Did Meteors Cause Life On Earth?

Graeme McMillan — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:00:38 PST

Are asteroids responsible for the creation of life on Earth? Recent experiments back up a theory that the basic ingredients for life came from beyond the stars... which makes us all aliens. Battlestar Galactica was right!

Scientists have long thought that the Earth wasn't formed with a lot of organic matter, due to the planet's proximity to the sun, but were unsure where we got the necessary chemical compounds for life to thrive on the planet. Now scientists believe that the answers may lie on meteors and comets passing through Earth's atmosphere.

New Scientist reports on experiments carried out by Peter Schultz of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and Seiji Sugita of the University of Tokyo, Japan, which suggest that, although organic compounds on the objects would get burned up on atmospheric entry, that's not the end of the story. Schultz:

The idea in the past has been, 'Any of this stuff coming through the atmosphere would be heated to the point where it would get wasted... What this new work did was to show that we might actually revive these compounds.

What Schultz and Sugita believe is that the flashes resulting from objects burning up on entry produces cyanide, which they believe could have reacted with the Earth's already existant compounds to form more complex, carbon-containing molecules that would ultimately prove essential to Earth-based life. It's not as dramatic as cylons and humans landing on our planet, but it's a possible answer to a long-standing question... and an appropriately cosmic origin for life on the planet.

Was life founded on cyanide from space crashes? [New Scientist]

The Ninteenth Century Madman Who Invented Martians

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:46:52 PDT

He was the man who launched a thousand imaginary rocketships to Mars — in the nineteenth century, before anybody knew the word "Martian" and War of the Worlds hadn't been written yet. Percival Lowell, a wealthy Bostonian, spent his youth traveling Japan and Korea before having a nervous breakdown and recovering by falling in love with Mars. He built the Lowell Observatory in Arizona just so he could get a better look at the planet, and spent months staring at it every night, taking notes and writing books about how it might be possible that other creatures lived there. A mesmerizing speaker, Lowell gave lectures and readings all over the country, popularizing the idea that the Martian "canals" might be signs of Martian civilization. With the new Phoenix Mars Lander about to plop down on the Red Planet, the Boston Globe's Nancy Zaroulis has published an amazing and timely article about Lowell's life.

Apparently, Lowell's unconventional thinking went beyond his desire to convince the public that Mars was inhabited. He broke off a marriage to a proper Boston lady, and wound up marrying a middle-class woman many deemed "beneath" him. He wrote several books about Japan and Korea, including the first book for Westerners that included photographs of Korea.

But his books about Mars (the first one called simply Mars), filled with pictures he drew based on all those nights in the observatory (you can see one above), were the most popular. Zaroulis writes:

The appearance of Lowell's book about Mars in 1895 came at a time of canal-building on earth. The Suez had recently been constructed; the Panama was in the works. For both Lowell and his adoring public, the prospect of canals on a neighboring planet was too captivating to dismiss. Let the stuffy academic scientists and astronomers carp and criticize, let them proclaim that there could not possibly be life on Mars because the Martian atmosphere was too thin, its gravity too weak. Lowell knew what he knew. He envisioned Mars society as a kind of utopia, with a place for every man and every man in his place. On Mars, there was no nonsense about workers' rights or labor unions or Progressivism or Socialism or any of the other discontents in the America of his time.

Later in his life, Lowell became convinced there was a ninth planet in the solar system, which he dubbed Planet X. Nobody believed him, but years after his death Pluto was discovered and became the controversial ninth planet (some still say the tiny chunk of icy rock is really just an asteroid at best).

The article is a great read — check it out.

The Man Who Invented Mars [Boston Globe Magazine]

io9: space history

Did Meteors Cause Life On Earth?

The Ninteenth Century Madman Who Invented Martians