People who search for aliens on Earth are likely thinking of little green men and flying saucers in the sky, but what if they should be looking at tentacles in the sea? A recent paper claims that octopuses and other cephalopods have their origins on a different planet, brought here as eggs on some asteroid in our planet’s distant past.
It’s a pretty far-fetched idea, and almost certainly not true, but the idea of life on Earth originating from somewhere else is not as completely ridiculous as it might seem. The idea is called ‘panspermia,’ and while there’s not a whole lot of evidence supporting it, it’s also not impossible.
Panspermia, broadly defined, is the idea that living organisms or genetic material can travel between planets in our solar system, and even between our solar system and nearby stars.
Some life forms—like tardigrades and certain species of bacteria and fungus—can survive for extended periods in the vacuum of space. An experiment on the ISS found that a number of microbes survived just fine in space for nearly two years, and it’s almost guaranteed that some species can survive for longer. In fact, microorganisms surviving in space is such a problem for NASA that the agency has a ‘Planetary Protection Officer’ devoted to making sure it doesn’t happen by accident.
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Category Archives: meteorites
Dust from the great beyond
Interstellar grains seen by the Cassini spacecraft lend support to the old panspermia hypothesis.
By Dirk Schulze-Makuch
airspacemag.com
April 21, 2016
After analyzing ten years of data from the Cassini spacecraft that’s been orbiting Saturn since 2004, a team of scientists led by Nicolas Altobelli of the European Space Agency in Madrid, Spain, reports finding dust that came from outside our solar system. Along with millions of ice-rich dust particles shed by Saturn’s moons, Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer detected a grand total of 36 grains that the scientists could trace back to the local interstellar cloud. That cloud is an almost empty bubble of gas through which our solar system is currently moving.
The small interstellar dust grains were zipping past Saturn at speeds of over 72,000 kilometers per hour (44,000 mph), which explains how they avoided becoming gravitationally trapped by the sun. This marks the first time scientists have been able to analyze material from outside our solar system. Intriguingly, the Cassini Cosmic Dust Analyzer saw the same kind of chemical and mineralogical make-up in the interstellar grains as it did in the local dust.
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Polonnaruwa – Hard evidence of panspermia, or bad science?
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Sounds exciting, but we’re skeptical so far.
POLONNARUWA METEORITE WITH EVIDENCE OF LIFE FROM OUTER SPACE DESCRIBED THE MOST IMPORTANT FIND IN 500 YEARS
Posted on January 13th, 2013
by Walter JayawardhanaA meteorite that Landed recently, close to the ancient city of Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka has been described as the most important scientific discovery in the last 500 years as it carried “compelling evidence of life” from outer space.
The scientists who discovered the contents of the meteorite said, “we report here the first compelling evidence for life existing outside the earth.’
Following extensive lab work in the United Kingdom and Sri Lanka four scientists in a paper said , “We report the discovery for the first time of fossilized diatoms in a carbonaceous meteorite that fell on 29 December 2012”. Diatoms are a variety of algae.
They very firmly said contamination, a hazard scientists face when examining things fallen from the sky on the ground is excluded in the meteorite they have named Polonnaruwa.
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We’ll keep looking out for follow-up on this and further support by the scientists, one of whom is Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe, the only scientist testifying for the defense of creationism and against evolution at the scientific/creationist trial in Arkansas.