Slashdot Mirror
Giant Cloud of Methanol Found in Space
kakos writes "Astronomers have recently discovered a giant cloud of methanol in our region of the Milky Way Galaxy. The cloud measures 463 billion kilometres across. Study of this cloud could lead scientists to a greater understanding of how star formation occurs. Furthermore, the abundance of organic molecules in interstellar space could also shed light on the chemical origins of life."
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Also note that you could smoke a bushel of industrial hemp and not get high. You don't need BC superweed to make methonol or use the fiber in other products. The US and other countries could just allow certain seed stock that has a very low THC content to be grown. May even be able to be genetically engineered out.
Of course, those who are paying attention will know that there was a big push in the early 20th century to outlaw many drugs which were legal but which were causing major social problems (complicated by the fact that technically speaking, Congress doesn't have the authority to regulate such things. Which is why Timothy Leary actually succeeded in making marijuana legal in the late 60s; but I digress).
The guy who was in charge of such things, the nation's first drug czar, didn't want to bother with marijuana because he was after drugs which actually caused serious problems, and the ganja just didn't happen to be one of them. However, we were in a depression, and California and Arizona (Texas and New Mexico also threw in) were looking for a way to get rid of their plentiful and cheap Mexican labor. It turns out that marijuana was heavily used in the Mexican laborer population, and the only other identifiable group which used it was black musicians in New Orleans, and really, who the hell cared what they thought? So marijuana became a regulated substance basically in order to get rid of cheap foreign labor so unemployed Americans could be exploited within an inch of their lives instead.
Which really seems to me to be at least as good as your conspiracy theory, with the added benefit of actually being true.
Considering how tough it is to find organic molecules at all - whether organic by courtesy or not - finding a vast cloud of methanol is extraordinary. While finding methanol on earth would at best be vaguely interesting, since in the lifetime of the earth we've managed to significantly bypass the stage of small molecules, remember that if you've got 463 billion km of methanol there's a fair chance that something did it. Whether it's vapour trails from a cosmic express or some strange unforeseen product from the explosion of a star with just the right mass balance to get this kind of ratio of atoms to form the products, it's hugely interesting to find it up there.
The chances of two random atoms interacting is middling to fair. Biatoms will readily form molecules, especially since the simplest atom is hydrogen which will happily pair up with another of itself. The chances of two different molecules interacting closely enough to react is very low. On earth we need dense solutions with a heat source to get a reaction to happen. The chances of interaction to produce a cloud of particles is very low, though with the amount of stuff out there you can understand how it happens. The chance of getting reaction of enough molecules in one way to produce enough of one kind of product to show up on a spectrometer is fantastically small. Note that the article doesn't say "methane and methanol", which would be more expected from reaction with carbon in a hydrogen-rich environment; and if you mix oxygen and methane together in an attempt to get methanol, you'll get the lower-energy products of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and water.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
Can't say that I agree. In the first place, about forty of the 130 or so known interstellar molecules are as big or bigger than methanol. In the second place, methanol is readily formed in a reducing environment, such as you'd find in hydrogen-rich interstellar space. Third, while it is true that the formation reaction rate would be low, because as you point out the interstellar gas density is low, it is equally true that it's got billions of years to react. Remember how easily Stanley Miller got amino acids to form in a primordial soup with a little electrical discharge? Frankly, I'd be shocked if simple organics didn't form in a reducing, cryogenic environment with plenty of high-energy photons swimming about.
On earth we need dense solutions with a heat source to get a reaction to happen.
Not always, no. Plenty of reactions will go without heat, and in dilute solution.
if you mix oxygen and methane together in an attempt to get methanol, you'll get the lower-energy products of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and water.
To be sure. But that is a highly oxidizing environment, and hydrogen-rich interstellar space is a highly reducing environment. Surely most oxygen in a hydrogen-rich molecular cloud is going to be present as H2O, not O2, and then
CH3 + H2O -> CH3OH + 1/2 H2
would happens readily enough in a highly energetic environment. Interstellar space is an unusual chemical environment from the point of view of Earthlings, used as we are to living at the bottom of a pool of potent oxidizer. It's highly nonthermal and highly reducing. Our Earth-based chemistry instincts may not necessarily be a good guide.