First look at asteroid dust brought to Earth offers surprises
nature.com
nature.com
Can anyone expound on which part of this is rare or what would be more expected?
I'm guessing that if most meteorite samples are collected after impact on earth such a brittle crust would be destroyed before observation.
That sounds about like every DIY repair around the house I attempt.
Joking aside, the article goes on to say that "NASA is now making new screwdrivers" to gain access. Does anyone have details on this? Why would NASA need to build something new?
They have to be qualified for use inside the glove box (read this in a different article), which I assume means sterile and unlikely to flake any material off. NASA is quite worried about being faked out by detecting something added post collection.
Also who knows what the failure mode is, so here is some speculation: Perhaps some distortion in the case, so the screw holes are no longer circular? In which case the tool has to apply more torque than normal (without flaking or snapping) and maybe have a special clamp, and even a strain gauge for measuring torque?
Yes, as well as being nonreactive, not able to outgas much, etc. They're going to do minute chemical analysis on the samples, so avoiding chemical contamination is essential.
That way we could cross-check for tool/storage-based contamination or accidental reactions.
> The screwdrivers that NASA is building to free the remaining rocks and dust will need to be made from materials that won’t contaminate the samples, which are currently inside a nitrogen-filled glovebox.
I'm not sure why the screwdrivers that opened the other screws wouldn't work though, if that's what you're asking.
I think any planet capable of hosting carbon-based life would be able to at least produce wind energy, and probably most (assuming a rocky planet with liquid water and an atmosphere containing oxygen) would be able to develop all the energy types I mentioned. Solar and nuclear might be relatively less feasible if certain elements aren't common on that planet, and battery storage might also suffer from lack of resources. But wind and hydro alone are probably sufficient to eventually be able to develop controlled fusion down the line and have most energy-resource issues obviated.
Even if you imagine some exotic form of life not like ours at all, on a planet that doesn't necessarily have water or an atmosphere, the life has to be able to derive energy from some kind of external source, whether it's by facilitating some chemical reaction like our deep sea micro-organisms or photosynthesis. Most likely that energy can be harvested in an automated fashion, and it's probably relatively abundant if life is able to evolve to the point of intelligence. For it to be completely inaccessible due to lack of resources, IMO you'd have to get into truly strange scenarios like intelligent life somehow developing in a nebula or the atmosphere of a gas giant.
So if we were the first large life to form on the planet, and there weren't any fossil fuels, I think we'd be screwed. I think we would've stalled until something burned us as fuel.
What about wood, or more "advanced" biofuels (idk, some kind of highly productive grass or a refined algae product), prevents us from developing wind and hydro power? Those were both developed before fossil fuels were widely used anyway. They produced mechanical power instead of electrical, but only because electricity was not understood yet.
The more energy you have, the easier it is to scale energy production up, but you have the resources required to initiate that process with just biofuels. And once you have a base of wind and hydro energy, that allows you to begin the feedback loop of using that energy to assist in constructing more power generation in a virtuous cycle.
edit: I'll also add that the industrial revolution came about after there had already been notable advances in mechanization and manufacturing - the introduction of fossil fuels quite literally threw gas on the fire, but people had started developing increasingly sophisticated machinery like the cotton gin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin) and mechanically-powered loom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancashire_Loom) before fossil fuels started being widely used. And indeed, many of these were hydro-powered.
Advances you mention in your third paragraph don't include the jumps in precision that were predicated on this capability, and indeed necessary for the next steps.
There may of course be some civilisations out there that managed what you're describing - it's a big ol' universe after all - but my gut feel is mitochondria is probably the great filter, rather than an abundance of energy-dense naturally occurring fuel.
This link pops up regularly on HN. It's a spectacularly good read, highly relevant here, in terms of the necessary set of converging prerequisites for an industrial revolution:
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
I appreciate I only have a sample size of one - but then, so does the 'it's no big deal' crowd.
On this planet we have no alternative routes to the same outcome, and no clear evidence that alternative routes a) couldn't have come about, or b) did but were subsequently out-competed.
