We Came From Outer Space!

[Zombie]

1950s horror sci-fi movies are great fun, but it seems more likely that WE came from outer space. The idea of "panspermia" has been around since Ancient Greece - proposed scientifically in 1834 - and was picked up by Professors Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe in 1974 when they proposed that some dust in interstellar space was largely organic. In 2001 Wickramasinghe led a team that discovered the existence of life forms near the edge of space in the Earth's stratosphere at 41 km. This was supported by an ISRO study in 2005 that also discovered radiation resistant bacteria, raising the question how these could have drifted up from the Earth or whether they could be extraterrestrial in origin.

The latest findings to support panspermia come from analysis of the Sutter's Mill meteorite "which lit up the skies over California with a dazzling fireball in April 2012.



Meteors that streak across Earth's sky mostly are fragments of the asteroids that lie between Mars and Jupiter. Meteorites can be rich in organic compounds, including some found among life on Earth.

"Their composition therefore has always been seen as an indication that the precursors to the evolution that led to the origins of life could have come from the extraterrestrial material of meteorites," study lead author Sandra Pizzarello, a biochemist at Arizona State University in Tempe, told Space.com. "Since the origins of life are utterly unknown, the idea has its merits."

Pizzarello and her colleagues analyzed two fragments of the Sutter's Mill meteorite, which streaked through the skies on April 22, 2012, crashing in California. Fragments of this meteorite were given to researchers who have worked on similar rocks before, including Pizzarello.

The organic chemicals in meteorites can get extracted with the aid of solvents. Speculation regarding the origin of life is based on the notion that it arose from a "prebiotic" soup of organic molecules, perhaps delivered in part by meteorites. Initially, fragments of the Sutter's Mill meteorite apparently possessed fewer dissolvable organic compounds left after solvent extraction compared to other similar meteorites.

"You may say that it was a disappointment," Pizzarello said.

However, the researchers tried dissolving the fragments in conditions mimicking hydrothermal vents on Earth, the environment often seen in the early Earth that life might have arisen within. Upon such treatment, the rocks released organic molecules not previously detected in similar meteorites. The findings that suggest there are far more organic materials available via meteorite for planetary environments than scientists assumed.

Scientists investigating the origin of life often suppose dissolved compounds desirable for life need to first have gotten concentrated and held together somehow, much as cell membranes do for the cell's components. The organic molecules the researchers discovered in the Sutter's Mill fragments "could be good for such a purpose, because they can form rudimentary enclosures to contain compounds useful to prebiotic evolution," Pizzarello said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Monday [september 9] in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

WARNING! WARNING!!
Usual risk warnings about mad scientists and scoop-hungry, credulous, weazel-wording journalists apply, investments can go down as well as up, and smoking really isn't good for you

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/meteorite-brought-surprising-ingredient-life-earth-2012-8C11118242?lite&lite=obinsite
 

[Sasha Distan]

the only thing that theory does is take the question of how does "life" happen (from chemicals) and move it further away.  with our extensive fossil records i very much doubt that the tiny single celled organisms that gave way to all life got here on an asteroid in space.

[Zombie]

The fossil records are there - nothing here changes that

[thebrinkoftime]

Have you ever heard the theory of the space donut?

 

It goes like this: There is an utterly massive, huge quantum strawberry and sprinkles invisible donut floating around space somewhere near Earth. It is not detectable by any of our instruments yet, oh, but like an intergalactic pop-tart searching for its one and true toaster, it is there. The gravitational pull of this sweet monstrosity is so strong that flying objects tend to get sucked into the middle of the donut and thrown out the other side. It also wrecks with the instruments of space vessels and causes them to crash down to Earth. In fact, the wonderfully strange space sweet has been known to be so powerful it causes time travel in its hyperactive, sugary accidents.

 

Thus it was that when super-evolved humans from thousands of years in the future (with their huge black eyes and enlarged oval heads) crashed through the space donut and into our time, they were merely branded as aliens and UFOs by the US government and dragged to Area 51, which by the way, in order to disguise its real purpose, is made to look like

 

a large donut factory.

[Zombie]

I guess those would be the donuts eaten with a fresh brew from Russell's Teapot :funny:

[wildone]

I'm getting so confused

 

I've now been told I came from:

 

Outer Space

Monkeys/Apes

A higher diety

My Mom (although it is confusing with this idea of how I was made)

I'm reincarnated from a lower life form

Descendants of Dinosaurs

 

I wish everyone would make up their mind

[Benji]

.............. I understand your confusion, as I have always been told Canadians evolved from reptiles!  LOL!

