dog will stud Titan into being a giant kennel in no time. Life is incredibly persistent.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
must not have taken hold early enough. I imagine terrorformers of other planets will use stuff stronger than Capsaicin, though...
ET would be phoning its ASS OFF trying to get back home from Earth if taken to some types of dinners here.
(I wonder what is the ET equivalent for Digel, Pepto, Tums... (A human, maybe?))
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WTF? are we talking about crews sneaking over to other apollo landing sites on the moon?
So the theory is that meteors hit the earth, and this somehow kicked up *boulders* to fucking *leave the atmosphere*? Think about how much force it takes to push things we *want* to go out of the atmosphere? And the escape velocities involved.
Is it just me, or does the idea of meteors kicking stuff *off the earth* not pass the laugh test?
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
I stand slightly corrected. Apollo 12 did pick up pieces of Surveyor III. I'm still waiting to be convinced about Apollo crews picking up something left by a previous crew.
out of this 600 Millions tons, how much matter does reach Mars? .. indeed, esp since the travel time is reduced by 1/200th
Quite, quite more than the amount that reaches Titan ( even taking to account, the gravity of jupiter).
Now what is the possibility of the life reaching safely then?
Much much more
So, I feel, that is what people should be looking at, rather than Titan.
Even then, this is just my opinion
Its not a dodge at all. Our current sample size of worlds thoroughly surveyed for life is 1. Its not a very statistically signifigant sample.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Yes, for Saturn AMD would be enough. Intel would be required for Pluto.
...we can cease fretting about contaminating stuff in our own solar system.
All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.
It was just a speculative explanation of the possible and the OP implied that it was a definititve proof in the positive of the actual. My point was precisely your point. What's the problem?
Looks like Stitch from Lilo and Stitch.
*shrug* Guess I should have studied more science and read less science fiction...
About 100 have reached Jupiter's moon Europa - but they landed at 24 miles/sec
All these world's are yours, except Europa. Do not land there.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
If large comets/asteroids can cause boulders to be launched off the planet. What about volcanic eruptions? Is it possible that large eruptions could also cause earth material/organisms to be launched into space? if so, I wonder if the chances of material from earth reaching other planets is even higher.
My main concern about this theory is not the fact that it may or may not be possible for micro organisms to travel, but probability.
First, something must force these organisms out in space. Then, when that "easy" job is done and without burning the organisms too much, they have to undergo years of travelling through space and supposedly surface on a planet which is habitable and warm enough. Then there's also an impact - a great amount of energy released when the dust, rock or meteor hits the ground.
I think you have a better chance of dropping a large object from space and hit a whale. After all, space is rather big and at least twice as big as anyone's living room.
Full Tilt
but I know what you mean :)
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What ever happened to Occam's razor? We haven't been able to adequately explain the jump from chemical compounds to self-replicating organisms, so we delay the hard work by moving it off-world - an hypothesis that is essentially impossible to disprove. It's biology's version of the multiverse.
Bollocks.
Thank you for your reply, I think it is extremely interesting and informative.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Now, when a cell is fully active, I imagine that it would be much more vulnerable. However, reading some of the replies, I am beginning to think that they have enough other protective mechanisms to make damage very unlikely.
You are correct that evolution works through DNA damage. Well, partially. It also works through failures to copy correctly, and may even occur through the (very) occasional retrovirus proving beneficial.
As for deep space - the heliopause deflects galactic background to a very high degree. It literally forms a shockwave, which the Pioneer probes may or may not have reached - nobody seems quite certain. I believe one of the Voyagers has, though. Just outside of the shockwave, however, I imagine things'll be really rough, as you'll not only be contending with the normal background but also with everything the heliopause has redirected in that direction.
Added to that, the extremely thin gasses within the solar system (it's not perfect vaccuum) and the ice/dust that make up the various surrounding belts will presumably provide limited shielding. The planets will, as well, to a degree.
So, yes, interstellar space is going to be truly nasty, compared to merely interplanetary travel.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Poor baby spilt some milk. Waa Sniff Waa
I probably fail to take a lot into account, but it would seem to me like water is a pretty nice place for life to begin.
Mind the frickin' laser...
...build a biological computer out of D. Radiodurans? That's about on-par with top-of-the-line rad-hardened space hardware, and microbes are much cheaper.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You said it was force that mattered, not mass. But now you keep talking about "larger meteors". It's nice to know that you have changed your mind without even realising it. So my original point about the rifle bullet analogy being irrelevant still stands.
Of course mass matters! I mean, a meteor the size of a grain of sand is going not to get through the atomosphere is it? What I meant was that above a certain size, mass is, of course, irrelevant. It has nothing to do with the so-called 'friction' (which is actually adiabatic heating), which was what you were stating.
The point about the rifle bullet is only that it indicated that bacteria can survive tremendous decelerations. You brought up the irrelevant matters of heat and mass. I don't know why. Do you have some philosphical objection to the idea of meteor delivery of microorganisms to planetary surfaces?
I fail to see why you are arguing - everything I have stated is perfectly clear. The fact that the centres of meteors retain their original structures provide conclusively that there is no major heating of their centres - there simply isn't time. And this effect (above, of course, a minimal size) is not affected by mass.