Dinosaur asteroid 'sent life to Mars' | Hacker News Reader

Dinosaur asteroid 'sent life to Mars'

bbc.co.uk

58 pointsalexkus46 comments

I have this vision of dinosaur astronauts, clinging to the rock that has been ejected into space, on their way to Mars to establish a new life there.

I have always found the pan-spermia theories interesting. It still doesn't answer the 'where first' question but it allows for many places to share similar lifeforms without requiring a recreation of an improbable event in all of them. Of course it would be really weird if the universe was populated in this way with humanoids, and the original Star Trek was closer to the truth than not :-)

  ... without requiring a recreation of an improbable event in all of them

Just to add to your post: the probability of such a spontaneous event (life emerging from a cocktail) increases as you're no longer looking at a restricted area. If panspermia is the mechanism then you don't require life to originate on a suitable planet in a Goldilocks zone. Every square mm of (often porous) rock flying around is a potential point of origin, carrier or seeding station.

Panspermia only interests me in an intra-solar system context. I imagine the probability of ejected rocks from an asteroid impact in one solar system reaching a body in another solar system is significantly lower.

And I doubt the math would allow them to span galaxies.

So kind of like the stargate SG1 plot line where instead of the ancients spreading life across the universe using stargates you have meteros doing the work

I guess that would make planets meteorsexuals.

(sorry I couldn't resist)

Given the right similar starting conditions in the DNA... It could be interesting.

What surprises me is that life can survive these trips. A rock ejected from the Earth would have to have tremendous heat during the escape velocity. Science is fascinating.

That's what I was thinking. That piece of rock must be very hot as it's flying out into space from a violent explosion. At least, that's how I picture it. It seems odd that the article was concerned about the danger of space itself, but never mentioned the exit from earth.

Science is very fascinating, but this phenomenon of life successfully leaving earth and arriving on other planets has never been demonstrated, so it's more idle speculation than science.

I think they've at least seen them survive in space. I recall reading stories of microbes surviving near absolute zero. Bacteria and spores could survive a lot, but I would think they would have to be inside a mighty big rock to survive the heat.

Some microscopic organisms are said to have survived exposure to space. But just because some of the pieces have been shown to be plausible, doesn't justify accepting the entire scenario.

I agree with you.

I think this is a good statistics exercise too. What's more likely? That life emerges spontaneously in multiple spots of space, or that life survives inter-planetary (and perhaps inter-solar system) journeys?

You couldn't possibly answer that.

> "Even using conservative, realistic estimates... it's still possible that organisms could be swimming around out there in the oceans of Europa," she said.

    ALL THESE WORLDS
    ARE YOURS EXCEPT
         EUROPA
       ATTEMPT NO
     LANDING THERE

Have you seen the movie Europa Report? I don't want to spoil any part of it for you, but it's really good. If you have Netflix, it's on there.

Is it realistic or do they find aliens/god?

[SPOILERS] There are some Hollywood embellishments I didn't care for, but I would say the movie is still a lot more realistic than 95% of sci-fi movies. It's definitely worth seeing. In the end, they do find complex life, but no "aliens" like you'd find in a typical sci-fi action movie.

aliens. Btw, I find the movie horrible...

> it's really good

No it's not.

The acting, story, soundtrack and effects all seemed good to me. What didn't you like about it?

I liked everything but the "documentary" aspect. Too many flashbacks/flashforwards, needlessly restrictive camera angles, pointless exposition, and it was really easy to lose track of the chronology. They even reveal one of the crewmember deaths before you have a chance to meet the guy, then they jump straight to his death, which was supposed to be a pivotally emotional moment for the crew but you haven't had a chance to care yet.

I don't regret watching it, I think it was a decent film overall, but it needed a different director.

I agree. Everything was good until the guy who wanted to show off his After Effects skills got to it. But even that wasn't enough to prevent me from enjoying the movie.

Race to Mars, a 4-part miniseries by the Discovery Channel, is also worth while. The spacecraft and lander are based on existing ideas for trips to Mars. The physics in it are depicted accurately, as far as I could tell. Problems that arise seemed plausible, too. The interactions of the crew are well done, and aren't hammed up for dramatic effect.

Panspermia[1] is not a new theory. This whole article is highly speculative. It might sound compelling, but we just know way too little to make any sort of prediction on this matter. Any real findings must come from actual data provided by probes and landers such as the Mars 2020 Rover[2] and the ExoMars[3] mission.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_2020_rover_mission

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExoMars

The only way to confirm it is once the asteroid minimg begins. Then it's a matter of time to find an asteroid from earth. Maybe it'll tale long but eventually they'll be able to analize what's left there.

