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Killer Asteroids Are Good For Life
Hugh Pickens writes "NASA reports that according to a study by Rebecca Martin and Mario Livio asteroid collisions may have provided a boost to the birth and evolution of complex life on earth delivering water and organic compounds to the early Earth and accelerating the rate of biological evolution with occasional impacts to disrupt a planet's environment to the point where species must try new adaptation strategies. 'Too many asteroids, and you've got an unrelenting cosmic shooting gallery, raining fiery death from above,' writes Fraser Cain. 'Too few asteroids, and complex life might not get the raw material it needs to get rolling. Life never gets that opportunity to really shake things up and evolve into more complex forms.' Martin and Livio suggest that the location of an asteroid belt relative to a Jupiter-like planet is not an accident. The asteroid belt in our solar system, located between Mars and Jupiter, is a region of millions of space rocks that sits near the 'snow line,' which marks the border of a cold region where volatile material such as water ice are far enough from the sun to remain intact. 'To have such ideal conditions you need a giant planet like Jupiter that is just outside the asteroid belt [and] that migrated a little bit, but not through the belt,' Livio explains. 'If a large planet like Jupiter migrates through the belt, it would scatter the material. If, on the other hand, a large planet did not migrate at all, that, too, is not good because the asteroid belt would be too massive. There would be so much bombardment from asteroids that life may never evolve.'"
Therefore it must be the work of God!
This is nice, but it is entirely speculation. There really isn't enough data to make a conclusion.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
...full of advanced life forms...
But not as we know it, Jim
You just gave another idea to those mad scientists out here that want to create a master race. Instead of diseases they`ll use meteors!
This combination doesn`t exist: ETIs that know about humanity and want to see us dead. Otherwise we wouldn't exist.
It was perhaps great for life back in the old days a couple billion years ago. But it wouldn't be very good for us today. Can we not have any more mass extinction events, please?
Anyway, we're doing a pretty fair job of causing our own mass extinction. Nuclear war, tailored viruses, nano-machines run amock, artificial intelligence that wants us gone. Yup, lots of chances to do ourselves in and give the Earth a chance to start over.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Here.
It is amazing how little we know about the universe. Not amazing in terms of "why don't we know this stuff", but amazing in terms of "there is so much to learn that it makes what we know seem infinitesimal."
Logic and what we know already point to a universe filled with intelligent life or at least life. Yet we seem so all alone. Are we the first? Are we in a universe filled with life and cannot detect it? Has this universe been abandoned by all the more advanced life forms and we're one of the few left? Are we in a zoo?
All of these questions, and we only have speculation for answers. I'd expect to have some answers to these question in the next generation or two. We're detecting planets at an accelerating rate and are getting to discover smaller planets now that Kepler has had enough time to get enough transits for the further away planets. Our detection of radio waves ability is improving and we now have better targets to try out.
While we may not have all the answers, I would expect by 2050 to know how common life is, but part of me wonders if we haven't detected intelligent life by then if we are not truly alone in this galaxy. I shudder to think that might be true, but it is a real possibility. We live in exciting times, and I thank those that have made missions like Kepler possible.
-- MyLongNickName
s/are/were/
Can we, within this theory, somehow equate human-induced ecological catastrophes to asteroid impacts?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
From TFS:
Martin and Livio suggest that the location of an asteroid belt relative to a Jupiter-like planet is not an accident. The
This seems to be a poor word choice. I think "coincidence" is far more appropriate choice to suggest a correlation. "Accident" seems to imply intent.
This sounds exactly like the kind of spiel a supervillian would give, prior to actually becoming a supervillian. Once he's rejected by his alumni and alma mater, he'll go through the necessary drastic measures to make sure something like this happens, just to prove he's right.
Anything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger. That is not necessarily a good thing, however. Or a bad thing. Life doesn't mind. Life just goes on. I don't think that life has no challenges without it, however. Earth offers too many different ecosystems to be bored.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
The reason we don't see a lot of other life is because it takes awhile to evolve.The Fermi paradox added time to their probabilities which always cancels out any calculations. The easiest-to-understand calculation is this: there are 10 to the 22nd stars in the entire universe. For Earth to be unique (at this time) all we need is a string of 22 one out of ten chances of something happening. Or 11 one out of a hundred chances.
For my money, I'll bet life doesn't come out of the oceans (and develop fire and civilization) without a moon causing huge tides.
Basically, intelligent life can only evolve under circumstances identical to the way we evolved.
"100 percent of the cases where we know life evolved, these circumstances prevailed. Therefore..."
The planet still contains a couple of super-massive volcanoes, too. If one of those blows, it will be an extinction-level event. Also, there is little we can do (at the moment) to delay or accelerate such an event.
If it's not an accident, then it's intentional. For it to be intentional, it must have been designed.
Sounds to me like they are trying to make a teleological argument for the existence of God.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Are also theorized as necessary for life on earth because all that loose hydrogen formed the Milky Way galaxy around Sagittarius A* and volcanos spread sulfur-based amino acids necessary for early life. Hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis are probably also necessary for life in some way we don't yet understand.
In conclusion, if something is extremely detrimental to life, it's probably also necessary for it.
Killer asteroids are good to life that might emerge after the collision. But if you poll the existing life on the planet? meh! Its popularity is going to be very very bad.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Snowline"-based conjectures actually postulate that Jupiter was formed exactly because of its location on the snowline: since this snowline has to be a sharp boundary(1), a locally-enhanced density area, radially symmetric around the Sun(2), is created and collapses into a massive planet because it rapidly accretes material(3) from its neighborhood.
I have seen a lot of hand-waving used to fill in the gaps (note: "hand-waving": (idiomatic) Discussion or argumentation involving approximation, vagueness, educated guessing, or the attempt to explain or excuse vagaries) on where and when a gas giant actually forms in a snowline, and how exactly planets 'migrate'.
(1) sharp boundaries may not be as common as you think: there is only a handful of computer models that actually take into account the three-dimensional structure of the accretion disk (proto-planetary disk, a very computationally expensive problem) and lots of physics are lost in 2D simplifications.
(3) Fairly recent observations have shown that complex organic molecules are present in Giant Molecular Cloud structures, long preceding the formation of any star or planet. The mechanism of their creation and their distribution is mostly unknown, and an active area of research, as of course is the formation of planetary systems. Hand-waving has not produced any robust results as of yet. Computer modeling, on the other hand, looks more promising.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
...because most planets form under similar conditions to Earth (coalescence of dust cloud, leaving behind large lumps - asteroids - which are pulled in toward the star by gravity and bombard inner planets).
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
...it works every time??
A sci-fi novel by Robert Sawyer, where aliens show up at Earth looking for signs of similarly timed planet-wide events like this that pushed evolution along to create intelligent life.
Good for life after transiently being really, *really* bad....
is not asteroids, but intelligence itself. It's more plausible that intelligent life self-destructs on it's own without any intervention, because that's the end result to intelligent life.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
...or your money back, guaranteed!
"that opportunity to really shake things up"
Like Stalin was good for Russia, Romney will be good for the USA, Hitler was good for Germany, Ahmadinejad was good for Iran kind of shake things up?
These things may be good in the abstract, in that Life can get nudged along by them.
But once life has formed, it's not so good for it .. just ask the dinosaurs. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Girly Man: A Steroid is bad!