The Amazing Trajectories of Life-Bearing Meteorites From Earth | Hacker News Reader

The Amazing Trajectories of Life-Bearing Meteorites From Earth

technologyreview.com

73 pointswglb21 comments

Is there any plausible way an organism could survive an explosion with the power of a million nukes and a million years floating in space?

Yes. For example: < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans >

From the article:

Deinococcus radiodurans has a unique quality in which it can repair both single- and double-stranded DNA. When a mutation is apparent to the cell, it brings it into a compartmental ring-like structure, where the DNA is repaired and then is able to fuse the nucleoids from the outside of the compartment with the damaged DNA.

Amazing.

But if all life on earth is descended from something resistant to radiation, why is most life on earth so vulnerable to it now?

Why do we need to consume Vitamin C to avoid scruvy? Evolution abandons what is no longer necessary.

Most animals don't need to do that.

Who says anything descended from this bacterium? Maybe it's not as competitive as other bacteria in more hospitable areas.

We should evaluate the paper on its merits, but the reddit discussion did note that this journal has some credibility issues -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Cosmology#Reliabilit...

Hm. So life on Earth could have come from some other place!

That hypothesis is known as "Exogenesis". See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpermia

No, the life on earth was here to early for that. What they are suggesting is after life evolved on earth sometime in the next 3 billion years single celled organisms from another planet may have reached earth. Or in theory, life from earth could have seeded another planet, and then a different impact could have sent some of that life back after billion years or so. Granted, it's more likely some life from one of those seed planets could visit another of the seeded planets.

However, I suspect whatever made the trip is unlikely to be able to out compete anything native to a planet.

"life on earth was here to early for that"

The Earth is only 4.5 billion years old and the Universe is 13.75 billion - doesn't that give rather a long time for a generation or two of stars to cook up the suitable elements for life and give it an opportunity to develop before the Solar System was formed?

[Reminds me of the ending of the novel "Heart of the Comet"]

First you need a galaxy to from. Then you need at least one generation of stars to live and die before plants can form. You then need to give those planets enough to to form and cool down before life can show up. That's the start of the window of opportunity for life to show up. However, life on earth is ~3.8 billion years at which time the window closes and such things become visitors vs seeders of life. And this is important, all this needs to take place outside of the center of the galaxy where things are a little to energetic for life to flourish.

Not to mention you need a lot of stars to die to have enough material to create a rocky planet. A single super nova is not enough because the material is ejected over such a large an area.

Now, having said all this means is you shrink the window the distance such things can travel. Earth could have been seeded by Mars no problem, but 1/2 the distance means 1/4th the stars. Ejecta just don't move vary fast so even with a 1 billion year window you need to be really close to earth to seed it. More importantly the window between when life could survive and when life showed up less than 1/10th as long as life has existed. So, if we where seeded then we have probably had many visitors after the fact which is what this guy was saying.

PS: Of course if life is common enough both could have happened and even ridiculously unlikely events can happen.

Apparently some physicists have come up with 4 billion years after the Big Bang (i.e. about 10 billion years ago) for life to have been possible:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/01/when-did-proto-...

Carl H. Gibson wrote a paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.1262v1) that could just possibly explain why DNA is almost universal. It reads a bit science-fictiony, but the essence is that DNA could have formed fairly early in the universe's life, when it was small, and spread along with the expansion of the universe itself.

All i could think of was: "damn it, all that organic material we found on other planets might have come from earth instead of those planets developing life" we might be alone after all :( (at least in the near vicinity)

Another way of looking at it would be that there's no way of proving that Earth was the starting point for all the life around us. So instead of looking for life that originated elsewhere we could find lots of "alien" life that looked remarkably similar to our own all over the galaxy.

If that life uses DNA, centuries from now the kind of genetic analysis we use to determine where one species branched of from another could be used to find where life on one planet came from.

Remember, "organic" means "contains carbon" (to a first approximation), not "alive". Earth is well-known not to have anything like a monopoly on all the carbon in the universe. We've never had solid evidence of life on other planets, so this is no change there.

It also raises another possibility not mentioned in the article, which is that life is in fact rare, the only life anywhere near us is what developed on Earth, and discovering life on Mars or the other possibly-hospitable locations in the solar system may not prove that life is common if it can be shown to have derived directly from Earth life.

There are supposedly a fair number of spores (and other small "critters" like microbes, viruses, etc.) that make it through our atmosphere and into space. I wonder how much, over the billions of years that life has existed, has made it into space. I'd think that it would be far more than survived on rocks from that meteor impact.

more Earth ejecta must end up in interstellar space than all the other planets combined

Coolest thing I've read all week. Sort of suggests that 1) there are earth rocks on Mars, we just need to be very lucky to find them, and 2) if we're really really lucky, they may still contain life.

So is it possible that life is just being flung from planet to planet through impact debris, over the course of billions of years?

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