I suggest everyone with a Fermi-opinion is in the same camp - massively speculative and a single datapoint (unless you count the myriad (in their absence) counter-points).
But yes, "worship" is not quite the right word for whatever obsession it is that people have with mitochondria.
Once you have sufficient electrical power, you can heat things in other ways - for example, aluminum smelting requires even higher temperatures than steel and uses electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting.
The title of the piece is Could we reboot a modern civilisation without fossil fuels?, and is well worth the read.
So, sure, yeah, aluminium melts at about 650 degrees (I considered this fact when looking at aluminium pizza trays for my oven, which can, though rarely does, go beyond 450) and is smelted about 150 more than that.
But in order to smelt it you of course need receptacles that won't melt at that temperature - ie, steel (plus insulation). I was off by a couple of hundred degrees in my earlier comment - steel smelting is around 1300-1500 degrees. So we're back to the original problem.
As to wind and hydro, sure, yes, you can easily generate power from those, as we did for millennia using mostly timber constructs. Though I'm not sure if you're suggesting getting electrical power from those sources is easy, absent some sophisticated technological capabilities (wire-making, for starters).
Oil may not have been used much before the latter half of the 19th century, but coal certainly was.
That's what they want you to think but the historical records of the USS Voyager clearly show that some branches of dinosaurs (haplosurus I believe) did eventually evolve to develop space travelling technology (which is how they survived the Chicxulub event).
There are only a few chemistries that could even support life. Carbon is the one we know the most about, and also one that we find the most evidence for getting to that complex of chemistry in the real universe. Nobody knows of course, but odds seem good if there is other life out there is it carbon based. (nobody really can know either - the universe is so far away we can't really detect details very well)
Not a thumb between them.
No thumbs.
Opposable thumbs are not a guarantee. Nor are tree-dwelling lifeforms, nor trees, nor thumbs, nor digits, nor four limbs. For all we know, intelligent life elsewhere might better resemble intelligent octopi using alkaline metals as their first rudimentary energy source as we did with fire.
Hell, it took 2 billion years to get to single celled eukaryotes on earth. But the earth was teaming with prokaryotes the whole time, two entire separate branches of them, too, and they seem to have sprung into existence almost as soon as the earth cooled enough.
There's still a lot more of them in terms of total weight than animals and protists. A lot.
I do think that developing more sophisticated tools under water is difficult. Once you have plants on land, taller “trees” are very probable, because they are competing for light. Once you have trees, it’s likely that animals will climb then for safety or food. Once they climb, they will likely develop better gripping, etc…
I guess another way to look at this is that life on Earth is not special (although it is still an insanely amazing occurrence).
Land mostly requires that your planet doesn't have too much water. Plate tectonics helps, but I'm not sure it's required.
They evolved here. The whole question is how much their existence depends on Earth's specific environment, genetics, etc.
Carbon is one of a few elements to be able to easily bind to other elements including itself and able to form long and complex chains. Silicon is another that can form long, complex chains.
https://www.sciencealert.com/lack-of-phosphorus-in-universe-...
I don't think this is an accurate reading of that article. See forex https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.08282 whose abstract reads in part:
> We also found average [P/Si] = 0.02 ± 0.07 and [P/S] = 0.15 ± 0.15 for our sample, showing no significant deviations from the solar ratios for [P/Si] and [P/S] ratios.
Quoting from the introduction I find:
Phosphorus abundances have been derived in planetary nebulae .... and in damped Lyman alpha systems using ionized phosphorus lines ... Anomalously high phosphorus abundances have been measured using optical phosphorus features in blue horizontal branch stars ....
Molecular forms of phosphorus, such as PO, PN, and CP, have been detected and used to understand phosphorus chemistry in the interstellar medium ...
or example, phosphorus molecules have been detected in the interstellar medium ... and in star forming regions ... Phosphorus molecules have also been found in the circumstellar envelopes of evolved stars (... Finally, the diffuse interstellar medium has been measured using P II lines....