Water Came Before Earth; Implications "Exciting" for Alien Life

[Rhykker]

Water Came Before Earth; Implications "Exciting" for Alien Life

Up to half of all the water in our Solar System predates the formation of the Sun.

Researchers at the University of Michigan wanted to know whether Sun [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/tag/view/water] formed.

"Why this is important?" asked Carnegie Institution for Science's Conel Alexander, who contributed to the research. "If water in the early Solar System was primarily inherited as ice from interstellar space, then it is likely that similar ices, along with the prebiotic organic matter that they contain, are abundant in most or all protoplanetary disks around forming stars."

In other words, one of the fundamental requirements for life to exist can likely be abundantly found throughout the universe. "Our findings show that a significant fraction of our Solar System's water, the most-fundamental ingredient to fostering life, is older than the Sun, which indicates that abundant, organic-rich interstellar ices should probably be found in all young planetary systems," Alexander said.

How did the researchers come to this conclusion? It's all about deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen that has a neutron in its nucleus. Hydrogen normally doesn't have a neutron, but isotopes are variants of elements that have either more or fewer neutrons than usual. Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, and when the hydrogen is instead deuterium, we get something called "heavy water" - the extra neutron accounts for the added weight.

The researchers ran simulations to predict the ratio of water to heavy water that should be found in our solar system if all the water was created at the same time, but their results showed that the observed ratios are not compatible with this model - there is simply too much deuterium. Since all the deuterium we observe cannot have originated in our solar system, it must pre-date it and have been part of the dust cloud that ultimately formed the solar system.

"The implications of these findings are pretty exciting," said study co-author Ilse Cleeves. "If water formation had been a local process that occurs in individual stellar systems, the amount of water and other important chemical ingredients necessary for the formation of life might vary from system to system. But because some of the chemically rich ices from the molecular cloud are directly inherited, young planetary systems have access to these important ingredients."

The possibility of finding alien life [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/tag/view/alien%20life] somewhere out there just increased.


Source: CNET [http://www.cnet.com/au/news/earths-water-older-than-the-sun-came-from-interstellar-ice/]

Permalink

 

[DragonsAteMyMarbles]

Sweet Christmas, that's weird to think about. Some of the water we drink - hell, some of the water we're made of - is older than the planet we stand on and the giant glowy sky ball that keeps us warm.

GET OFF MY LAWN, MERCURY

 

[Commodore Vic Twenty]

Am I the only one who read that title and immediately imagined the voice of Mordin Solus saying it?

 

[Tony2077]

cool that is very interesting and adds weight to the water from space stuff

 

[TheSYLOH]

Sweet Christmas, that's weird to think about. Some of the water we drink - hell, some of the water we're made of - is older than the planet we stand on and the giant glowy sky ball that keeps us warm.

GET OFF MY LAWN, MERCURY

Well technically, all the carbon in your body was forged in the heart of a dying star. So you are made of stuff older than the solar system.

Also come to think of it, alot of the hydrogen is from the primordial big bang, it just so happened to come together to form you.

 

[Rhykker]

cool that is very interesting and adds weight to the water from space stuff

Adds weight to the water... heh... deuterium... heavy water... pun intended?

 

[Ylla]

snip

arrrgh ignorance, it hurts my eyes
XD

OT: General chances of life in other star systems are already too high, and this surely makes them even higher, so why havent we made contact with anyone? At least there's a lot of places humankind can expand in this solar system in case we dont fuck up.
Future appears brighter everyday.... If we dont fuck up

 

[Kieve]

Am I the only one who read that title and immediately imagined the voice of Mordin Solus saying it?

Not until you mentioned it. Then I reread it and will never even try to hear it differently.
Thank you for that.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Interestingly enough, one of my former professors from college (he's an astrophysicist) used to talk about this a lot. It was his pet theory. He didn't believe for a second that life began on Earth, and he thought that panspermia is too convenient, but he didn't rule it out. This was his favorite theory of how life came to develop on Earth. It already existed in the water according to him. He's probably ecstatic now.

You know, stuff like this should be the end of all religions. Isn't it sad that people still can't accept simple facts?

 

[Maze1125]

Wow, ok, i'm sorry but you need a bit more education on these things.

