Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Organic Space

Crack open a meteorite and find organic compounds.

The Murchison meteorite, a 100-kg stone made of carbonaceous chondrite, is conventionally estimated to be 4.6 billion years old--as old as the solar system itself, according to the conventional nebula theory of its formation. It fell to earth on September 28, 1969 at about 11:00 a.m. local time, a fragment of a fireball that broke into three parts over some farmland near the town of Murchison and then shattered into thousands of pieces that fell over a five-square-mile region. Since its discovery, scientists have long known that it held a variety of organic compounds. Today's report by John Matson of Scientific American announced the results of a high-resolution mass spectrographic analysis conducted at the Helmholtz-Zentrum in Munich. This analysis revealed at least 14,000 "unique molecular compositions," considered a highly conservative estimate.

These findings have caused great excitement among astrobiologists (scientists who search for life in space, especially life that they think they can prove came from space). Daniel Glavin of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center speaks openly of the possible seeding of the earth from space, perhaps by meteoroids like the one that became the Murchison meteorite. By definition, then, Glavin and others are reviving a proposition called panspermia (literally, "seeding everywhere"), according to which the stuff of life fell to earth either on meteorites or from a comet's head or tail.
Neat stuff so far. And then the guy writing the piece goes off the rails.
Another commenter raised another possiblity: that the Murchison meteorite, before it fell to earth, came from earth. The commenter cited the Chicxulub impact as an example of impacts great enough to send fragments into space, even at escape speed.

This last commenter might, without knowing it, have hit upon the real answer. Even if the Murchison meteorite is not contaminated, it could have been ejected into space, not by a meteor impact, but by the great water jet that rushed through the rupture in the earth's original crust that caused the Global Flood. This is a far more likely scenario than the conventional one, which assumes that life somehow generated itself in space and then survived billions of years in a hostile environment, followed by a fiery transit to earth.
Oh well. He is the religion writer for the site so what would you expect.

I do have an idea though. We need to send missions out with micro GCMS sets and start examining things.

1 comment:

BMoreKarl said...

Regardless of the mind-numbing improbability of this fragment being some previous earth-ejecta that made it's tortuous way home, I've always had serious doubts about the possibility of life arriving on Earth via meteorite.

Someone please tell me this has been discounted!