Evidence For Comet-Borne Microfossils Supports Panspermia

New submitter onyxruby writes "On December 29th of last year a comet exploded over Sri Lanka. When examined by Cardiff University one of the comet samples was found to contain micro-fossils akin to plankton. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center tested additional samples with similar results. The research paper was published in the Journal of Cosmology. In practice this means that the argument that life did not start on Earth has gained additional evidence." Update: 03/12 16:59 GMT by S : On the other hand, Phil Plait says the paper is very flawed; the sample rocks the researchers tested may not even be meteorites.

Comments

What If?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its just a piece of the earth's ocean that was blasted into space during the theoretical asteroid extinction event?

Re:What If?

[cshark]

That would be fascinating.
Question would be this: Does it match anything in the fossil record?

Re:What If?

[durrr]

Nah, it's a freshwater contaminated sample, the diatoms found are not fossilized and they are all existing species. Go read the Bad Astronomy blog for details.

Re:What If?

[Big Hairy Ian]

Indeed it hasn't even been officially classified as a meteorite

Re:What If?

[minogully]

Wouldn't this only matter if we had an exhaustive fossil record?

Re:What If?

[flayzernax]

The nitrogen content doesn't match living organisms, don't know about the fossil record though.

"Panspermia"

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that something that mainly the Germans are into?

Re:"Panspermia"

[Black Parrot]

Isn't that something that mainly the Germans are into?

You're confusing Germans with satyrs.

Re:"Panspermia"

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Isn't that something that mainly the Germans are into?

No, it's a meme of the Intelligent Designer retinue: The belief that the seeds of life are spewed throughout the Universe.

You know, like, in the beginning, the Intelligent Designer created the Heavens and the Earth, and then He wanked off all over them.

Re:"Panspermia"

[tompaulco]

I have never heard of Panspermia being associated with Intelligent Design. I have heard people who believe in Intelligent Design shooting down Panspermia as some kind of new age nonsensical unscientific crap.
Basically, Panspermia solves the issue of the unlikelihood of life developing sporadically on Earth, by saying "Space did it", which is the scientific equivalent of "God did it".

Re:"Panspermia"

[Tarlus]

You know, like, in the beginning, the Intelligent Designer created the Heavens and the Earth, and then He wanked off all over them.

I'll have you know I just spilled my drink. Thanks for the laugh. =)

Re:"Panspermia"

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Panspermia saying "life came from space" is no different than a new isolated lake being formed from meltwater in a frigid environment and over a period of thousands of years being filled with an entire ecosystem as the environment warms. The inhabitants of the lake (if they were intelligent enough) ask how life arose spontaneously in their little world because to them that lake is their world. But to us it's obvious life arrived there from the vast ecosystem that surrounds it -- an ecosystem the inhabitants of the lake can't see. Even in this day and age people still have the prejudice that the Earth is the center of the universe. Being "certain" the life arose on Earth and attacking the idea that it came from space as if it were some kind of heresy demonstrates that human psychology doesn't change. Some of us are just more enlightened thinkers.

Re:"Panspermia"

[Sibko]

Basically, Panspermia solves the issue of the unlikelihood of life developing sporadically on Earth, by saying "Space did it", which is the scientific equivalent of "God did it".

But... technically, space did do it. We are, after all, the example of space doing it.

Question: If we send a probe to Europa, contaminate it with Earth-born bacteria, and 2 billion years from now that moon is crawling with life, does that mean "God did it" too?

Or perhaps panspermia is not the equivalent of 'god dun it' anymore than evolution is.
The idea of panspermia still requires evolution to take place somewhere.

Re:"Panspermia"

[the biologist]

Not exactly.

Arguing that life didn't start here, but instead started somewhere else... simply avoids the issue of how life started. Panspermia advocates have routinely claimed that "DNA from space" gave key adaptations to earth life forms. Instead of the hypothetical new enzyme to digest an odd sugar, they claim such key adaptations as wings and eyes. This is nonsense.

There are plenty of ways in which life could spread from other places/stars. Even at incredibly low odds of surviving the transit from another star system, one origination of life in an otherwise sterile galaxy would quickly result in that life system being found everywhere it could survive... but there is plenty of evidence in our biology that the life system here was formed here. There is plenty of evidence suggesting that the origination of life is, while not trivial, likely to be commonplace in our galaxy. The life that is floating around in space (under the Panspermia model) very likely would get eaten by whatever native life it encounters, because that native life is in better shape for not being mostly dead due to the the long travels. If you sterilized a world with a directed Gamma-Ray-Burst, then that space life might possibly, maybe, have a chance... except that native life will have survived deep under ground and would reclaim the surface in large numbers before the rare space microbe came by.

Re:"Panspermia"

[the biologist]

Why would you assume that life is unlikely on the time- and size-scales of planets, just because we haven't yet seen it in very small lab experiments over very short periods of time? The longest running experiment to examine abiogenesis has been going for 151 years in about a liter of liquid. The lessons learned from this do not apply to whole planets over billions of years.

Why would you assume that life only happened once here on Earth? Once there was an existing bio-system, any newly formed nascent life would be less well adapted than previously formed life... and would have quickly been consumed.

Why are all Y-chromosomes derived from one Y-chromosome in the past? Just because everything else died out doesn't mean that there was only one Y-chromosome around.

Re:"Panspermia"

[TapeCutter]

It's a false dichotomy. The idea that the emergence of life was a unique event is a religious concept not a scientific one. Life arose on Earth from chemistry, most likely near hydrothermal vents since the convection currents supply a cyclic temperature gradient and the vent supplies the chemicals. It may have been supplemented with life from comets (surrounding environment) but whether the first ever microbe on Earth was a native or an immigrant is not only an unanswerable historical question, it's also an "unenlightened one" since a clear scientific definition that divides living and non-living chemistry still alludes us.

