New Scientist reports that Italian researcher Marco Masi has discovered that the stars and gas clouds at the center of the galaxy are so tightly packed that twice as many comets are shaken loose, and could hit planets at twice the impact of similar Earthbound objects. Which would mean that some kind of force shield that would protect future space colonies from collisions might be the first thing to add to any future to-do list, really.

Life in the inner galaxy would be bombarded by comets [New Scientist]

In 2004, the NASA spacecraft Stardust captured particles shed by the Wild 2, an icy comet in our Solar System. Last year, the team examining the Wild 2 sample discovered it contained several amino acids as well as nitrogen-bearing amines. At the time, the team was unable to rule out contamination from Earth as a possible source of the amino acids. But after painstaking tests, they were able to determine that at least one of the amino acids, glycine, came from the comet itself.

Although discoveries like this by no means prove that life on Earth originated with a comet bringing amino acids into our atmosphere, the Stardust team is excited by the implications it has for eventually explaining the origins of life on Earth. And, combined with the recent discovery that some comets contain liquid water, it seems possible that comets strikes could bring the building blocks of life to a planet's surface. The next step is to obtain larger samples from comets, and samples from the comet's nucleus instead of its debris. Fortunately, the ESA'a Rosetta spacecraft is scheduled to land on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, and will hopefully bring back just the sort of sample the Stardust team is longing for.

[New Scientist]

In a paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, Chandra Wickramasinghe of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology — one of the earliest proponents of the theory of panspermia, that the seeds of life exist throughout the universe — revealed his team's calculation, which indicate that large reserves of water likely existed inside comets in our solar system, that happened to form around the same time as the Earth:

The Cardiff team has calculated the thermal history of comets after they formed from interstellar and interplanetary dust approximately 4.5 billion years ago. The formation of the solar system itself is thought to have been triggered by shock waves that emanated from the explosion of a nearby supernova. The supernova injected radioactive material such as Aluminium-26 into the primordial solar system and some became incorporated in the comets. Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe together with Drs Janaki Wickramasinghe and Max Wallis claim that the heat emitted from radioactivity warms initially frozen material of comets to produce subsurface oceans that persist in a liquid condition for a million years.

Wickramasinghe claims that a "large fraction" of the 100 billion comets in our solar system probably contained liquid interiors, with ideal conditions for the growth of bacteria, which perhaps lends greater credence to Wickramsinghe's theories on the extraterrestrial origins of life.

[Universe Today]

First of all, the members of Heaven's Gate were web designers (check out their amazing Web 1.0 designs here), which automatically makes them twenty million times more likely to meet aliens, since we all know aliens live in cyberspace. And they also watched Star Trek religiously, gathering together on the nights it aired and sitting in perfect rows to take in the next installment in the show that apparently confirmed their belief in aliens riding behind the Hale-Bopp comet who would save them.

Though the Heaven's Gate religion had once had thousands of members back in the 1960s and 70s, by the late 1990s it had dwindled to just a couple of dozen. Sadly, they took their beliefs way too seriously. Several of the men in the group voluntarily castrated themselves in order to maintain their monastic lifestyle. And then the group began careening towards suicide. Believing they needed to leave their human bodies to become one with the Hale-Bopp aliens, they took poison together in 1997 and died in their palatial San Diego mansion where their website building business was located. Though their deaths were incredibly sad, it's clear they died believing they would be going to a better world. And they never tried to force anyone else to go with them the way the Scientologists do.

Heaven's Gate via Wikipedia

Helix Nebula image by NASA. [BBS News]