[meteorite-list] Meteorites as hosts for seeds of life

[MexicoDoug at aol.com]

Mark Fr. wrote:
>To borrow from Jim Carrey, "Alrighty then!"...a  cautionary 
>tale about letting your hopes make a fool of your  reason.
 
"Until Ace Ventura, no actor had considered talking through his ***."  
...Jim Carrey
 
Definitely no further comments (I already promised), let me  add another 
interesting topic for discussion:
 
_Halosimplex carlsbadense_ " variation 250 million years old" dated to  the 
age of the "Great Dying", the worst documented extention in the Fossil  record 
"P/T Boundary".  Surviving the breakup of Pangea and riding the  plates of 
continental drift over 10,000 kilometers?  Chicxulub?, a minor  event at the K/T 
Boundary when they were already 185 million years old...
 
This is an interesting organism.  Google it for what is out there.  It is not 
a living fossil.  It was revived.  Viable spores were  extracted 5-10 years 
ago from inside the similar sorts of halite crystals  found in certain 
meteorites we all know and love.  The probability of  contamination was claimed to be 
less than 1 in a billion using the latest and  greatest protocols developed by 
NASA.  Now, only 5% of the samples,  collected in the Permian salt deposits 
in the drill samples from the New  Mexico caverns 600 meters below actually 
contained viable spores in their  suspended, basically dead state.
 
Although the news isn't hot off the press, they, in fact, were viable  and 
live once again today, according to their discoverer, long after going  
"extinct".  The genomes of these extremophiles and characteristics and  requirements 
are being/have been studied, and they turn out to be somewhat  different, 
though related to certain modern _Bacillus_, if my short term memory  serves.
 
250 million years is a long time, and we've seen since then exquisite  
"bottled water" meteorites being marketed shamelessly.  Probability of  transfer of 
these organisms from a world like Mars that dies during a quarter of  a 
billion years afterwards?  Would a small fraction  survive near  absolute zero 
temperatures if frozen gently?  Is there anything magic about  250 million years, 
or could it well have been 500 million?  I don't know,  they probably don't 
have souls or other higher order complexities to worry  about and are basically 
remarkable resilient bubbles formed into spores, but  maybe Sterling or Mark 
knows the answer.
 
Where life may be found and how it survives is one of the most difficult  
questions space scientists are wrestling to the limits. We can be pretty  
confident, though, that wherever water once was, and drys, halite crystals are  hard 
to avoid.  A vacuum is only -14.7 pounds/in^2.  Could a bacterium  survive in 
a 'halite crystal' from Mars to Earth?  Yes.  Exploding  bodies and so forth 
may happen in the movies, but much greater pressures are  routinely experienced 
by ocean divers right here on Earth.  All that is  required for recovery is a 
gentle equilibration so they don't get the  bends.  The pressure under just 
10 meters of water is an additional 14.7  psi, the same differential between 
the earth and space.  Sure vacuum has  its challenges, but a normal person 
sucking a lollypop can probably get at least  half way there (7 pounds per square 
inch).
 
Disclaimer:  I do not "want" to believe in Panspermia.  It is  just a theory, 
like all the rest of the scientific ideas on origins and  proliferation of 
life.
 
Best wishes, Doug