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

[MexicoDoug at aol.com]

>Ah yes - Hollywood; ever the source of  wit.  Half of it, anyway.

> ...and vacuum is a gift  that keeps on giving.  It doesn't just give us
>a lack of air - it  boils water, leaving dessicated wreckage where cells
>used to be.   Hardly comparable with a scuba diver's environment.  

Right, sweat "boils" right here on earth if you want to put it that way,  and 
lips get chapped if you don't remember the chapstick, so what.
 
The original post discusses halite crystals found in meteorites and  produced 
in evaporative environments.  These crystals are naturally  bottled water/ice 
in space.  They appear to be quite effective natural  space capsules 
(especially if a hardened spores were inside, like those found in  the New Mexican 
Caverns).  Further, halite crystals have been shown to  hitchhike protected on 
meteorites like Zag, among others.  The pressure  comparison I make is fine and 
relevant when discussing the integrity of the  crystals.  A vacuum isn't much 
of a hurdle pressurewise given these  capsules.  If you wish to discuss scuba 
diving or other obvious  situations on how to kill organisms, you've missed 
the point, have a different  point to make, just want to be disagreeable, or 
some combination of the  three.
 
Common halite crystals could be an ideal vector for the interplanetary  
transport of bacterial spores.  The pressures of a vacuum is weak enough  that a 
standard bottle of Evian mineral water, properly twisted  shut would have no 
problem with reasonable headspace(i.e., not filled  to the top), to float around 
space near the Earth's orbit, and be no where near  its burst point.  That is 
another example of pressure as was the 10 meter  sea depth, to make a point 
that the stresses caused by vacuum pressures are not  always the problem 
Hollywood makes them to be, and just fine for bottle water in  salt capsules.
Saludos, Doug