3 ms·
I can't find it now, but I recall an article which simulated interstellar transit times for asteroids. The conclusion was that something like the dinosaur kill
by adekok 10y ago
I can't find it now, but I recall an article which simulated interstellar transit times for asteroids. The conclusion was that something like the dinosaur killer asteroid could throw rocks into orbit. After 100M years, some of those rocks could have reached other solar systems (i.e alpha centauri)
Given that life on Earth is ~4 billion years old, there's good reason to be believe we've seeded rocks across a sphere ~100 or more light years across.
Whether those rocks reach another solar system is another question. Space is big, and even giant killer rocks are tiny.
- api 10y agoOne of my favorite admittedly speculative evolutionary informatics papers agrees with you: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513781/moores-law-and-the...
- theparanoid 10y agoIt's probably true. The earliest rocks on earth show signs of life.
- api 10y ago"Life originated on Earth" is probably the last remaining geocentrism. Literally every other geocentrism has fallen. My prediction is that this one will fall this century, probably with the discovery of simple microbial life elsewhere in the solar system followed by the genetic confirmation of common ancestry. My favorite definition of life (courtesy of Dr. Christoph Adami and others in evolutionary informatics) is that life is a "phase of matter in which Turing-complete information processing dominates ordinary matter/energy dynamics." A phase of matter means exactly what it sounds like-- solid, liquid gas, life-- though life would be more of a rare exotic phase like a superfluid or a Bose-Einstein condensate or neutron star stuff (whatever that's called). I seem to recall him or one of his colleagues playing with terms like "computonium" or "Turium" (Turing-complete matter) for life. Most phases of matter are found all over the place in the universe, but some places in the universe are more hospitable for some than others. Stars are great for plasma. Gas giants are full of gas. Cold icy outer planets are the ideal abodes of solids. Life, like other phases, is probably ubiquitous but Earth just happens to be a place that is peculiarly hospitable to it and a lot of it is found there. That's likely because it's at the edge of many phase boundaries (the water cycle, etc.) and it's been shown that Turing-completeness occurs in systems close to phase boundaries: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/bio_sim/articles/langton_edge_of_chaos.pdf http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/bio_sim/articles/langton_edge...
- hamilyon2 10y agoPre-planetary solar asteroid ring had probably not the worst conditions for life to be created. Water is abundant in solar system now, probably not was then too.
- greglindahl 10y agoHere's a paper discussing rocks from Earth being tossed all over the solar system after being ejected by impacts on Earth. It's from 2013, and references a lot of earlier papers on the topic. http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ast.2013.1028 http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ast.2013.1028
- mathattack 10y agoCouldn't those rocks have come to us as well?
- azernik 10y agoFor more on this theory, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
- spyder 10y agoPanspermia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia