Exo-biology -Did Life on Earth Originate on Mars?
Life on Earth may have arrived billions of years ago with an unceremonious thud.
Charles Cockell of the Center for Earth, Planetary, Space & Astronomical Research at Great Britain's Open University and head of Cockell Geo-microbiology Lab, who studies microbes in extreme environments, joined German and Russian scientists in testing a controversial theory that was the origin of life in Earth, after arriving here on a meteorite from the red planet.
Life could have begun billion years ago as began to cool down. At that time, it was steadily bombarded with rocks from the asteroid belt, which then knocked rocks and the microbes living on them into space, where the gravity of the sun sent them hurtling towards Earth….where they found an hospitable environment.
In testing whether microbes could survive the enormous shock of being blasted into space and colliding with another planet, the science team gathered colonies of micro-organisms including cyanobacteria, which live in rocky fissures, lichen, and spores of the hardy bacterium Bacillus subtilis, and sandwiched them between slices of gabbro, a coarse-grained rock similar to that known to make up Martian meteorites.
The researchers then used high explosives to fire a steel plate at the sandwiched organisms and after each shot transferred the microbes to a dish to see if any had survived. The shocks to the Martian meteorites were the same as those found on Earth (pressures of up to 50 billion pascals). FYI: The pressure in a car tire would be 200,000 pascals.
The surprising result was that the lichen and bacterial spores survived all but the most cataclysmic impacts up to 45 billion pascals. The cyanobacteria survived shocks of up to 10 billion pascals.
The findings support the theory of “lithopanspermia”, which says that microscopic life can be conveyed from one world to another inside meteorites. [It had the support of several eminent scientists in the 19th century, including William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and Hermann von Helmholtz.]
The conclusion: “These results strongly confirm the possibility of a ‘direct transfer’ … from to Earth.”
Posted by Ingrid Stamatson
I highly doubt life would evolved that early but you never know... I'm always proved wrong again, and again, and again... :(
Posted by: Summer Glau | July 24, 2008 at 11:38 AM