This week’s episode discusses hidden mountains in Antarctica, bacteria living high atop the Andes, panspermia and extraterrestrial life and more.

Participants (links in brackets are Twitter feeds)

Chris - goodSchist (@yorrike)

Chris –  Highly Allochthonous (@allochthonous)

The Gamburtsevs Mountain Range and Antarctica

The BBC News article “‘Ghost peaks’ mapped under ice” is a nice summary of the story. New Scientist article has additional information in the article “Alpine mountain range revealed beneath Antarctic ice.”

And as always, there’s a little more information at Wikipedia on the GamBurtsevs Mountain Range.

Here’s some information about Lake Vostok.

And you can read about the International Polar Year at Wikipedia.

Extremophile Bacteria at the top of the Andes

Have a read of Science Centric’s Article “Earth’s highest known microbial systems fuelled by volcanic gases.”

NASA’s Kepler Mission

There’s the Wikipedia page on Kepler and the NASA’s official Kepler Mission page too. Plus there’s an example of the mass media misinterpretation from the BBC.

And Venetian resurfacing I was talking about is detailed  in this interview with David Grinspoon “Venus (and Earth) Resurfaced in a Single Catastrophic Event?” and in the paper Catastrophic Resurfacing and Episodic Subduction on Venus from Science Direct. This episodic resurfacing is still up for debate, though, and The Imperial College in London has a counter view.

Exbiology, Panspermia and Planetary Geology

Titan is Saturn’s moon with methane oceans.

Europa is the Jovian moon (beware the obelisk).

You can read about the Dawn Mission at NASA’s official site, or there’s the Wikipedia entry.

My article on Ceres, Dawn and (no) Panspermia (containing information on Ceres, 4-Vesta, the HED meteorites and the Murchison meteorite). And the offending article on The Universe Today.

There’s information about the bacteria on the Moon

Dave’s article on resurrected Eocene yeast and the resulting beer.

The Allan Hills 84001 was the one with the bacteria-looking inclusion in it.

Mars had recent running water and there’s Google Mars to have a look at too.

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Next Episode

We like to have a new episode of the podClast every fortnight, so the next episode will be recorded on Sunday the 22nd of March at 2000 GMT.

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Credit

The intro and exit music was Roots Fi Cool by Burning Babylon.

Text Addresses

The post that accompanies this podcast can be found at http://www.goodschist.com/2009/03/12/the-podclast-episode-8/ or http://is.gd/n2PW and an archive of all  podClasts can be found at http://www.goodschist.com/category/podclast/

Another important part of the Dawn mission will be swinging passed 1 Ceres (Ceres for short), the largest body in the asteroid belt, but the smallest identified dwarf planet in the solar system. There’s strong evidence Ceres contains a lot of water. The implications of water on an extraterrestrial body need not be repeated here, I’ll assume you’ve jumped to the same hope that some in the astroblogosphere have: life! The source of the panspermia that seeded the Earth!

This brings me to one of my major annoyances with the subject of panspermia. Don’t get me wrong, I think the idea is fascinating, and the prospect of interplantary geographical isolation and it’s evolutionary prospects makes me giddy. But the mere prospect of Earth being seeded from a source within the solar system just seems plainly ridiculous, and frankly, verging on the fantastical. Let me explain.

The Murchinson meteorite is a carbonaceous chondrite which landed near the town of Murchison in Victoria, Australia on the of 28th of September 1969. Murchison and its associated CM-class of meteorites are incredibly important because in addition to the normal treasure trove of mineralogical gems (some of which are literally gems) you’d expect from a carbonaceous chondrite, Murchison contains something very unusual: amino acids. The particular amino acids are not a form of contamination from Earth – the living systems on Earth which produce amino acids have a heavy preference for “left-handed” molecules (see the article Meteorites Made Life Left Handed), while the acids from Murchison have a left-hand/right-hand ratio of ~55/45 t0 60/40 (and that slight difference may have pushed life here to be left handed, see the aforementioned article for details). It’s therefore reasonable to assume that no living system has gotten in there and biased the handedness of the molecules present (at least, that’s extremely unlikely).

Murchison, being a carbonaceous chondrite, is from a parent body (we’re not sure which), which was not big enough to melt and differentiate. This implies that the amino acids we find in Murchison were formed either in space, or in a very, very low gravity situation. Therefore, amino acids, the building blocks of DNA, could very well form in space, away from any biological systems, and then rain down on planets during the formation of a solar system. So the building blocks of DNA can form in space without life and rocks containing these chemicals are still raining down, to this very day on Earth.

Why then do we require a hypothesis that Earth was seeded by already-formed life from somewhere else? This is the exact same infinite-regress problem one arrives at when debating the existence of a god – if the creator created everything, who created the creator? What is wrong with the concept that life formed, originally, on Earth, from the basic ingredients? Earth had the conditions right – liquid water, and therefore a warm environment, a protective magnetic field, a thick atmosphere (but no too thick), also protective from the nasty radiation of space, and a good, steady, consistent orbit. Ceres too may have had similar conditions 4.55 billion years ago, and it too would have had amino acid-laden meteorites raining down on it prior to and during the late heavy bombardment. If you’re willing to accept that life formed on Ceres, Mars, Venus or any other body from the same raw ingredients the Earth was receiving, but that life  THEN had to be transported to Earth, why not cut out the middle-planet and concede that life probably formed on Earth?

The hunt for extraterrestrial life will continue, and will remain exciting. Should I be privileged enough to see its discovery in my lifetime, I will have witnessed one of, if not the most important scientific discoveries ever. What I object to is needless scientific hypotheses gaining traction in the public mind when there’s absolutely no evidence to support them. Yes, panspermia is an incredible idea, and yes, exerts wildly pontificating about its mechanisms and implications is important, but in my opinion it is far more important to study and concentrate on the origins of life from those basic, and it would seem abundant, ingredients, and once proven, continue to unravel more mysteries of the mysteries of the solar system and beyond.

In short, to answer Universe Today’s article title of “Life on Ceres: Could the Dwarf Planet be the Root of Panspermia?” No, probably not. And what’s wrong with the idea of life starting here?