Why is this not an even bigger story?

[scottnix]

Proof of extra-terrestrial life.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[Black Parrot]

Wickramasinghe has been "proving" panspermia for decades. This isn't any bigger a story than the last dozen times.

He once claimed that influenza was from space because it struck everywhere simultaneously - a patently false claim. You can learn more than he knows about it on Wikipedia.

He should give it up and go into creationism, where there's money to be had.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[arth1]

Because there is no proof, and not even any evidence for it.
It's been pretty thoroughly debunked, and at most it seems to be proof of Chandra Wickramasinghe's incompetence as a scientist, lackluster con man abilities, or both.
Oh, and certain slashdot editors accepting bad articles without spending two minutes on Google first.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

So is Cardiff University just a diploma mill with an all-hack staff, or are they a credible uni that happens to tolerate eccentrics like Wickramashinge?

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[j00r0m4nc3r]

All I've seen is criticism of the analysis techniques involved. No real "proof" either way, just a bunch of opinions...

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[Black Parrot]

All I've seen is criticism of the analysis techniques involved. No real "proof" either way, just a bunch of opinions...

No real proof either way on Russell's Teapot either, just a bunch of opinions. We should keep an open mind until someone goes and has a look.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[poetmatt]

he is no more likely to be right than he ever was before. Which, without evidence, the chance remains at a firm 0%.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[tompaulco]

All I've seen is criticism of the analysis techniques involved. No real "proof" either way, just a bunch of opinions...

No real proof either way on Russell's Teapot either, just a bunch of opinions. We should keep an open mind until someone goes and has a look.

Ironically, Russel's teapot is falsifiable, albeit a very large pain in the butt to prove false.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[Jane Q. Public]

"Proof of extra-terrestrial life."

It's not a bigger story because it's not new. This particular meteorite may be new, but this has all been done before.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[Black Parrot]

But despite that, he is still probably right. What is the chance of micro-organisms NOT getting into space?

There's a rather large gap between "there are some microorganisms in space" and "he is probably right".

He's claiming to have found something specific, and he is wrong. Again.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[Jane Q. Public]

"he is no more likely to be right than he ever was before. Which, without evidence, the chance remains at a firm 0%."

That's even less "science" than Wickramashinge's critics believe he is performing.

Without real evidence either way, the "chance" of his being right is completely indeterminate. And if it could be determined, it would likely not be 0%. A lot closer to 0% than 100%, though.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[Black Parrot]

I would guess that it's a tenure thing.

Universities usually worry whether they'll give tenure to someone who will spend the rest of their career loafing. Perhaps they should be more worried that they'll give tenure to someone who will spend the rest of their career embarrassing them.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[arth1]

So is Cardiff University just a diploma mill with an all-hack staff, or are they a credible uni that happens to tolerate eccentrics like Wickramashinge?

The latter, although they fired Wickramashinge a few years ago. He's still working in Cardiff, but not for Cardiff University.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[ShanghaiBill]

But despite that, he is still probably right.

No, he is almost certainly wrong. It is plausible that a rock containing live microorganisms could be ejected from a planet during an asteroid strike, drift to another planet within the same solar system, land, and survive. But it is implausible that this mechanism could spread life through interstellar space. To eject a rock fragment with enough force to completely escape a solar gravity well would melt it. Once it was ejected from the solar system, it would take eons to reach another star system. Once it reached another system, it would have an infinitesimal chance of hitting a life supporting planet. It would be far more likely to fall into the star, hit a gas giant, or just orbit for a few billion years. The chance of this happening, even once, in the lifetime of the universe, is remote. The chance of it happening repeatedly, in some sort of chain reaction, is as close to zero as anything can get.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[MightyMartian]

In other words, Wickramashinge is a more accredited version of Archimedes Plutonium.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, he COULD be right because, after all, ANYTHING's possible. But, saying he's 'probably' right is a broad broad stretch (as in Armstrong).

I think your idea is cool. You know, somehow a micro-organism finds it's way into a rock, either due to a pourous surface or perhaps a crack.. Somehow, this rock has a great food and oxygen supply for this organism. This rock has excellent radiation shielding and temperature insulation too. Due to these exotic properties, this rock also regenerates these microorganisms so they can survive millennia, if not millions of years, without degeneration of their DNA and other critical bits. Coupled with regeneration, the rock also stores secretions of this micro-organism so that it doesn't provide a toxic environment for it's passenger.

Lastly, when it injects into a future planetary body, it won't burn up completely in the atmosphere (with such exotic properties, it wouldn't burn up). Once on the ground, the rock would have to somehow let the micro-organisms out to explore and lead to future intelligent beings who'll eventually question their own origins.

Okay, I'll quit joking as it's gone too far.

Finding evidence to support transpermia from a comet sample would be far-fetched without first taking the sample directly from space and studying it on a space station in a container somehow NOT contaminated with existing earth-based micro-organisms. And, you'd have to assume that there are actual exo-biological micro-organisms somehow living dormant within the cometary material (complete with intact DNA or some alien equivalent to DNA). It'd have to survive millennia within this cometary material to begin with. Cosmic rays and other radiation would somehow not effect them, and varying temperature extremes wouldn't effect it either.

At this point, it's still philosophy.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[arth1]

In other words, Wickramashinge is a more accredited version of Archimedes Plutonium.

Wickwrackrum isn't nearly as funny as Archie was, though.
He's more like Jack Sarfatti, in that he occasional gets into big press and taken seriously by journalists who really should know better.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

Wow. Now those are some intriguing notions, and I'd subscribe to his newsletter in a heartbeat. Is the DC comics bad guy pseudonym his way of saying, yes, I have gone completely off the deep end, so what?

