Living organisms surviving in open space supports the idea of ‘panspermia’ – life spreading from one planet to another, or even between solar systems.
The life in this case was lichen but it seems possible that organisms could colonise planets by hitching rides on asteroids. ESA (European Space Agency) is probing this intriguing theory further on future Station missions with different samples.
The Eurasian Center for Big History & System Forecasting (ECBSF) seeks to develop a unified and interdisciplinary history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life and Humanity. It also seeks to develop system forecasting of social, political, demographic, ethnic and cultural processes at regional and global levels.
for more information see Mission Statement.
The search for liquid water beyond the Earth is important in the struggle to understand the origin of life. Data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have revealed Saturn’s moon Titan probably contains a layer of liquid water under its ice shell.
Researchers saw a large amount of squeezing and stretching as the moon orbited Saturn. They deduced that if Titan were composed entirely of stiff rock, the gravitational attraction of Saturn would cause bulges, or solid “tides,” on the moon only 3 feet (1 meter) in height. Spacecraft data show Saturn creates solid tides approximately 30 feet (10 meters) in height, which suggests Titan is not made entirely of solid rocky material. The finding appears in today’s edition of the journal Science.
“Cassini’s detection of large tides on Titan leads to the almost inescapable conclusion that there is a hidden ocean at depth,” said Luciano Iess, the paper’s lead author and a Cassini team member at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. “The search for water is an important goal in solar system exploration, and now we’ve spotted another place where it is abundant.”
via Cassini Finds Likely Subsurface Ocean on Saturn Moon – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
For geologist Zalasiewicz, each and every pebble you find in your garden or on a shoreline is a “capsule of stories” which tell the dramatic history of the Earth. From the “pebble menagerie”, he chooses a piece of slate lying on a Welsh beach, then embarks on a fascinating journey into the “enormous atomic vault of the pebble”. Surprisingly, half of its mass is oxygen bound up with minerals such as silicon and aluminium. Some of its atoms (such as iron) come from deep within the Earth’s super-heated mantle; others (sodium, chlorine) from the oceans. A few of the more exotic atoms come from space, or are the product of our atomic age, such as plutonium. Zalasiewicz’s geological narrative shifts from atoms to silt grains washed from the now vanished continent of Avalonia, then crushed at unimaginable pressures in the Earth’s “tectonic vice”. Moving through deep time, he takes the reader into the microscopic realm of minerals and microfossils before venturing into a far future in which the pebble’s atoms are reabsorbed into a new star system.
via The Planet in a Pebble by Jan Zalasiewicz – review | Books | The Guardian.
ANCHORAGE, ALASKA—If there are other species like us in the universe, theyve probably been around for a lot longer than we have. According to new research presented here today at the 220th meeting of the American Astronomical Society and published online today in Nature, habitable Earthlike planets orbiting other stars may have formed billions of years before ours did. Earlier, researchers had found that giant, gaseous exoplanets preferably form around stars with a relatively high abundance of heavier elements like iron. Since heavier elements are forged in earlier generations of stars and then dispersed through supernova explosions, Jupiterlike giants must be pretty new to the scene. However, a study of the parent stars of a few hundred smaller exoplanets found by NASAs Kepler space telescope reveals that they have a wide variety of heavy-element abundance. Apparently, small planets can easily form around stars that were born much earlier in the history of the universe. Who knows how many civilizations have already risen and fallen in the cosmic past.
via ScienceShot: Alien Earths Have Been Around for a While – ScienceNOW.
Adam Rutherford presents an amazing three-part series on extinction on UK BBC Radio 4 broadcast on Tuesdays at 11:00 and Thursdays at 21:00 (GMT+1 hour).
People living in the UK can listen on the BBC iPlayer.
Others might be able to listen live via BBC – BBC Radio 4 Programmes – Extinct!, Episode 1.
Details about Episode 1
Why did almost all life go extinct 250 million years ago? Why on four other occasions in the geological history has the living world experienced sudden episodes of global mega-death with the majority of species being annihilated? These are two of the questions Adam Rutherford explores in this new series on extinction.
The programme travels to an unassuming suburban development in the middle of Pennsylvania in search of the traces of one of these mass extinction events. Geologist Paul Olsen is as familiar a sight in the neighbourhood as the local school bus, the generously proportioned identikit homes and neat lawns. Beneath the veneer of suburban banality here he’s uncovered a thin layer of rock recording one of the great five episodes of global catastrophe in the history of life on Earth. During this event 202 million years ago at least three quarters of the species of animals and plants died out.