I think you'll find that this entire thread is full of people spouting off about things they have no education in and, instead, have just heard some nice sounding "theory" that they like. Yourself included.

 

[Thaluikhain]

And this is null news...

Of course water is out there ... and no the water on earth isn't necessarily the same stuff that formed out there in space. in fact there's a good chance the majority of it isn't. Water is a surprisingly easy molecule to make.. It's Hydrogen and Oxygen.. hydrogen is perhaps the most common element in the univers.. oxygen, not exactly rare either.

No "perhaps", it's something like 3/4 of the universe (by mass).

But, I guess this is something that they needed to confirm. Not a surprise, sure, but has to be checked.

Most organic life actually manufactures watter from the hydrogen in the foods we consuime and the oxygen we breath in.

Er...some organic life, yes, dunno about most.

Likewise...if you you throw water on something hot enough you can actually cause the bonds to split and you get hydrogen and oxygen and a nice little explosion.

Not sure about that, but emphasis on "little". Separating it into hydrogen and oxygen and recombining them is inefficient, you lose energy.

1) It's really far.
Imagine if every time you sent a message, you could only get one back in a few thousand years. By the time you get a message back, language, coding, the way you receive the messages, all of this would have changed dramatically, easily to the point where a message would go completely unnoticed, since it's in a medium we no longer understand, and this is assuming the original message we sent out is recognized as a message, which is probably really really unlikely. Basically it would be like being given a message on a laserdisk when every laserdisk player has long since stopped working and nobody knows how to make or work one or what they even are just based on the huge amount of time since anyone used laserdisks.

Correct...but then again, the aliens might not upgrade their equipment for millenia for all we know. Normally I'd just go with "correct", but when aliens are involved, who can say?

(Instead of talking to aliens, we might be able to watch their old movies. Really, really old movies, if a franchise goes downhill, it'll take ages for the producers to get the viewing figures.)

2) The hypothesis of inevitable societal death.

This is just a hypothesis, since it's impossible to get any evidence for it, but there is a serious question as to whether the human race, or any intelligent race for that matter, has the capacity to exist indefinitely. Not to get all preachy, but for a society to exist, a lot of resources have to be consumed regularly. If we're to get a message thousands and thousands of years later, we have to still be alive as a society. Fact is, we consume. Renewability will only get us so far, and entropy is inevitable. It's likely advanced society will fail at some point in one way or another, and this means no messages, sent or received. This may seem abstract, but remember the timeframe we're dealing with here, thousands and thousands of years. Think of the cold war, how close our species came to total societal destruction, and how narrowly we avoided it. Now imagine enough time for variations of this to happen hundreds of times. At some point is it not likely we get wiped out by our own hands?

Another important point, one explanation of the Fermi Paradox. Extra-terrestrial life might be common, but surviving long enough to be noticed might not.

(As an aside, humanity was always going to survive the Cold War, IMHO. Might horribly kill zillions and put civilisation back a few hundred years, but we'd recover and be ready to do it all again sooner or later.)

3) The hypothesis that any intelligent life is so different from us that communication is impossible.

We live as carbon-based life forms. We communicate through speech and electronic signals and such. But more likely than not an alien civilization would have such vastly different means of communicating that we wouldn't have a place to begin. Imagine for a second humans grew up without hearing or sight, and how radically that would affect us as a species and how we communicate, now consider that that's nothing compared to how different an alien species is likely to be and communicate.

Again, no way of telling. This very much could be true, or it might not be. Really, we have to wait and see on this one.

You know, stuff like this should be the end of all religions. Isn't it sad that people still can't accept simple facts?

Eh, religions have survived the progress of science in the past. Just tweak things a little and things are ok.

Alternatively, revise things or start a new religion.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Well as long as you don't count 'dark matter'

True, I'd overlooked that.

Well let's put it this way. If it breathes oxygen....it's producing water. Water is a byproduct of of aerobic respiration, which pretty much accounts for all species of plants, vertebrates and most species of invertebrates and many species of microbes and unicellular organisms to date.

Ah, right, I'd misread your post there.