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[flayzernax]

But this has a lot more proof then Russels Teapot, at the very least there's pictures of something. The disproof comes from the people claiming it is a "rock ejected from earth"

Ok so prove its not a meteor. Haven't seen very good science done here =/

Just a bunch of curmudgeony professorial types demanding that Chandra Wickramasinghe is a heretic. Just because Mr Wickramasinghe's theory postulates its evidence for fossilized life in a meteor doesn't mean it must be tossed out. Add it to your body of "things to investigate more fully".

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[Beezlebub33]

But despite that, he is still probably right. What is the chance of micro-organisms NOT getting into space?

Those are separate questions. It makes sense that micro-organisms get into space. He is still (probably) wrong. His argument is that life on this planet came from micro-organisms and that this provides evidence for that (and that Archaeopteryx is a fake. )

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[arth1]

Keep in mind that it's the same professor Wickramsinghe that testified on behalf of creationists in Arkansas, and among other things claimed that the Archaeopteryx never existed and the fossils were all forgeries.

The onus is on those who makes extraordinary claims to provide extraordinary evidence. And doubly so when they have a crackpot history.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[T Murphy]

I know! Everyone is right! You see, life started on Earth, but then a giant meteor smashed into earth, which happened to send some rocks into space that had bacteria on them. That meteor was so big, it wiped out all life on Earth, so years later when some of those rocks landed back on Earth, they became the source of all life we see today.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[the biologist]

Ok so prove its not a meteor. Haven't seen very good science done here =/

The rock was found on Earth, where there are many Earth rocks and few rocks of recent space origin. Given this context, the rock in question is mostly likely an Earth rock. This is not an exceptional claim. The exceptional claim is that the rock is a meteor, a claim for which the researcher has shown no evidence

Just a bunch of curmudgeony professorial types demanding that Chandra Wickramasinghe is a heretic. Just because Mr Wickramasinghe's theory postulates its evidence for fossilized life in a meteor doesn't mean it must be tossed out. Add it to your body of "things to investigate more fully".

His theory isn't being tossed out because it is 'heretical'. It is being tossed out because he has shown absolutely no evidence for it. I'd wager that eventually, some real evidence will be found which supports the panspermia idea... but even then it wouldn't support his claims.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[flayzernax]

Those indeed are pretty extraordinary claims, thanks for pointing them out.

I wouldn't take anything he said at face value without scrutiny. The discussion section of http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.1845.pdf pretty much states the arguments for the samples being meteorites.

There's also quite a few other names on the paper as well. Its not proof, but evidence, maybe.

Who knows, we are definitely still waiting for that extraordinary evidence. In my opinion it'll come from us going to space, digging around on asteroids, comets, and planets, and finding things like this to back it up. Or sending a probe to Europa and taking a picture of a geothermal vent crawling with life.

It stands to reason if fossils survived in meteorites on earth, there might be some in craters on the moon as well, microscopic fossils anyway.

The journals, news articles are not at least claiming this is the extraordinary proof to say, yeah for sure.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[Anonymous Coward]

To eject a rock fragment with enough force to completely escape a solar gravity well would melt it.

You only need the impact to eject the rock into space. The rock can be ejected from the system later after being accelerated by large bodies like Jupiter. Yes, the trajectories will have to be just right, but there are lots and lots of rocks that have been blasted into space. I would have a hard time to believing an impact rock containing at least fossils has never been ejected from the solar system.

Once it was ejected from the solar system, it would take eons to reach another star system.

Extremophiles can theoretically survive the environment of space indefinitely in a dormant state. In the vast reaches between stars they aren't likely to encounter anything challenging beyond the cold vacuum of space itself. So if they can survive space, they can certainly survive the trip regardless of duration.

Once it reached another system, it would have an infinitesimal chance of hitting a life supporting planet.

The problem is that you are referring to a single rock. Your odds of winning the lottery are very poor, but someone eventually wins. There are potentially a lot of life-bearing rocks being thrown around.

The chance of this happening, even once, in the lifetime of the universe, is remote.

We simply don't have enough information to make this claim.

The chance of it happening repeatedly, in some sort of chain reaction, is as close to zero as anything can get.

You have this backwards. It is more likely to occur as some sort of chain reaction than it is to occur once or twice, because of the unlikelihood of it happening for any given rock.

Given what we know about comets there is a chance that life can form there as well. If this is the case, the chances for panspermia are vastly improved.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[flayzernax]

"The exceptional claim is that the rock is a meteor" - I hear you there, that is maybe an exceptional claim, as a lay man I can not really comment there. But it certainly looks like there is good argument for it being a meteorite, and evidence is given in the paper linked to by the article.

But thanks for taking the time to further explain that the scientific community does not believe it is a meteorite. I would like to see more solid proof though. That would require the samples going to other labs and having analysis done, and a different theory postulated.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[Black Parrot]

So is Cardiff University just a diploma mill with an all-hack staff, or are they a credible uni that happens to tolerate eccentrics like Wickramashinge?

The latter, although they fired Wickramashinge a few years ago. He's still working in Cardiff, but not for Cardiff University.

LoL. The link quotes him as saying that he is the Astrobiology Editor for the Journal of Cosmology, where this article was published.

If this was for real it would be appearing in Nature.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[poetmatt]

he has no evidence. so everything he proposes is explicitly and entirely speculative. he does not deserve any credit for anything as a result of that.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[The Evil Atheist]

Really, then how do you explain comets etc being ejected from solar systems?

Hint, not everything has to be done in one big explosion.

Re:Why is this not an even bigger story?

[Jane Q. Public]

"he has no evidence. so everything he proposes is explicitly and entirely speculative. he does not deserve any credit for anything as a result of that."

I don't dispute that. But that's not even close to the same thing as 0% chance of being right.

