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Pieces of Ancient Earth May Be Hidden On the Moon
swestcott brings us a story from Space.com about the possibility of finding evidence for ancient Earth life on the moon. A team of scientists has published work confirming that meteorites originating from Earth could have remained sufficiently intact while colliding with the moon to allow the survival of biological evidence for life. Quoting:
"Crawford and Baldwin's group simulated their meteors as cubes, and calculated pressures at 500 points on the surface of the cube as it impacted the lunar surface at a wide range of impact angles and velocities. In the most extreme case they tested (vertical impact at a speed of some 11,180 mph, or 5 kilometers per second), Crawford reports that 'some portions' of the simulated meteorite would have melted, but 'the bulk of the projectile, and especially the trailing half, was subjected to much lower pressures.'"
Shit, I spent so much time thinking of something witty to put in here, I'm not first anymore!
It's a... oh, right.
Why the hell would you model an asteroid with some improbable shape like a cube?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Here's a good reason to go back to the moon if there ever was one. Or at the very least a better excuse than we've had so far.
Though the survival of the species is always a good reason...
All rites reversed 2010
Can just see the reaction to this. Life can't survive elsewhere in the solar system. It's all pieces of Earth that got blown out.
Another theory is that Moon was tugged into place to stabilize Earth.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
So aliens must exist! If they didn't exist the meteorites would be lying on the ground, not "hidden".
We're whalers on the Moon
We carry a harpoon
But there ain't no whales
So we tell tall tales
And sing our whaling tune
The Admin and the Engineer
Tax the little buggers up there!
Table-ized A.I.
The collision theory is pretty much universally accepted by now. I'm not sure it requires a complete breakup of the planetoid that hit earth.
ALso, looking at that site... the first theory... "The present Pacific Ocean basin is the most popular site for the part of the Earth from which the Moon came." I can't think of any reason why this is even remotely valid given plate tectonics and several billion years.
I can confirm that there are pieces of the Earth in the moon. Somewhere in the back of my closet, I keep a fossil of a ancient platypus that astronauts brought down from the moon a few decades ago. Looks an awful lot like Hexley.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Why don't these scientists do something useful for a change and tell us where to drill! I just bought my Hummer and now I can't afford the gas.
Look on the bright side. You might not be able to aford to drive it but at least your dick's bigger.
I'm having problems accessing /. homepage and I'm posting this from coral cache. oh! ..Wait.. I for one welcome our Chinese ddos overlords?
My granma's spectacles!
Blame Canada.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
A cube is pretty much the worst shape possible when it comes to distributing the force of an impact evenly across the entire object
Not true; What about those crystalline spacecraft that the Kryptonians use to send their infants to Earth in? They have all sorts of jutting and produding suraces.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
If not, it is not of much use knowing they could exist. After all the article says the meteorites would be small, fractured and covered by dust and later impacts. IMO expecting to stumble on them by accident on a return trip to the moon, as it says, is way too optimistic.
"Pieces of Ancient Middle Earth May Be Hidden On the Moon"
Did you know DNA is what makes a lot of the choices in your brain? Right, in every neuron, every time it fires, messages go into the nucleus (that's the dna's housing and equipment) and get translated by RNA and DNA... the resulting parts of the neuron that fire are due to the response from the DNA!
Erm... not really, no. Most "firing" of neurons (generation of action potential) happens on a purely electrical basis. There is chemical modulation of this based on quantities of neurotransmitters that are produced by the nucleus, but this only takes place on a very long term scale (think minutes, not the milliseconds it takes for an action potential to propogate).
Besides, so what if it does? DNA is responsible for governing _every reaction that goes on in our body_ by determining what new substances are to be produced based on the quantities present of other substances. That's simply how life works.
We use this same thing to make RNA computers that can do massive calculations in a fraction of the time it would take our current PCs to do it (well, the setup takes a while, yuk yuk.) This building blocks of life, which came about in a cave as the world cooled off from its volcanic eruptions, just randomly have supercomputing ability?!
The stimulus/response mechanism provided by RNA is an important part of life because it allows it to rapidly adapt to changing circumstances. But (1) it isn't really a "supercomputing ability". At least not until a lot of it has accumulated in the same place. Early RNA was probably extremely simple compared to what we see today. And (2) it didn't have to occur randomly in a form anything like as complex as RNA. Current theories of the origin of life include a few alternatives, including a much simpler system called PNA that might have evolved into RNA, and the possibility of "metabolism-first" abiogenesis which allows for a self-perpetuating cycle to exist and evolve without the complexity of a self-replicating information store. It then evolves such a store and begins replicating.
Presumably the collision needed to splash a bit of rock off the Earth, through its atmosphere, up its gravity well to the moon would be at least 6 times as forceful as the collision with the moon.
