I nearly didn’t post this, but things seem to have been really quiet here so here is my latest review of a TV program…
Another interesting program by Horizon.
Starting with the southern Indian ‘red rain’ the colour of which was identified as cells and at first was identified as having no dna to the extremophiles being studied by one of NASA’s astrophysicists, brine shrimp living in water three times as salty as the ocean at 80 degrees, an organism living in penguin guano that can multiply down to -5 degrees to the organism found living in nuclear reactors around spent nuclear rods that created holes in the stainless steel surround.
Surveyor 3 sent to the moon 2 ½ years before lunar landing brought back an organism on the inside of the foam inside the camera. Believed to be an earth born organism that had survived over 3 months in space.
The Murchison? Meteorite that landed in Australia, when examined under the electron microscope seems to show the remains of living micro organisms. It’s a highly contentious claim.
Firing bugs, that live in rocks, at 5 km/sec into water with rock behind it, (to simulate a meteorite hitting the ocean) something that would kill most things, confirmed that some bugs can survive, albeit with a low survival rate.
Apparently even some of the micro organisms on the space shuttle Columbia, that blew up on re-entry, survived.
Most scientists now believe that micro organisms can survive many extremities, cold, heat, impact even periods of vacuum and many believe that life almost certainly exists else where in the universe.
Compared to the more standard (non religious) belief that life created itself on this planet, Panspermia is the belief that life originated elsewhere and was brought to the earth from outer space (via a meteorite perhaps.)
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Life and its appearance on earth is a wondrous thing; from its religious connotations to the Acarus mites of Andrew Crosse, precursor to Frankenstein. I think it is very unlikely that life arrived in this way, an extremophile of extremophiles arriving on a lump of rock. Then again if it did; Darwinbots continually show that they love to devolve away from the acme of design into often lazy and simplistic forms. Who is to say the first building blocks of life didn’t arrive from elsewhere?
PS, some extremophiles show a great resistance to radiation, does this challenge the way mutations work in DB?