Personally, I think he's full of bull. Because what little evidence I *have* seen would tend to refute his claims. But I wouldn't put it at 0%.

On earth...

[i kan reed]

We're all illegal aliens.

Re:On earth...

[donutz]

What do you mean illegal? I think the immigration laws at that time consisted of "gravity" -- you're not suggesting the cometary debris disobeyed that law, are you?

On Bad-Ass Tronomer

[Black Parrot]

Phil Plait rips the paper to shreds. Wickramasinghe is a crank, and that Journal publishes all kinds of nonsense.

Re:On Bad-Ass Tronomer

[Jane Q. Public]

"Phil Plait rips the paper to shreds. Wickramasinghe is a crank, and that Journal publishes all kinds of nonsense."

This deserves more than a short mention. I do not always agree with Phil Plait, but I think he nailed it pretty solidly here.

First, Plait points out that the diatoms are (A) all known Earthly varieties, and (B) almost certainly not "fossilized".

Then, he gives us other good reasons to question whether the "fragment" is a meteorite at all.

BA link

[Scareduck]

Here. Interesting stuff.

Re:BA link

[nametaken]

I can't help but laugh at the differences.

Slashdot-linked Register article...

Earth bombarded by interplanetary SLIME MONSTERS
We are not alone' is the message of Invasion of the Hystrichospheres

Invaders from an unknown planet entered Earth's atmosphere on December 29 last year, riding in a fiery comet that burst 10km above Sri Lanka.

Compared with Phil's article...

UPDATE: No, Life Has Still Not Been Found in a Meteorite

Oh boy. Here we go again, again.

In January, I wrote about Chandra Wickramasinghe, who claimed he had found fossilized diatoms (microscopic plant life) in a meteorite. I showed pretty carefully why this claim is very wrong, but apparently it wasn't enough: A new paper from Wickramasinghe's team has been published furthering the claims, and it's getting picked up by mainstream media.

I read the paper, and really it's more of the same as from the first paper. In some ways, it's even shakier;

Phil Plait says no...

[janeuner]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/11/meteorite_life_claims_of_fossils_in_a_meteorite_are_still_wrong.html

Re:Phil Plait says no...

[quixote9]

I'm a biologist, and I'd second Phil Plait. Definitely wait for second, third, and fourth opinions on this before getting excited. The fact that they're seeing ET "dinoflagellates" and "cyanobacteria" in their samples is a fair indication that they're seeing things.

Re:Phil Plait says no...

[Rogerborg]

Plait is kidding nobody this time. I can clearly make out infinitesimal strings of starch based polymers, with a scattering of ball-like protein cores. Deny not the touch of His Noodly Appendage.

Re:Phil Plait says no...

[arth1]

A few seconds reading JOC or about JOC reveals it's a complete farce of a "journal".

More to the point, the Executive Editor of the Journal of Cosmology is none other than Chandra Wickramasinghe himself.

Because it's wrong?

[slashmojo]

According to this..

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/11/meteorite_life_claims_of_fossils_in_a_meteorite_are_still_wrong.html

Not a meteorite nor fossilized diatoms

[jmichaelg]

Bill Plait's take on this story.

Re:Not a meteorite nor fossilized diatoms

[wonkey_monkey]

Bill Plait's take on this story.

Is that Phil's big brother?

Chicken or egg?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

If the best way to populate the galaxy is to seed it with primitive, unicellular life, perhaps the ultimate function of multicellular life is to help scatter and feed bacteria (and the like) all over the world, so when something big finally hits us, enough of the well-distributed, well-fed spores might survive on blasted chunks of rock to colonize the next world.

Re:Chicken or egg?

[EvilSS]

So we're all just cattle to our subtle microbial overlords? Interesting. I kinda like that.

Re:Chicken or egg?

[khallow]

By number of cells, the bacteria we carry, outnumber our own cells by an order of magnitude.

Re:Chicken or egg?

[j00r0m4nc3r]

Bingo. If you define evolution as the process by which you maximize your species' survivability, then bacteria are WAY more evolved than we will ever be, quite counter-intuitively. It wouldn't take much to rid the universe of humans, but try that with bacteria. Even if the Earth exploded or something, bacteria would ride on the debris to some other planet and colonize, almost guaranteed. And they do it without intelligence, complex biological structures, or technology. We think we're so advanced evolutionarily, but really we're one of the least adapted species on the planet, in terms of survivability.

Re:Chicken or egg?

[khallow]

We think we're so advanced evolutionarily, but really we're one of the least adapted species on the planet, in terms of survivability.

We'd be better off than any other large animal (say using the arbitrary floor of 45 kg, which apparently is sometimes used to define the minimum size of "megafauna") on Earth. So I wouldn't call us the "least adapted". And we've since learned the trick of adapting the environment to us rather than vice versa, which puts us in a unique place as far as large animals go.

Astroturfing

[dmini]

Read the title as "Evidence For Comet-Borne *Microsoft*..." That's would be some heavy astroturfing!

Re:Plankton? Wow!

[Black Parrot]

But the discovery of extra-terrestrial plankton would be a huge deal.

Yeah, it would mean whales can live in space.

Comet?

[Jaysyn]

Must have been a very small comet, I didn't hear of a mass die-off near Sri Lanka.

Diatomaceous BS

[ttimes]

Looking at the original article, they are not peer reviewed and they have loads of fun citing only their previous articles that claim the same thing. Are they looking at small dust particles and thinking they see 'plankton' or is it really there? - a greater mystery than their paper can answer.

Isn't the big story "extra-terrestiral life found"

[jrifkin]

If true, isn't the big story that "Non-earth life has been discovered"?

The question as to whether non-earth life seeded earth is of secondary importance, it seems to me.