[mickey1952]

I don't spend much time wondering where I came from as long as I know where I'm going. Then scatter the ashes from my shell in the Monument Valley area and move on, cuz I'm already on the way to my next adventure.

[JamesSavik]

  < So is gravity.

 

 

Edited September 28, 2013 by jamessavik

[W_L]

I'm getting so confused

 

I've now been told I came from:

 

Outer Space

Monkeys/Apes

A higher diety

My Mom (although it is confusing with this idea of how I was made)

I'm reincarnated from a lower life form

Descendants of Dinosaurs

 

I wish everyone would make up their mind

 

You forgot the Lords of Kobol! (BSG reference)

 

I've always wondered if people are genetically engineered to evolve to a form resembling our creator/s, like in the same concept as Star Trek TNG "The Chase". It would be cool to imagine that human beings are descendants of a long lost alien race, perhaps the last of their kind in this part of the universe. That final scene from the show always gives me a little goosebumps. It feels like we're part of something bigger than we are rather than being created, when a deity took his holiday and wanted to make something that is narcissistically pleasing. 

 

This line gave me the goosebumps:

 

 

"You're wondering who we are ... why we have done this ... how it has come

that I stand before you, the image of a being from so long ago.  Life evolved

on my planet before all others in this part of the galaxy.  We left our

world, explored the stars, and found none like ourselves.  Our civilization

thrived for ages -- but what is the life of one race, compared to the vast

stretches of cosmic time?  We knew that one day we would be gone, and nothing

of us would survive -- so we left _you_.  Our scientists seeded the

primordial oceans of many worlds, where life was in its infancy.  The seed

codes directed your evolution toward a physical form resembling ours:  this

body you see before you, which is of course shaped as yours is shaped, for

you _are_ the end result.  The seed codes also contain this message, which is

scattered in fragments on many different worlds.  It was our hope that you

would have to come together in fellowship and companionship to hear this

message -- and if you can see and hear me, our hope has been fulfilled.  You

are a monument, not to our greatness, but to our existence.  That was our

wish:  that you too would know life, and would keep alive our memory.  There

is something of us in each of you, and so, something of you in each other.   Remember us." - Star Trek The Next Generation, The Chase"

 

Edited September 28, 2013 by W_L

[JamesSavik]

Outer Space

Monkeys/Apes

A higher diety

I'm reincarnated from a lower life form

Descendants of Dinosaurs

 

[we'll leave you mom out of it ]

 

There is no reason that we have to assume that only one of those answers is the only CORRECT answer.

 

We know for sure that earth was heavily bombarded by asteroids and comets in the distant past. In fact our current atmosphere and hydrosphere came to earth this way.

 

We know for sure that there have been a number of mass extinctions events both major and minor. The reasons for these extinction events have been caused by impact events, volcanic out-gassing and other more exotic theories.

 

I actually explored this somewhat in one of my stories.  The Cloud ( https://www.gayauthors.org/story/jamessavik/thecloud )

 

There is room for all of those theories in the 6 1/2 billion years since the earth formed.

[Kitt]

So...A higher deity came to Earth from outer space,was reincarnated from a lower life form, descended from dinosaurs and evolved through Monkeys/Apes to man?

[JamesSavik]

So...A higher deity came to Earth from outer space,was reincarnated from a lower life form, descended from dinosaurs and evolved through Monkeys/Apes to man?

 

 

What is a deity? To any primitive, a sufficiently advanced race is a god and their works can only be explained as magic.

 

 

Edited September 30, 2013 by jamessavik

[Sympathia]

oooh Babylon 5!

[Kitt]

 

 

What is a deity? To any primitive, a sufficiently advanced race is a god and their works can only be explained as magic.

 

Hey - I am not the one came up with the deity theory. I just tried to integrate the possibilities!

[Celethiel]

no i evolved from a creme puff...

[wildone]

no i evolved from a creme puff...

 

 

Hmmm, maybe I can work that into a new insult

 

You son of a cream puff

 

 

 

(and yes, I do understand the difference of evolved and born)

[Daddydavek]

I subscribe to the theory that most theories have a particle of truth and a load of speculation when it comes to explaining how life and intelligent life came about. In the grand scheme of things we are on a pretty insignificant little blue marble orbiting a not so significant G class star, one of millions or billions in an eddy of a huge galaxy in an even larger universe filled with galaxies both smaller and larger than our own.  The light we are receiving from some of these stars today,  started traveling our way before any life on this planet came into being in the primordial soup. So historically speaking on the scale of the universe, human intelligence has existed about a nanosecond.