So basically, if a planet has no dominant/intelligent species capable of protecting itself; not only nature resets that planet; it scatters the building blocks of life to other planets as well in the process.

Billions of years forward. Intelligent life on multiple planets from same building blocks. They fight for dominance in a new natural selection. This time to see which planet was conducive for creating better lifeforms.

The notion that an asteroid impact could launch life-bearing debris to escape velocity is not new. I remember it being mentioned in one of Lester Del Rey's juvenile science fiction books -- possibly "Outpost of Jupiter", which according to Wikipedia was first published in 1963.

The difference is that this models a specific impact to see whether it would work. That's a long long way from conclusive, of course, but it's a useful addition.

I agree. I just find it interesting that the base idea has been around so long -- longer in fact than the "asteroid killed the dinosaurs" theory.

Even if organisms got ejected with rocks, wouldn't they just die frozen or from radiation on the long journey thru the vacuum?

Not necessarily. It's worth reading the entire article. We've observed small life surviving raw space exposure before.

TFA: "Three metres is the minimum they think necessary to shield microbes from the Sun's radiation over a journey lasting up to 10 million years."

....or from the rock they're in burning up in reentry.

Mars' atmosphere is much thinner, I don't think a 3m thick boulder would burn up (impact, though, would be, uh, energetic, however).

What if life on earth was also just a fragment of another past planet?

For anyone who is interested in the Dinosaur asteroid, may I suggest listening to or watching the latest RadioLab, which went into some interesting (speculative) depth about what may have happened.

This article is ridiculous. They have a theory and a model that says, for example, that 6 chunks of rock hit Europa. Of course we don't know that they did! This is unfalsifiable twaddle.

How likely is it for these organisms to survive ejection in the first place? I thought asteroid impacts were incredibly hot and violent.

Rocks make great insulators though, which just leaves acceleration as an issue, though microbes handle high acceleration just fine.

This is interesting primarily because we know a decent amount about the nature of the Chicxulub impact event, so we can model it. And in doing so we've found that it should be possible for microbial life deep inside Earth rocks to end up in heliocentric orbits and to be protected from space radiation long enough to have a reasonable chance of surviving until the rock they are in hits another planetary body in our Solar System.

What this actually means, though, is that likely many other impact events in Earth's history could have done the same thing. Even going back billions of years. Which means that the probability of Earth life having landed on Mars, Venus, or Europa in a way which might have seeded locations favorable to life is very much non zero.

This sort of thing has been speculated about before but never modelled so rigorously using real-world impacts as examples.

I don't believe this story! Why don't we find those rocks ejected during the impact on Moon?

Are you asking why we never found a small number of Earth rocks scattered over the entire surface of the Moon during a period of only a few hours total of lunar exploration? The answer should be obvious.

To be fair...the surface of Earth's moon has been much more extensive than just physical lunar surface exploration.

It's also a fair question, have we seen evidence from this on our moon? And if not is it really because of the limited exploration or some other factors?

Thank you josefresco!

We're talking about a fairly small number of rocks scattered across an enormous surface. On the Moon it's even worse because the Earth rocks would simply be lying on top and amongst other rocks. There is no possibility to identify such things from orbit since the rock fragments, after impact, would typically be smaller than could be resolved by an orbital camera and proper identification involves detailed mineralogical and isotopic analyses that cannot be done remotely.

We can, however, be quite certain that Earth rocks have landed on the Moon, and Mars, and many other planetary bodies in our Solar System. We have conclusive evidence of meteorites on Earth that have come from Mars, the Moon, and Mercury. We know this because of their distinctive mineralogical and isotopic characteristics. For example, we have been able to extract trace amounts of atmospheric gases from bubbles within rocks suspected to have come from Mars and we found that they were a very precise match for the atmospheric composition of Mars. Given those facts, and given the fact that simulations of impacts and evolution of the orbits of impact ejecta from Earth should eventually cause a significant fraction of such objects to impact the Moon, Mars, and other planets I think it's a virtual certainty that they have done so.

I agree that it could be due to limited lunar exploration. Having said that, my concern or thoughts is that, why we limited our exploration mission to moon? I have been looking for answers for a long time.

I'm not sure what you mean. It ended up costing about a billion dollars per person to send someone to the Moon. And those are incremental costs. Few people thought that the costs of the moon program justified the expense of keeping it running.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com