Microbe experiment suggests we could all be Martians

[Flabbergasted]

Microbe experiment suggests we could all be Martians


Ian Sample, science correspondent
Saturday January 13, 2007

Life on Earth may have announced its arrival billions of years ago with a whistle and a thump, according to planetary scientists.
Experiments by an international team of researchers back a controversial theory that life flourished on Earth after primitive organisms arrived aboard a meteorite, itself gouged from Mars by a giant impact.

The theory supposes that life was able to gain a tentative foothold on the red planet as it cooled down and became more hospitable several billion years ago. At the time, the planet's surface was regularly bombarded with rocky detritus from the asteroid belt, knocking clumps of rock and the microbes living on them into space, where the gravity of the sun brought them hurtling towards Earth.

Charles Cockell, at the Open University, who studies microbes in extreme environments, joined a team of German and Russian scientists to test whether microbes could survive the enormous shock of being blasted into space and crash landing on another planet.
They gathered colonies of micro-organisms including cyanobacteria, which live in rocky fissures, lichen, which smother their surfaces, and spores of the hardy bacterium Bacillus subtilis, and sandwiched them between slices of gabbro, a coarse-grained rock similar to that known to make up Martian meteorites.

The researchers then used high explosives to fire a steel plate at the sandwiched organisms and after each shot transferred the microbes to a dish to see if any had survived. The shocks were equivalent to those suffered by Martian meteorites that have been found on Earth, with pressures of up to 50 billion pascals. One pascal is equivalent to the pressure exerted by a £5 note resting on a surface. The pressure in a car tyre is equivalent to 200,000 pascals.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1989431,00.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. Fun theory--and experiment! Now we're going BACK!

W.B. Yeats was right. History is a gyre of ever-repeating, but also ever-evolving, events and themes. Will we finally give the gift of life back to Mars? (Ray Bradbury thought so!).

[jeff30997]

2. Again?

Ok,so my real name is Spargle!

[peacetalksforall]

3. I say we're all from different planets and higher beings are trying

to determine if we can live together. (We = humans and our relatives.)

Question is - if we're hit and break up, will we all go back to our own planet?

[DoYouEverWonder]

10. We're probably

some brat's science experiment.

[peacetalksforall]

4. Religious radical are just going to hate this news. nt

[Chipper Chat]

7. Fundie heads will explode when they see piks of their ancestors:

GRAB YOUR BIBLE AND RUN FOR YOUR LIFE !!!!!

[blues90]

5. If true , can I go back to the planet I orginated from ?

[papau]

8. If you want a "right of return" - that is discussed in other forums. n/t

n/t

[sandnsea]

6. Too weird, check this out

Back when I was in college, we had to analyze an article about colonizing Mars to bring the planet together on a united mission so we'd stop killing each other. In that process, it occurred to me it would make a great sci-fi novel, lead the reader to believe it was Mars being colonized, only to discover in the last chapter that we had colonized Mars, destroyed it, and were back to colonizing Earth again. How weird that that might be what happened, albeit in a different form.

[papau]

9. There is a group that believes the raw material on Earth was enhanced by celestial visitors 200,000 ...

years ago.

So we have the first DNA factories - and it is said that after enhancement the "fixed" Neanderthals mated with these visitors leading to our current situation and to those stories in the mid-east of Gods mating with humans (Greeks) and of places where the Gods made people (further east and earlier).

[sandnsea]

12. Definitely possible

Sometimes it seems as if we aren't really 'of' this planet. Although we were worshipping long before the Greeks, so I don't know about that part.

[papau]

14. Ancient astronauts that created mankind may have been microbes from Mars!

Heroic - in any way - stories that relate activity not common to the reader's daily life are called ‘incredible’ - not credible - or ‘mythical’. When life experience provides the needed faith to consider the stories credible, as it does for Christians and the other religious, some of the religious then choose to omit the stories from the term "mythology".

But there is little need for such sensitivity to this label. The use of the term "mythology" to mean not true seems to be ending. Research has shown that much that has been labeled myth has been found plausible, if not provably true (such as in recent under water findings in the Black Sea of Noah's "great flood" and the discover of the physics needed for the "parting of the sea" by Moses, and the finding of the bone box for the priest that condemned Jesus).

So the Bible, the Koran, the Mahabharata, and the thousands of clay tablets from Mesopotamia may tell stories that in the end are not "too incredible to believe".

So there are groups combining ancient megalithic structures, building pyramids at ancient sites all over Earth for a period and then stopping and not building more, gigantic lines and figures (the Peruvian Nazca lines, the Bolivian "ceques", British "ley" lines) on the surface of the earth and "artwork" on Mars(? humans have the ability to see structure where there is none), with the idea that there were ancient astronauts known as "the Gods" who were feed by the vapors emanating from food and drink which humans provided and burned for them. And as God in Heaven meant God moved through the air, we having flying Gods- I didn't say the logic was greater than science fiction by a 15 year old - but hang in there.

Just as some atheists confuse "could have been this way" - as in the possibility that the Bible is just earlier myths being copied by Christians and Jews - as proof that "it did happen this way" - forgetting they are talking about an unknowable topic, these folk look for all the "could have happened this way" - and it is a lot of fun to read!

So we have apes "suddenly" becoming "men" via a mix of Cro-Magnon man with ancient astronauts 10,000 years ago, giving us the emergence of a full-blown intelligent civilization. Don't ask why the ancient astronauts left earth just as we became fairly smart (the “Fermi Paradox” or “Space Travel Argument” used by Freeman Dyson and others to put down the project SETI).

Zecharia Sitchin (see The Cosmic Code: Book VI of the Earth Chronicles by Sitchin and Neil Freer at www.ancientX.com) runs with the above, saying that ancient Sumerian clay tablets reveal that gods from another planet (a 10th planet Nibiru, which orbits our Sun every 3,600 years) arrived on Earth some 450,000 years ago and created humans by genetic engineering of female apes. Sadly, because I like the story, Sitchin says his story hangs on the 10th planet (now discovered) every 3600 years wandering through the inner solar system effecting the Earth, sometimes in catastrophic ways - and that seems a no go!.

But today we may have found a real extra terrestrial beginning to intelligent life on Earth - the Martian Microbe! http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1989431,00.html Of course this does nor explain how life developed on Mars, now does it?

[ngant17]

13. Actually JFK thought of something like this as the Apollo Programme

in 1963, in which it was originally proposed at the UN for a joint lunar mission with the Soviet Union. NASA didn't like the idea and fought against it, but the Soviets were a lot more amenable to his idea.

NASA gained a lot from the assassination, the joint lunar mission was scraped under LBJ.

[knitter4democracy]

11. So, how did the microbes develop there?

That's the leap that always bends my brain.