Slashdot and the Register both reporting on a nice Observer article about extraterrestrial rains of blood, making a welcome reappearence after a couple of months of silence on the subject. The original red rain paper can be viewed on line, and Wikipedia, as usual, is informative on the subject of panspermia and, indeed, the late archaeopteryxsceptical, bigbangophobic, panspermophilic Fred Hoyle. Francis Crick was a fan of the theory, too.
Anyway, the metanarrative is also interesting. Panspermia seems to be of great interest to some groups within the creationist/evolutionist debate that is gently infiltrating the European media discourse. The general argument runs something along the lines of: panspermia is gaining impetus among serious scientists as more is discovered about how bacteria and viruses can survive space travel, and indeed for how long, overturning several earlier objections to the theory. Panspermia plus discoveries of hefty horizontal gene transfer plus the Gaia hypothesis plus, ironically, Francis Crick get you to (please mind the gap) directed panspermia, where you get seeds sent by intelligent beings -- thus intelligent life (again, please mind the gap) can only descend from prior intelligent life, and so on.
So who's directing this debate? Guess we'll have to wait and see, but my money's on the creationists as the drivers of this, which is possibly a little concerning. Ho hum.
9 comments:
But that's very silly, though. It's like "turtles all the way down." Logically, some life must have originated from non-life; just saying that it did so elsewhere seems rather shuffling the problem off to one side.
I like the idea, though, that panspermia is how Gaias reproduce, and Gaias with biochemistry likely to produce interstellar seeds are more likely to succeed than ones that don't.
Odd. Can see Alec's comment when leaving another comment, but not when on the page itself. Maybe posting another comment will free things up.
I think that the creationists like the turtles all the way down conclusion as it suggests a prime mover.
So why not just say "God created life on Earth"? Seems a lot more elegant than hypothesising all this panspermia stuff...
Oh, I see. "Sure, the evidence here doesn't show any signs of Creation, but that's because it happened elsewhere and spread here!" Grrrgh.
Just read the red rain paper itself. Absolutely fascinating. Ultrastructure - cell wall plus inner capsule - but no nucleus or DNA! 50% carbon and 45% oxygen with 3% silicon and a few traces (Fe, Na, Al, Cl, all sub 1%), but very little nitrogen content (2%). So not dust, which would be high Si, O, maybe Fe.
Cell walls could be tubulin bands on erythrocytes, but the spectro seems all wrong and who the hell dumps fifty tonnes of mammalian blood into the atmosphere anyway?
Very interesting indeed.
Couldn't these 'cells' be spores of some kind, e.g. from a large algal bloom? The paper discounts it as impractical, but surely it seems a bit more likely that they were picked up from Earth and distributed by a hitherto unknown meterological phenomenon than that they come from an interstellar meteorite composed almost entirely of identical 'cells'.
And yes, very interesting metanarrative. I suspect that the creationists love things like this not because it backs any specific theory of theirs, but more because it muddies the evolutionary waters. The more questions they can raise about evolution the more (seemingly) justified they are in claiming that evolution is contentious and 'just a theory'.
I've always thought panspermia quite interesting - I'm probably agnostic about it. It terms of origin of life discussions it is, as Alec says, simply shifting the question elsewhere. But given the huge quantities of stuff moved around by comets it does seem possible.
How are you all anyway? I've been away for a week, walking Hadrian's Wall. Magnificent fun, but I could have done with less rain...
Spores would have DNA. To be honest, it's the absence of DNA that's unnerving; otherwise they could be algae, fungal spores, pollen or whatever.
Alas, I am starting to class this as 'sloppy lab practice' now rather than anything else.
Well yes, intact spores should contain DNA, I was (in a vague and unconsidered way) imagining that something in the magic way they'd been picked up and dumped over South India had divested them of DNA - e.g. if a load of algal spores were moved from deep in the ocean to much nearer the surface the pressure change might burst them, losing the contents and leaving just the cell walls, etc, d'you think?
But yes, lab errors or sloppy technique remain a high probability. Bit of a shame no-one else went and tested the rain or got a sample (although perhaps shadowy US military UFO cover-up brigades did but they're just not telling us).
Algae, being photosynthetic, would be unlikely to be in the deep ocean in the first place.
It is a shame no one else has done lab work - presumably this chap has enough samples that he can spare some...
Fair point about the algae, cleverclogs;-)
But still - 'they are terrestrial cells who have lost their contents in a way we haven't thought of yet' still seems more plausible than giant meteorite of alien bacteria. I think this is mainly what I find so unconvincing about it - a meteorite with traces of alien microbes seems possible. A huge meteorite composed entirely of them just seems weird. I mean, what do they think it is? The contents of an alien starship's waste tanks?
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