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Could Fossils of Ancient Life From Earth Reside On the Moon?
MarkWhittington writes Does the moon contain fossils of billions of years old organisms from Earth? That theory has been laid out in recent research at the Imperial College of London, reported in a story in Air and Space Magazine by Dr. Paul Spudis, a lunar and planetary geologist. The implications for science and future lunar exploration are profound. Scientists have known for decades that planets and moons in the Solar System exchange material due to impacts. A large meteor smashes into a planet, Mars for example, and blasts material into space. That material eventually finds itself landing on another planet, Earth in this case. Mars rocks have been discovered on Earth since the 1980s. Other rocks from the moon and, it is surmised, Mercury have also been found, blasted into space billions of years ago to eventually find themselves on Earth.
That makes another good reason to go back to the Moon!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The moon is probably a good place to store time capsules (or backups). Well, except for the meteorites and the annoying dust that gets everywhere.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
The issue is we'd likely need to be digging for decades to find something that might have something, if it hasn't been broken down so much from high radiation in solar storms.
It would be a very long search for that needle.
Even on Earth as we find fossils, these are just fossils that are LUCKY enough to have survived all that time. The majority of skeletons aren't lucky and degrade.
There are very likely large numbers of life we will never* know about that filled various niches, was the in-betweens of one lifeform and another as it evolved over millions of years.
We have also just barely scratched the surface. The deeper we go, the older we are finding. (especially in the cold pole regions)
Just recently we found that cave with stupidly old stuff in it, several billion years old if I remember.
There are likely millions of little caves like this scattered all over the planet where life has been hidden away and protected .
Also aliens. And pyramids.
*unless we make time machines.
This is a very silly idea. There are countless fossils still to be uncovered on Earth, including microfossils from billions of years ago in rock that has not been altered by too much heat and pressure. On the moon there are probably very, very few, if any fossils. Why would anyone waste time and money going to the moon to look for fossils rather than just spending more time carefully looking and digging on Earth? This is the silliest excuse for sending something or someone to the moon I can think of. If you want to explore the moon, go to the moon. If you want to look for fossils, dig right here on planet Earth where you actually have a good chance of finding something very interesting, and very old.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Oh please! That is a really stupid reason to do nothing.
The money spent on space exploration is virtually nothing compared to the rest of what the government spends. Diverting just a month or two's bill for removing foreign dictators so that religious wack jobs can take over would be enough to really start to move forward as a species.
Your grandchildren wouldn't notice the money as it would be just pennies compared to dollars spent on much less productive stuff.
Those private companies started by Ex-NASA employees? At the height of space expenditure the US spent about 4% gdp which it got back 10 fold with super qualified skilled engineers allowing the US to dominate war production.
But don't worry China will do it.
Because *YOU* and *I* aren't even paying enough taxes for the government to pay its bills for the stuff it's already doing right now
We don't have a tax problem, but an appropriations problem. We collected over 3 trillion in taxes last year and only 1% went to science and technology. That's abysmal, but reflects our overall stance to disregard facts and science (selective ignorance), and indulge our gross sense of self entitlement.
Economically speaking, there are only two areas of government spending that have a positive ROI, research and development (10:1), and infrastructure (3:1). If you are concerned for future generation, the last thing you want to cut are these two areas of spending. If you really want to fix the problem, cut medicare, medicaid, welfare, social security and military spending.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
If we are finding rocks from Mars on Earth, it is likley there are rocks from Earth on Mars and possibly fossils from Earth on Mars. And I wonder about bacteria from Earth on Mars. It is possible. This complicates the "finding life on Mars" projects. Is it martian life or transplanted life from Earth?
"To establish Post Offices and post Roads;
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
This reminds me of a time that I showed picture of the LHC to a few (ahem Republican) colleagues and lamented that we stopped work on the SSC. That started a debate and they started lecturing me that the SSC was a frivolous waste of tax payer money. This was back in the bowels of the Iraq war and I reminded them that the entire SSC project would have cost less than two months of the war in Iraq.
It was one of those rare moments where you could see a light turn on. They realized it wasn’t a matter of whether the war was necessary and justified or ill-conceived and evil. They realized the raw trade off humanity makes for whatever reason. They considered the fantastic scale and complexity of the LHC and how it embodied a small facet of humanity’s capacity to achieve and progress and weighed it against a blip in one campaign of misery and devastation.
BTW, I’m neither a hawk nor a dove. Humanity is too often brutal, and I have always had a certain respect for and fascination with the spirit and technology of the military in the face of that brutality. Humanity is a long way from peace on Earth. That doesn’t mean I don’t grasp the almost incomprehensible loss of prosperity and potential humanity accepts to maintain and flex the machines of war (many of which are economic) and the conflicts that allow those machines to flourish.
Actually, Saddam was a CIA appointed dictator that left the reservation.
And like all the other petty dictators that we stopped supporting (Shah of Iran, Qaddafi, Mubarak ... ) it was replaced by something much much worse.
And I know that the Left loves to blame the USA for "meddling" into the affairs of radical Islamists, but I would like to point out that when the USA was a new country, having its merchant ships being attacked by the Pirates of Tripoli, it responded and thus formed the Marine Corps. In other words, if you're going to start issuing ridiculous "we started it" logic, go back to the beginning, and realize that it was Radical Islam that forced us into a permanent military class ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I reminded them that the entire SSC project would have cost less than two months of the war in Iraq.
One expenditure keeps a newly minted US ally stabilized for at least two months. That at least fulfills concrete interests of the US. The other distracts thousands of physicists from doing productive work for two decades and sucks the oxygen out of the room for future physics research funding.
Yeah, sure... how's it working out for that ally?
It was working well until Iraq was abandoned to ISIS.
Meanwhile half their neighbors have ousted their own dictators and voted in religious nutcases. Oh boy.. the world just keeps getting better doesn't it.
The world is better for it. What you don't get here is that first, we now have established precedent for getting rid of tyrannical governments. Second, why shouldn't the voted in religious nutcases get a chance to show they can govern?
I strongly believe that increasing our knowlege of the universe and how it works is far more profitable in the long run than getting involved in the middle east could ever be.
But I believe that spending money in a way that strongly impairs our future ability to gather knowledge of the universe is worse that dumping that money on two months of war.
Well, no.
The Marines (and the Navy) were formed in 1775. Then they were disbanded at the end of the Revolution.
Then they were recreated in 1798 for the Quasi-War with France.
Shortly after that (1801), Marines were sent with Decatur's Squadron to deal with the Barbary Pirates.
And no, the Barbary Pirates had little, if anything, to do with "radical Islam". No more than Edward Teach was a part of "radical Christianity" a century earlier....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"