Miller–Urey experiment

[HaeMaker]

Miller–Urey experiment created amino acids in the lab with lightning. This is the most likely source of life on earth. Not Mars, not comets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment

Re:Miller–Urey experiment

[Ardeaem]

Miller–Urey experiment created amino acids in the lab with lightning. This is the most likely source of life on earth.

The Miller-Urey experiments are the source of life on earth? Those experiments were more successful than I thought!

Re:Miller–Urey experiment

[MozeeToby]

All that Miller–Urey showed was that it's really pretty easy to get the basic ingredients to life, heck, more recently we've found huge clouds of amino acids floating free in space. There are a lot of open questions about how you go from amino acids to self replicating bacteria though, enough so that it doesn't necessarily make sense to dismiss panspermia out of hand, to do so would limit our thinking to only those conditions that could existed on primordial earth.

Re:Miller–Urey experiment

[Immerman]

Well, it's a very likely source of life, but not necessarily on Earth. At present we have absolutely no idea what the odds might be proto-life could spontaneously arise in the organic slime. On the other hand we know that some earthbound animals (water bears - they get their own phylum and are not closely related to any other species on earth) are capable of drying up and entering a suspended state in which they can surviving unshielded in space for prolonged periods, even repairing most genetic damage that may accumulate once they reanimate. Whether they could survive long enough to reach another planet of star if, say, nicely shielded and cryogenically frozen within comet is an open question.

So, two viable explanations for how life got started on Earth, with supporting anecdotal evidence for both. We'd need to know a lot more before we could dismiss either possibility.

Re:Miller–Urey experiment

[Immerman]

Yeah, it's too bad the flux capacitor in the next lab malfunctioned and apparently disintegrated the evidence.

Re:Miller–Urey experiment

[Extremus]

Panspermia doesn't really answear the question of how life started. If panspermia is found to be true, then the question just changes from "how life started on earth" to "how life started".

Re:Miller–Urey experiment

[Immerman]

Sure, lots of smart people have their favorite back-of-the-napkin models for things like this, it makes for good conversation at cocktail parties. Get five of them in a room and you'll get five perfectly reasonable and well thought out answers that completely disagree with each other.

Order from disorder is no big deal - that's what the universe *does*. The question is, what are the odds of randomly stumbling across an *imperfectly self-replicating* system. It appears to have taken at least a half-billion years to have occurred on the amino slime covered early Earth, or at least to reach the point where it started leaving geological clues that it existed.

It's Junk Science

[Maddog Batty]

Bad Astronomer has done a good hatchet job on this story:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/11/meteorite_life_claims_of_fossils_in_a_meteorite_are_still_wrong.html

Re:It's Junk Science

[Black Parrot]

Bad Astronomer has done a good hatchet job on this story

If by "hatchet" you mean bardiche or one of the other candidates in our recent poll.

Re:It's Junk Science

[durrr]

Like "more than three ounces of shampoo?"

I'm sure that would clean up the story.

Re:Plankton? Wow!

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

You are right. Eukaryotic cells are quite evolved from what are thought to be the earliest cells to form.

Who thinks life began on Earth?

[jason8]

Perhaps I'm not being anthropocentric enough, but does anyone really think that life began on Earth? Perhaps there's no evidence yet to prove otherwise, but just on an intellectual level, it seems roughly similar to claiming that the universe revolves around us, or to expecting that alien life forms will be carbon-based, with arms and legs, symmetrical bodies, a tendency to post as anonymous cowards, etc...

Re:Who thinks life began on Earth?

[characterZer0]

It is only anthropocentric if you believe that live began only on Earth.

Re:Who thinks life began on Earth?

[Black Parrot]

Perhaps I'm not being anthropocentric enough, but does anyone really think that life began on Earth? Perhaps there's no evidence yet to prove otherwise, but just on an intellectual level, it seems roughly similar to claiming that the universe revolves around us

There's a difference between thinking that life began on earth vs. thinking that life could *only* begin on earth.

The observable universe contains something like 100,000,000,000 galaxies with an average(?) of 100,000,000,000 stars each, and heaven knows what's beyond our observability horizon. I would be utterly astonished if we somehow proved that life has never existed in any of those systems. Yet I suspect that life really did begin here on earth, independent of any of the others.

Besides, if you claim that it originated somewhere else and got transferred to earth, you're just relocating the question of how it began. That hypothetical somewhere else isn't the center and purpose of the universe any more than earth is.

Re:Who thinks life began on Earth?

[Black Parrot]

and heaven knows what's beyond our observability horizon.

BTW, if physicists are right even God doesn't know, because the information can't be transferred. Or, if God is everywhere, the part of him that's "here" doesn't know what the part of him that is "there" knows, due to to the whole speed of light thingy.

Pardon the mental/theological masturbation...

Re:Who thinks life began on Earth?

[SecurityGuy]

To borrow a phrase I just read in Plait's rebuttal, I'm not sure life began here, but I think it's the way to bet.

Why? Because it's been demonstrated to be chemically possible given the environment here billions of years ago. Because the panspermia theory strikes me as people trying to answer the question "how did life arise?" merely by postulating that it came from somewhere else, which doesn't answer the question how it arose there.

Right now, we don't have any evidence life exists anywhere else in the universe. Personally, I think it probably does. If/when we find it, we can start looking at ways it might be transported from its home to ours. Wickramasinghe's basic idea isn't even a bad one. If you can find evidence of life in something demonstrably not from earth and rule out contamination, that's really compelling. Someday, perhaps, that will happen and qualified scientists will look at the tests and data and say "I can't see where they did anything wrong. I accept this result." That is just not what happened here.

Re:Who thinks life began on Earth?

[tompaulco]

Life as we know it started on Earth. Life as other entities may know it may have started elsewhere. The "as we know it" factor in our universe is so mind-bogglingly big that there may be life that we simply wouldn't be able to recognize as life.