And now you're just picking nits that have no relation to the point. Sure it's a crappy way to convert but it happens lots. Any fire fighter will tell you that once a fire hits a certain temp you can't use water on it. Sure the splitting of the bonds still sucks energy from the heat source but if the ampient temp is still high enough to immediately combust the liberated hydrogen and oxygen... well I'll let you figure out the science. Point is, in the early days the earth had a pretty molten surface... molten rock is HOT hot enough in most a few cases to cause that bond split and it certainly would have been back in the day so those water molecules that were pulled in by the condensation of hearth into a planet would have likely been burnt off by the heat into it's composite atoms. So any water pulled in was destroyed and brand new water molecules formed.

Ah, ok, also misread you there.

When has technology or it's application or ideas ever stood still for a thousand or so years? ANy species that could go a few thousand years without innovating probably would never have figured out maths or the internal combustion engine in the first place.

Nevermind that even if the base tech is the same... applications of the tech can. I mean your 1TB hd is fundamentally not much different from ye old 5.25 floppy. The principles are the same. Just like the difference between a trinary and binary computer would not be apparent. trinary is not any different from binary it's just how you count the charges.

Oh, I agree, however, like you correctly said here:

You're making an assumption on alien life which every narrow minded soul makes. Think on the word 'Alien'. You see it comes back to the flaw in our search for alien life... and intelligence and thusl;y the likely reason we haven't found any.

We haven't truly internalized the concept of alien life. When we say life we mean earth-life and when we say intelligence we mean human-intelligence. You aren't going to find either of these out there. Anyone stop to think that maybe.... juuust maybe that we might be the only life form to which water isn't toxic?

Alien life would be, well, alien. We've no way of predicting what it'd be like.

Sure, it'd make sense for them to upgrade their technology in millennia. I'd be surprised if they did not...but until we've gone and found aliens, we can't be sure of that point. For all we know they operate on a timescale very different from our own.

It's a very strong hypothesis which is pretty much supported by the fact that there have been no less than 4 global mass extinctions on this planet already. Change happens and even the human species will fade out eventually, because sooner or later Homo sapiens will give rise to a new species. Just like Homo Erectus, Cro-magnon, and Neanderthal did before us.

Or did you think evolution stopped once we develop the brain capacity to comprehend the concept of evolution?

While that is true, not sure what that has to do with what I said.

Then you will see nothing. if you keep looking for birds but only consider black flamingos to be birds then you will over look everything that isn't a black flamingo and thusly come to the conclusion that birds are very rare... even as a pigeon drops one in your hair.

Again, nothing to do with what I said. Yes, aliens may well be very different from us. Or they may not. We have no way of telling either way as yet. Again, it'd be surprising if they were similar to us in any real way. But until we discover aliens, no way of telling for sure.

Yeah...fancy that. The institution that based itself around charismatic people capable of swaying people to believe what they say is very good at convincing people to keep believing them in spite of everything around them.

Well, yes, they wouldn't have a job otherwise.

Besides very few people who practice religion actually believe in their religion, they simply do it be cause it is a cultural ritual that they are expected/obligated to follow.

Oh, that's another big argument there. Now, sure, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on, but how much and in what numbers, is hard to determine.

OTOH, not sure why murder is a crime if you are sending people to heaven.

 

[rutger5000]

Sweet Christmas, that's weird to think about. Some of the water we drink - hell, some of the water we're made of - is older than the planet we stand on and the giant glowy sky ball that keeps us warm.

GET OFF MY LAWN, MERCURY

Well technically, all the carbon in your body was forged in the heart of a dying star. So you are made of stuff older than the solar system.

Also come to think of it, alot of the hydrogen is from the primordial big bang, it just so happened to come together to form you.

Pretty darn sure that Carbon is made in the normal live stage of stars. You're thinking of heavier elements. (There is a carbon cycle going on in our very own sun, and I'm pretty sure it isn't dying.

 

[Tiamat666]

You know, stuff like this should be the end of all religions. Isn't it sad that people still can't accept simple facts?

Why? Is there any reason why "God" could not have created life and the universe using the laws of physics, math and the forces of nature?
Holy books were probably not intended to be understood literally.

 

[SnakeTrousers]

You know, stuff like this should be the end of all religions. Isn't it sad that people still can't accept simple facts?

Maybe because the facts aren't simple, and for most of us there's no way to even prove they actually are facts. Also, because religious belief isn't always incompatible with science.