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."

Comments

Its life Jim, but not as we know it.

[LiquidCoooled]

Lawyers.

They can survive anywhere.

Airborne bacteria?

[Bahumat]

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.

Re:Airborne bacteria?

[isomeme]

there are bands in Jupiter's atmosphere that are comparable to Earth's atmosphere, past and present.

There is certainly a broad layer where the pressure and temperature are roughly Earthlike. However, there is nowhere in Jupiter's atmosphere where the composition is more than vaguely similar to Earth's primal (prebiotic) atmosphere, and nowhere similar to Earth's current atmosphere at all. There is effectively no free oxygen in Jupiter's atmosphere, and only tiny traces of anything other than hydrogen and helium. Most of the traces are simple alkanes and water.

Re:Airborne bacteria?

[linguizic]

Panspermia is just a dodge. For some reason people can't believe that here on earth, where life as we know it has done better by far than anyother place that we know of, could possibly have been where life originated. The probabillity of life evolving somewhere else and then being magically whisped away to earth is even MORE improbable than life originating here. Just because something that we know has happened is improbable doesn't mean we have to completely throw all of the most probable scenarios for it to happen out the window.

Re:That Would Be A Very Tough Bug

[LiquidCoooled]

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.

The Bug Speaks.

[Anonymous Coward]

'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.

Mir was a good example...

[jd]

And NASA carried out a related experiment not too long ago, plastering microbes on a surface they then exposed to the hard vaccuum & hard radiation of space. The microbes stopped growing in space, but went into a suspended state. When returned to Earth, they revived and did not appear to have been harmed any by the experience.

(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.)