Re:Who thinks life began on Earth?

[Immerman]

> what is more probable?

Correct answer: We don't know. We have absolutely zero idea what the odds of protolife spontaneously arising in the organic slime might be, except that if that is what happened on Earth then it took somewhere north of a billion years to happen in a planet-sized petri dish teeming with amino acids, so probably pretty low. Then again maybe Earth was just spectacularly (un)lucky. You can't really tell much from one data point.

Meanwhile we also have Water Bears - freaky little indestructible animals that are perfectly capable entering a suspended state and surviving unprotected in space for extended periods (freezing, radiation, etc), and might just possibly be capable of crossing between planets or even stars if they were unlucky enough to get lobbed into space by a large impact and be cryogenically frozen deep in their lump of mud (aka comet). So anecdotal evidence that panspermia might also be possible. Probability, also completely unkown.

Re:Who thinks life began on Earth?

[Hatta]

Life had to begin somewhere. What's anthropocentric about assuming that life began in the only place it's ever shown to exist? Until there's evidence to suggest otherwise, it's the only sensible hypothesis.

Re:Who thinks life began on Earth?

[Immerman]

S1) Actually the amino acids are the easy part, the Miller-Urey experiment combined with what we know of Earths geologic history suggests that the entire planet was awash in them for over a billion of years before life appeared. And we could probably work out a decent estimate for reaction rate. What we *can't* estimate is the likelyhood that a reaction (or more likely a long complicated sequence of reactions) results in a complex proto-life molecule capable of self replication and almost by extension evolution. Because frankly the number of variables are astounding, and we have only the vaguest idea of what that proto-life might have been. Something like RNA was the latest theory I heard - so what are the odds that a bunch of random amino acids will link up into an RNA chain that just happens to be "programmed" for self replication an evolution? Not a fraken clue. It probably happened here at least once after about a billion years of stagnant amino muck, but for some reason nobody has yet run an experiment to see how long it takes to happen again., and you can't tell much from one data point. Maybe the average time is 50 years, or 15 billion. We just have no way to even make an educated guess.
ESTIMATE: Unknowable from the data available.

S2) We don't yet have enough data to make an informed estimate of the number of Earth-like planets in the galaxy that might have possessed a hospitable "amino soup" at some point, but in the next few decades that may change. As a rough approximation we could take the estimated 2-20 billion "Earth-like" planets in the milky way, and then multiply by the completely unknown chance of life arising on a given planet...
ESTIMATE: Unknowable.

As for panspermia, I seem to remember hearing an estimate that free-floating matter could spread throughout the galaxy within a span of a few of galactic years (225 million years each), let's call it an even billion years. So has there been enough time? It's speculated that life is only likely to form around a 3rd generation or later star like our own since 1st and 2nd-gen stars lack sufficient quantities of the heavier elements necessary in their proto-planetary disc. So 3rd-gen stars started forming about 9 billion years ago - and assuming life followed a similar timeline on "AnceStar" as here, the first evidence of life would be laid down about a billion years later (8bya) , photosynthesis and the resultant planetary oxygen poisoning life would be developed about a billion years after that (7bya), another billion to evolve sexual reproduction (6bya), and finally a half-billion more for multicellular life to evolve. (5.5bya). A billion years later the first animal life shows up (4.5bya). It's about this time our own star forms, and life will show up in a billion years so something has to happen to AnceStar's planet. Nova, meteor impact bombardment, *something* throws great chunks of life-rich cruft out of the star system, and it has a billion years to spread throughout the galaxy and reach us, no problem.

Now you may object to having one of the very first 3rd-gen stars develop life, or maybe you think that if life here were "jump started" then it should reasonably take longer to have evolved the first time, and that's fine. Because if panspermia happened then it probably happened with that first early life that we find evidence of here, which had time to have evolved on AnceStar over 3 billion years before the animals - so we've got a three billion year "fudge factor" to work with - that's the entire history of life on this planet, 2/3 of the age of our sun, plenty of time for lots of stars to form, and lots of proto-life to possibly evolve.

Not saying it happened that way, but it's definitely a possibility. And one other implication of panspermia - if we ever meet aliens descended from the same "seeds" we should be at least chemically compatible. Built from the same small handful of amino acids, similar cell processes. We might even find and least some of each others' biota nutritious: "Explore the galaxy, meat strange new people, and then eat them."

Re:Who thinks life began on Earth?

[Black Parrot]

Of course God for this universe, by definition (mine) is omnipotent and omniscient for this universe, and so not really subject to the laws of physics in this universe....

Which, if indeed true, has the interesting consequence that supernatural mechanisms exist that can make an end run around the laws of nature.

If you want to invent a warp drive, get a research position at a seminary.

Where life started

[falconwolf]

I'm neutral on whether this is good or bad news, however while it's evidence some life may have an extraterrestrial origin it is not evidence life may not have started right here on earth. I have no problem with both being true, terrestrial and extraterrestrial origins of life. The odds may be astronomically high but without proof ruling out one or the other I won't ignore it.

Falcon

Beat the crap out of the rock

[mynameiskhan]

Wallis and Wikramasinghe are certainly persistent in publishing a paper in every volume of J. Cosmol. on this one polonnaruwa rock. Their last volume pub was discussed here (http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/01/15/2119212/no-life-has-not-been-found-in-a-meteorite). And now this. Seems pretty tough for his peers to counter the claims.

Re:wrong

[j00r0m4nc3r]

Don't assume that just because it's bad science it must absolutely be wrong. Bad science can still be right, once in a while... Not saying this is one of those cases, but still better to not jump to conclusions, otherwise you shut the door on possibilities you should have explored more thoroughly

Simply no.

[Sique]

The claim is somewhat outlandish. It might be proof that life can form again and again in non-living environments, but that's the only thing one can conclude right now. If we notice building blocks of life everywhere in the universe, and if we can recreate them under sterile conditions on earth, it just means that building blocks of life are very common in the universe which increases the probability of spontaneous life-forming.

It does not mean by any length that life was forming only once, and every other life is the offspring of the first one. Au contraire.

Re:wrong

[HappyHead]

The problem there is that the guy making these wild claims has about as much chance of being right as I would if I picked up a random rock with some algae on it on the street corner, and started claiming the algae was aliens and the rock was from space - I'd have exactly the same amount of proof of all of my claims that Wickramashinge has, and in my own favor would be the fact that I at least haven't made a large number of similar claims in the past that have all been shown false. It's not that the possibility of alien life existing is being discounted, it's that this particular hack is being called out on not doing any of his research and verification properly, and is simply making wild claims without showing that they're accurate.

Re:wrong

[Black Parrot]

I don't think anyone is saying "there could never be biological organisms on a meteorite". Rather, they're saying that this specific claim is bad science.

NASA made essentially the same claim a while back. The difference is that the debunking wasn't quite as trivial.

Water Bears.

[Immerman]

Water Bears. Freaky little microscopic animals. They go into a suspended state in unfavorable conditions and ca remain there indefinitely. While in that state they'll survive unshielded exposure to space - radiation, temperature extremes, the whole nine yards. When they encounter a benign environment again and reanimate they're good as new - they can even repair considerable radiation damage to their DNA. If they're not panspermic creatures they're certainly candidates to become such. Now imagine they get frozen into the heart of a fair-sized comet where they're shielded against most radiation, they could potentially even cross between stars. Disclaimer: we have no idea what the upper limit on suspended duration is, assuming there even is one. I imagine freezing to near 0K could extend it considerably though.

I can only imagine that similarly durable single-celled creatures exist as well.

Re:Water Bears.

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Sure, they survived for a few days or weeks of exposure. They might even survive for years. Perhaps 1000's, maybe even millions. The thing is this isn't enough. The Universe is unimaginably vast. If the target of a projectile carrying life were to be the volume of space occupied by another world capable of sustaining that life then assuredly the odds against any such thing happening are expressible only with very large numbers. Consider, in the 4 billion years that the Solar system has existed the Sun has never come close enough to another star or large body at all, otherwise our planet would not be here. The odds, even in billions of years, that any object will come near another solar system is thus unimaginably slim. A rock thus escaping from the Solar System with life within it and tranferring that life to another world would require that said rock beat odds of trillions or probably more like 100's of millions of trillions to one against, and its flight time would on average be extremely long, on the order of many billions of years.

Thus for panspermia to have likely actually happened we would have to imagine that vast numbers of these projectiles are sent out into interstellar space bearing life all the time. There is no evidence that this is the case. Certainly the Solar System contains substantial bits of material that have come from the Earth, but few, if any, have reached solar escape velocity. We have never yet either found a single bit of material which originated from another star system in our own system. Surely the percentage of life bearing rocks would have to be pretty small and thus even if by chance none are around us now we would have to see MANY non-life-bearing interstellar visitors if they exist in the required numbers for panspermia to exist.

Beyond that I just find it hard, having a fairly good knowlege of biochemistry, to believe that ANY form of life could endure in the high energy radiation environment of space without being able to perform any biological functions for billions of years. Even at around 2 K chemical reactions still happen now and then, QM alone means molecules will slowly change and break down, and if even a single gamma ray slams into our poor old microbe every 100k yrs its going to sustain a lot of damage in the 100 billion yrs it is likely to wander out there.

Which of course simply leads to the ultimate problem with panspermia, time. It simply will take VAST time for life to spread, so much that it is far less likely it arrived here from space than just arose on its own, even if it IS possible.

Re:Water Bears.

[ogdenk]

How often does this happen? If the collision of stars is fantastically rare, then so surely is the collision of planets equally very rare, and the collision and breakup of life-bearing planets even more so. Nor is it in any way assured that should such a cataclysmic event happen that any living organism could survive it. Surely few enough would. You are dealing here with a LARGE number of events, EACH of which is fantastically unlikely.

That would explain why SETI has been less than successful wouldn't it? I've had several 1 in a million things happen to me in 30 years. Anything can happen in 1,000,000,000. Anything you could think of probably WOULD happen in a billion years.

If Panspermia was the cause, either by transporting life or through it's creation by chemical means in the comet (along with cosmic rays), then it would be an extremely rare event. And likely part of the reason we're not picking up Alien sitcoms on TV.

It's not an unsound theory. In fact it almost makes sense. Not saying life didn't start here, but I'm not going to rule out panspermia either until more data is presented that makes it seem less reasonable.

Re:Water Bears.

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Well, the Universe is huge, so improbable events DO become probable, in some degree. It isn't a horrible theory, but the question is could it be ubiquitous? SOMEWHERE life has bridged from system to system I'd think, and everything else has happened, once. Of course one could argue that ANY life is one of those one-time things, etc. I think the chances that EARTH was seeded that way is what is remote, or any other specific planet.

Re:Water Bears.

[Immerman]

And how exactly would an interstellar meteorite look different than a local one? It's a rock that's been floating in space for billions of years. 1st-gen systems probably wouldn't have any, H and He not being known for their clumpiness, they'd be rare in 2nd-gen systems, and 3rd-gen systems would produce objects not terribly unlike the local ones. At most I'd expect an interstellar asteroid to have a somewhat different mix of elements than the local normal, and possibly some evidence of different radiation exposure. And we do have a smattering of local asteroids that are considerably different from the norm.