They'd have to show that bits of organic material would survive both collisions to make it plausible.
Then explain how you would go looking for the few unlikely surviving chunks on something the size of the moon. Which by the way keeps getting hit all over with rocks from everywhere else, hence all the dust and craters.
Good luck with that.
Or is this just one of those things like string theory where you get to make up a hypothesis that you can't possibly actually falsify?
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
There was a great collision and the Moon was formed from the Earth, so the Moon is the Ancient Earth.
Right ?
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
Directly from the page you apparantly googled (since you don't seem to have read it):
A detailed comparison of the properties of Lunar and Earth rock samples has placed very strong constraints on the possible validity of these hypotheses. For example, if the Moon came from material that once made up the Earth, then Lunar and Terrestrial rocks should be much more similar in composition than if the Moon was formed somewhere else and only later was captured by the Earth.
These analyses indicate that the abundances of elements in Lunar and Terrestrial material are sufficiently different to make it unlikely that the Moon formed directly from the Earth. Generally, work over the last 10 years has essentially ruled out the first two explanations and made the third one rather unlikely. At present the fifth hypothesis, that the Moon was formed from a ring of matter ejected by collision of a large object with the Earth, is the favored hypothesis; however, the question is not completely settled and many details remain to the accounted for.
Emphasis mine, and as it says the most likely theory is the collision theory. It fits all the known data and computer models show how plausible it is compared to the other theories.
Come on now... isn't this stretching things a bit. Science is supposed to be what about what we KNOW.
I used to think like that about evolution 10 years ago but now I think there is enough evidence to support it. I was a fairly fundamental Christian up until the last couple of years too, now I'm not sure what to believe, but what you are suggesting is just the "God of the Gaps" idea where you have to use God to explain everything you think is too amazing. I still believe there could be some greater intelligence/power than our own though, if only because another race could have evolved before ours in our own universe before this cycle, or in another part of a multiverse, whatever. You then have to try to explain how they got started, etc, and it just never ends. A man could drive himself mad wondering just why everything even is. I probably say that too much but it's just because it's the only thing that truly confuses me :P It's good to concentrate on what we can learn and know rather than waste time, but it's also true that people just ignore that 'something' must have always existed. I know aren't really capable of understanding anything with a lack of reference in time or space but to me it's unlikely that anything would exist, let alone a god, or some inanimate mass that would then develop into life. It's all pretty amazing.
Anyway as far as PNA and metabolisms go etc, I never studied biology (though I did study chemistry and physics), isn't the point that these systems didn't just appear one day, but they developed from simpler systems. Life is self-organising, and generally gets more organised over time. To say that RNA just appeared out of nowhere is pretty fantastic, but to say that some powerful intelligence appeared from nowhere to help it along is also pretty fantastic, so where do you draw the line? Urgh, I think that's enough random philosiphising for now, I'm off to play Battlefield: Bad Company. I wonder when computer game characters will start wondering who created them :P
which is totally what she said
The article doesn't mention how these earth-originated asteroids become space-borne, except a brief mention of the "Late Heavy Bombardment." I would think that pieces of earth that are sent into space by other asteroids hitting earth, would be subject to *far* more stress, heat, and general voilence in being struck hard enough to reach escape velocity, than they would on a simple re-entry.
Surely the impact event and associated energy required to eject the matter from Earth's stronger gravity and much thicker atmosphere, would be far worse when compared to the landing on the moon, no? (I know it's not a direct comparison, but consider how much fuel the Apollo missions in the massive boosters used to get out of Earth's gravity, versus how little they used to decelerate down to the moon's surface, carried on board the relatively small lander.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Quiet, secluded location. Clear skies. Perfect for the adventurous. Ideal for your country estate or getaway. Some restrictive covenents; but they aren't being enforced. Possibility of well water on site. Bring all reasonable offers.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Four letters:
NaCl
Earth is full of it. And so are you.
.
- aqk
F U
Four letters:
NaCl
Earth is full of it. And so are you.
Do you want to engage in some kind of debate about this, or just resort to name calling? What about my statement do you think is wrong, and why?
OK, Salty- no more name calling.
The NaCl crystal is cubic. A "square", if you will.
And you ARE full of it.
Luckily for you (perhaps unlucky for the rest of us) yours is in solution.
.
- aqk
F U
Welcome to the "Curse of the Thinking Man". Question everything!
I think what really frees most peoples' thinking is when they realize that "there is no why". Either that, or the plan/"why" is so alien, so outside of what we call the human experience (3D space, unidirectional time, etc), so dependent on things outside our frame of reference, that we haven't a prayer (pun intended) of ever "seeing" it.
PS - The *last* group of folks I'd expect to be "right" are desert tribesmen from 2000 years ago who thought all sorts of wrong/atrocious things.
With the first link, the chain is forged.