Posted on 12/18/2002 6:27:43 AM PST by forsnax5
That sounds reasonable if organics are floating around freely in space. If they're restricted to comets and comet fragments, then dispersal without an atmosphere would be difficult.
I've always felt that comets were rather odd, BTW. I mean, they're described as being huge conglomerations of water ice and miscellaneous space detritus. They're as much a fixture of our solar system as planets. How could such things have been created in such numbers?
Ha! You *can* send ballons to space in a rocket.
I stand corrected... :)
What part of the moon does not have a crater on it?
How many of those craters were caused by comet impacts?
About the same proportion as those that impacted the earth.
Concur on this point. If they trap some bacteria from geosynchronous orbit or trans-lunar space, THEN they have "something to crow about".
"We're finding germs in the bowels of the planet, so it's not a surprise they've made it to the stratosphere."
Yeah! I now believe that the "biosphere" started to develop as soon as the earth warmed enough to form liquid water in the interstices of the planet--LONG before there was life on the surface.
Well, just to quibble, this article here isn't affirmation subject to confirmation in the first place. Speculation, as it stands.
Gotta link to the other one?
That I'll go along with. There is also the possibility that our solar system is unique, so we're decades away, at the least, from demonstrating widespread panspermia.
Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.
Next time some wiseacre kid of 4 asks why the sky is blue or the grass is green, fire that one back at him. Maybe he'll take up science as a career and figure it out and tell the rest of us.
Side story:
They used to publish schedules of "Echo I" visibility on newspapers; I frequently observed it passing overhead in the evening sky.
An important point that is NOT addressed in the article is the reason for suspecting that the microbes are other than terrestial in origin: the convection layer of the Earth's atmosphere doesn't extend to 40km. IOW, there aren't many other viable mechanism for transporting large volumes of microbial material from the earth's surface to these altitudes.
Really big volcanic eruptions could probably do it, as would really big meteorite impacts, but both are fairly rare events.
Beyond that, I'm hard pressed to see how the buggers get up there (unless someone can show that Brownian motion is sufficient to propel microbes to an altitude of 40km (about 125,000 feet.) Hitch-hiking on rockets and stratospheric research ballons is about the only other imaginable sources, neither of which would ever get any significant volume of microbes up there.
A different article, but the same subject. I missed the October post -- there's some interesting comments on that one. Thanks for the link...
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