Age and size - did you miss the part where our tiny, slow, primitive Voyager is going fast enough to cross the entire fraken galaxy in a paltry billion years? Astronomical phenomena regularly eject stuff at far higher velocities, and we have 4-6 billion years to work with. If it happened once early on then there are now likely life-bearing fragments scattered throughout the galaxy.

Distance and aim - you'd be right if space were flat, but it's not. Stars systems are going to get way more than their "fair share" of stuff passing nearby by virtue of their gravitational field, and a star system is not a small target - the hypothesized Oort could well be a couple light-years across. Also, we're not talking about the path of any individual rock - most scenarios that might eject planetary matter into interstellar space will eject a lot of it on a lot of different trajectories, it's almost inevitable that some of it will make it's way into another star system. Eventually *all* of it probably will, though by odds most of it will end up inside a fresh star.

Planetary collisions - they're likely FAR more common than stellar ones. Mars was pretty clearly smacked by something huge at some point. So probably was Earth - most of the ejected material probably ended up becoming the moon, but I'd bet good money that some of it was ejected into the solar system, though probably not directly into interstellar space (though I wouldn't be terribly surprised if some of it eventually ended up getting a sufficient energy via gravity slingshot). If life existed on Earth at the time it'd be reasonable to assume that at a minimum some of it probably made it's way to every other planet in the system. I don't know of any evidence for similar impacts on Venus or Mercury (not that I've looked), but of the four planets in our system that would potentially show evidence of such a cataclysmic impact we're pretty sure at least two of them experienced at least one. Which actually is a compelling argument for panspermia occurring at least within a solar system, I would be surprised if we ever find a system with two "fertile" planets but only one bears life- even a fair sized asteroid impact will likely eject some material at escape velocities, a "planet-killer" likely ejects fairly large amounts (though the energies involved might well have already sterilized it, you don't get planetary "splash" like you do with a really big impact).

I portrayed one possible scenario, you want another? What happens to a life-bearing planet whose star goes supernova? The surface is likely sterilized, and the shockwave would likely shatter the planet and eject it's fragments into interstellar space at ridiculous speeds. But would *all* the stuff living underground be wiped out? On Earth that's probably 90+% of the biomass. Also conveniently a population rich in chemovores who wouldn't require any local biological matter to thrive - to them a rock at a pleasant temperature isn't barren, it's lunch.

Culturing - I doubt the accuracy of that 99.9% number, in fact recent seawater DNA analysis indicates we have absolutely no idea what around 20% of the species on the planet even are - their DNA is unlike anything we've seen. But assuming it's simply hyperbole-enhanced then clearly a petri dish full of agar is *not* a generally favorable location. It's probably only even remotely favorable to that narrow slice of biota that norm

Re:Plankton? Wow!

[Muad'Dave]

Didn't you see Star Trek: The Voyage Home? Whales have giant Grogan-looking spaceships, for Pete's sake.

21st Century Slashdot

[GodfatherofSoul]

Bringing Discover Channel-quality science to geeks everywhere...

Thanks for making me just a wee bit stupider, editors! You can probably crank up your hits by getting a comment from Kim Kardashian with a nice fake-boobs cleavage shot in the summary.

Real panspermia on Mars

[gewalker]

If I were betting, I would bet that the first real evidience we ever get of panspermia, is when we find evidence of life on Mars that is of terrestrial origin. Those earth rocks splashed up from meteor strikes have got to land on Mars as often as the reverse. And we know Earth rocks are filled with life.

Conspiracy?

[sackofdonuts]

When dealing with information like that presented in the original article one should always ask, "What is gained by debunking the notion of earth being seeded by life instead of life fully developing on this planet without external help?"

No evidence = no reason to believe

[DragonWriter]

Don't assume that just because it's bad science it must absolutely be wrong.

But do assume that because its bad science on every point, there is no reason to believe that its true. Sure, the conclusion might be true -- just as much as it might have been true without the "research". But this paper does nothing to justify any greater belief in its conclusion than there would be with no evidence at all, because it is no evidence at all.

Re:wrong

[Firethorn]

I don't think anyone is saying "there could never be biological organisms on a meteorite". Rather, they're saying that this specific claim is bad science.

This. A scientific theory and evidence gains credence through surviving stringent attempts to discredit it. Bad science is still Bad science even if it's technically correct in it's conclusion: The goal is to develop iron-clad theories and evidence that can't be trivially disproven.

Meteor(asteroid/comet) life evidence (either live or fossilized) would indeed be a game changer, but the best form of evidence in this case would be a properly isolated sample being collected while still in space and analyzed. Even then, a single sample wouldn't be able to prove 'no', though a 'yea' would certainly generate lots and lots of news. If 1% of sampled objects have signs of life, scientists on earth would be going through a frenzy to come up with explanations, the sources of the objects would be tracked/determined, etc...

It wouldn't really touch the core evolutionary theory, but it'd have major consequences on the current theories on the origin of life*.

*Yes, creationists, evolutionary theory doesn't actually touch the origin of life. It's more a statement of current conditions.

I am not that impressed

[Takatata]

Ok, not true. I would be impressed. It would be prove that there is life on other planets. That would be a more fantastic discovery than that of the first extra solar planet. But the idea of panspermia itself does not sound spectacular to me. So, life did not start on earth? So what? It started on another planet. Most likely a planet much like earth. Life certainly did not come into existence somewhere in deep space. IMHO the idea of panspermia does not introduce a new quality on the theories of how life came into existence.

No, it's an American version of Bukake

[Mister Liberty]

The champaign glass is substituted for a pan.

This is up on rbutr as of Mid Jan.

[Craggles]

http://rbutr.com/rbutr/WebsiteServlet?requestType=showLinksByToPage&toPageId=14434

Oh, look! Terrible journalism!

[AbominousSalad]

Oh, look! It was posted by Timothy!

Is it Groundhog Day? Nope, that's pretty much just every day on Slashdot.