NASA asteroid sample contains life-critical water and carbon
phys.org
phys.org
NASA finds water and organics in Bennu asteroid sample - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37850556 - Oct 2023 (52 comments)
> Scientists believe the reason Earth has oceans, lakes and rivers is because it was hit with water-carrying asteroids 4 to 4.5 billion years ago, making it a habitable planet.
This might be common knowledge for lots of folks but this is the first time I read this and is just mind boggling to me. There's A LOT of water on our planet, that's a lot of / very big asteroids.
Deep sea thermal vents seem like a reasonable origin as well.
Ignoring the question of the likelihood of intelligent life out there, I do wonder if maybe the universe is full of lush planets with lots of related lifeforms across trillions of star systems.
Could life even cross into new galaxies this way? I dunno! But it's fun to think about.
So the seemingly logical argument that life should be extremely common, begs the question... well then where is it?
I love me some Star Trek so I have hope of greater things but I'll never get a chance to see it.
The only problem is $$$ and risk. We're happy to casually spend hundreds of billions of dollars on obscure geopolitical goals half way around the world, but fight nickle and dime for visionary goals that might genuinely positively reshape humanity. And the other issue will be risk.
Most early colonists will, in all probability, not meet pleasant ends - like literally every colonization effort, ever. And so it's important to have a society that can recognize and praise them for their bravery, try to prevent what killed them from killing the next batch, and immediately continue carrying on.
It will be a significant time before we colonize the Mars or Venus, and that's only within our solar system.
We're going to have to practice and master doing that before we can consider putting people in a giant can in space with zero guarantees that their efforts will succeed.
I'm not trying to dismiss the value of it, just that we've got a long way to go and a lot of problems to solve first.
I'm sure there will be some sort of interesting thing found about the carbon itself, as there always is whenever something is closely examined for the first time. Perhaps that news will challenge a theory, surprise someone, or disprove someone. But this news isn't it.
> "This is the biggest carbon-rich asteroid sample ever returned to Earth," NASA administrator Bill Nelson said
Maybe the presence of carbon and water is well-established through theory and remote observation, but it seems a lot more conclusive when you can find it, go out and grab it, and bring it back to Earth. Or maybe it's already well-established through asteroids that fall naturally to Earth?
And isn't there a huge related question that is not conclusively settled whatsoever (if my armchair scientist readings are correct): whether life started here or elsewhere?
It's sort of like the stories about how there are planets around other stars, therefore, handwave handwave something about life give us more money. Nobody (of scientific relevance) has ever seriously claimed that the only planets in the universe are the ones we can see in our solar system. There were some debates about how many there may be, but nobody ever proposed that they were somehow rare in absolute terms. Debates about the natures of those planets aplenty, certainly, but not their existence.
Its actually doing the opposite of this. See https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/negative-results-null-...
The presence of carbon and water in these asteroids is interesting because they preserve a record of what the early solar system was like.
We did not know if they had these materials in abundance. Maybe they had a bit, maybe a lot. Maybe almost none. We did not know. Now we do. If the finding was almost none, that prompts different ideas about their source on earth than if they had.
You may have thought this outcome was very likely, but it was just speculation on your part.
My point, you found it. Congratulations.
It is not often talked about in the ever-popular "logical fallacies" articles online, but you do need to do slightly more work than just seeing a fallacy and immediately trying to score points with an accusation. There mere presence of a fallacy does not quite mean an error is being made.
You might also want to try to finish reading the content before reflexively jumping up and yelling FALLACY, as you clearly did not.
This hypothesis seems to be getting more and more traction. There is an excellent recent video on topic from Kurzgesagt [0].
Interesting that neither the video nor the article uses the name panspermia[1] to refer to the hypothesis. I wonder why that is. Wikipedia also states that "[the fringe theory] is also criticized because it cannot be tested experimentally". Can't it? If we ever find an organism based on DNA compatible with organisms on Earth, wouldn't that validate it?