The mass extinction is called the End Triassic event. On land, an entire diverse and planet-dominating group of crocodile like creatures were wiped out. The ecological roles they left empty were then filled by dinosaurs, some of which survived the extinction event. In fact the global mega-death event enabled the rise of the dinosaurs to world domination for the next 140 million years on the planet.
The root cause of this little known extinction event seems to have been a vast volcanic outpouring of lava in what is now the eastern United States and Morocco (the two were joined together back then).
Some of the ancient lavas jut through the shorn grass verges of Dr Olsen’s suburban study area. They are just fragments of a colossal eruption of lavas which covered an area as large as the surface of the Moon.
An even more enormous volcanic episode in Siberia appears to be the most likely suspect for the most disastrous extinction moment in the history of the living world – a brief episode 250 million years ago when, according to some estimates, 96% of species both on the land and in the sea became extinct. It was the day (or at least several thousand years) when life almost died out on Earth.
But why did these volcanoes cause the diversity of life such trauma? That’s the question under investigation by scientists such as Paul Olsen of Columbia University, New York featured in the programme. Jennifer McElwain of the University of Dublin, Jonathan Payne of Stanford University, Mike Benton of Bristol University and Paul Wignall at Leeds University are on the case.
There is still debate about the species death toll at these times of great dying. As Peter Wagner of the Smithsonian explains, palaeontologists can be led astray by tricky fossils known in the trade as Lazarus taxa and Elvis taxa. Also enlivening the extinction discourse are the Red Queen and the Court Jester. For a full explanation of the charming jargon of mega-death, tune in.
As presenter Adam Rutherford explains, recognition of the profound importance of mass extinction events in shaping the evolution of life is something that’s quite recent – within the last three decades. It was something Darwin had dismissed. Adam also asks if the study of mass extinction events in deep time has any relevance and offers insights on the levels of man-made extinction of species on the planet today and how our biodiversity crisis may develop in the future. The interviewees in this programme say yes.
Adam Rutherford is an evolutionary biologist who works for the science journal Nature. He is a regular presenter of BBC Radio 4 and TV science programmes.
Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker.
RELATED LINKS
01. Professor Paul Olsen – the End Triassic Extinction (eesc.columbia.edu)
02. Prof Mike Benton – the End Permian Extinction (palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk)
03. Dr Hans Sues – National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC (www.mnh.si.edu)
04. Professor Paul Wignall – University of Leeds (www.see.leeds.ac.uk)
05. Dr Jonathan Payne – The End Permian Mass Extinction in the Oceans (pangea.stanford.edu)
06. Dr Jenny McElwain’s palaeobotany research (www.ucd.ie)
An ancient family of trees, the cypresses, got their start on the supercontinent Pangaea before it split apart. New genetic research indicates this continental split helped shaped the evolution of these trees, which now include giant redwoods and sequoias.
More than 200 million years ago, Pangaea contained all the modern continents, squished up against one another. The separation of these continents isolated populations of living things, putting them on different evolutionary paths.
A survey of galaxies using the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Herschel Space Observatory has shown that only the most powerful black holes in the early Universe were able to quench the formation of stars in their host galaxies. This finding is an important contribution to our understanding of one of the most hotly debated phases of galaxy evolution.
The first galaxies in the history of the Universe started to form a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. At this very early epoch in cosmic history, galaxies were quite different to those that are now observed in the local Universe. Early galaxies produced stars at tremendous rates and the supermassive black holes residing at their centres were exceptionally active in accreting the surrounding matter.
Galaxy surveys indicate that both star formation and black hole accretion were most intense when the Universe was only a few billion years old, and that this later declined to the moderate rates observed in local galaxies.
via ESA Science & Technology: The most powerful black holes quenched their galaxy’s star formation.
An article entitled “Big History Hits the Big Time” appeared yesterday on the Huffington Post with a good review of its spread and some interesting responses.
Watch children experience the epic of evolution in 40 steps in a fun, interactive, and highly illustrated way. Connie Barlow has been bringing this curriculum to children since 2006. It is structured as a walk back through the timeline of life, using data presented by Richard Dawkins in his 2004 book, “Ancestor’s Tale: Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution.” On our journey we stop at 40 “confluences” where we humans meet an ancestor that we share with other species alive today. For example, Confluence #1 happens 6 million years ago in our walk back through time. There we greet the great-g-g-g grandparent we share with chimpanzees.
Connie leads this program by using guessing games, rhymes, song, and movement. She gradually adds components — including inviting volunteers to read scripts in character of a creature. The video is posted in two installments:
“Ancestor’s Tale for Kids – interactive program based on book by Richard Dawkins”
http://youtu.be/ueWvjUn5GiE
http://youtu.be/thcHtJjgZfc
All the instructions, slides, and scripts are freely downloadable from Connie’s educational website: