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From: Bruce Sterling [bruces@well.com]
Subject: Viridian Note 00352: Bug News
Links:The ol' "No Blood for Oil" riff. She's got the good sense
to stand in front of an Exxon, though. No blood in the Spanish beach sand, just oil. Lots. Baby ate the ubicomp. Red-hot ancient yogurt.
Big Mike, our beloved Viridian Mascot.
Revolutionary New Theory For Origins Of Life On Earth"A totally new and highly controversial theory on the
origin of life on earth, is set to cause a storm in the
science world and has implications for the existence of
life on other planets. (((Great hook!)))
"Research by Professor William Martin of the University
of Dusseldorf and Dr Michael Russell of the Scottish
Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow, claims that
living systems originated from inorganic incubators ==
small compartments in iron sulphide rocks. The new theory
radically departs from existing perceptions of how life
developed and it will be published in Philosophical
Transactions B, a learned journal produced by the Royal
Society.
(((That paper would be "On the origins of cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells" by Professor William Martin, Institut fuer Botanik III, University of Dusseldorf and Dr Michael Russell, Scottish Environmental Research Centre, Glasgow. And if these guys live long enough to see that hypothesis somehow proved, woah, the Nobel is a shoe-in.))) (((This new hypothesis chimes in remarkably with Thomas Gold's radical writings on the"Deep Hot Biosphere." Gold's notion is that most earthly life is subterranean. Oil is not a "fossil" fuel but microbe-altered carbonaceous chondrite material. And the bacterial sulphide spew that comes out of hot ocean vents goes down == it goes WAY down. Earthquakes, continental drift -== it's ALL caused by bacteria.))) Links:
Thomas Gold rupturing geological paradigms. "Since the 1930s the accepted theories for the origins
of cells and therefore the origin of life, claim that
chemical reactions in the earth's most ancient atmosphere
produced the building blocks of life. In essence == life
first, cells second and the atmosphere playing a role.
"Professor Martin and Dr Russell have long had
problems with the existing hypotheses of cell evolution
and their theory turns traditional views upside down. They
claim that cells came first. The first cells were not
living cells but inorganic ones made of iron sulphide and
were formed not at the earth's surface but in total
darkness at the bottom of the oceans. Life, they say, is a
chemical consequence of convection currents through the
earth's crust and in principle, this could happen on any
wet, rocky planet.
(((Thomas Gold thinks that most rocky planets, Mars and
Venus for instance, have subterranean single-celled life.
There may be a haze of microbes, entombed in rocks and
asteroids, knocked off the surface of one planet to fly to
others, seeding them.)))
"Dr Russell says: 'As hydrothermal fluid == rich in
compounds such as hydrogen, cyanide, sulphides and carbon
monoxide == emerged from the earth's crust at the ocean
floor, it reacted inside the tiny metal sulphide cavities.
They provided the right microenvironment for chemical
reactions to take place. That kept the building blocks of
life concentrated at the site where they were formed
rather than diffusing away into the ocean. The iron
sulphide cells, we argue, is where life began.'
"One of the implications of Martin and Russell's theory is that life on our planet, even on other planets or some large moons in our own solar system, might be much more likely than previously assumed. (...) (((On Venus, for instance.)))
"Public release date: 25-Sep-2002 Venus may be hiding life"The acidic clouds of Venus could in fact be hiding
life. Unlikely as it sounds, the presence of microbes
could neatly explain several mysterious observations of
the planet's atmosphere. (((Another great hook. It's
those British. They still employ real journalists.)))
"Venus is usually written off as a potential haven for life because of its hellishly hot and acidic surface. But conditions in the atmosphere at an altitude of around 50 kilometres are relatively hospitable: the temperature is about 70 C, with a pressure of about 1 atmosphere. Although the clouds are very acidic, this region also has the highest concentration of water droplets in the Venusian atmosphere. (((Yes, fellow yeasts, it's a warm, damp, balmy haze, here 50 kilometers above the crushing acidic hell.))) Link: "'From an astrobiology point of view, Venus is not
hopeless,' says Dirk Schulze-Makuch from the University of
Texas at El Paso.
"To look for possible signs of life, Schulze-Makuch
and his colleague Louis Irwin looked at existing data on
Venus from the Russian Venera space missions and the US
Pioneer Venus and Magellan probes. They noticed some
peculiar things about the chemical composition of Venus's
atmosphere. Solar radiation and lightning should produce
large quantities of carbon monoxide in the planet's
atmosphere, but instead it is scarce, as if something is
removing it. They also found hydrogen sulphide and sulphur
dioxide. These two gases react with each other, and so are
never normally found together unless something is
producing them.
"Even more mysterious is the presence of carbonyl sulphide. This gas is so difficult to produce inorganically that it is sometimes considered an unambiguous indicator of biological activity. "'There may be non-biological ways to produce the
hydrogen sulphide or carbonyl sulphide that we don't know
about, but both reactions need catalysts to proceed
efficiently,' says Schulze-Makuch. 'On Earth, the most
efficient catalysts are microbes.' (((Note that
chemosynthetic angle: bugs eating sulfur, underground and
in the sky, on two different planets.)))
"Schulze-Makuch thinks that bugs living in the
Venusian clouds could be combining sulphur dioxide with
carbon monoxide and possibly hydrogen to produce either
hydrogen sulphide or carbonyl sulphide in a metabolism
similar to that of some early Earth bugs. ((("Early Earth
bugs" would read as "universal rock bugs.))) He suggests
the bugs could be using ultraviolet light from the Sun as
an energy source. If they are absorbing UV, that would
explain the presence of mysterious dark patches on
ultraviolet images of the planet. He presented his theory
at the Second European Workshop on Astrobiology in Graz,
Austria, last week.
"Not everyone is convinced. (((Well, thank goodness.
Because that has some seriously freaky implications.))) 'I
am reluctant to believe this result,' says Andre' Brack
from the Centre for Molecular Biophysics in Orleans,
France. 'For life, you need a volume of water, not just
tiny droplets.' (((That's not what the Martin-Russell
hypothesis says. Oceans, fiddlesticks.)))
"But Schulze-Makuch points out that there is chemical
evidence that Venus was once cooler and had oceans. 'Life
could have started there and retreated to stable niches
once the runaway greenhouse effect began,' he says. (((Or
maybe it just blew in from out of town. Or == and this is
the good part == maybe the giant nebula from which the Sun
formed 4.5 billion years ago was already saturated with
galactic microbes. Brrrrr!))))
"But we may have to wait several years for any firm answers. The European Space Agency's Venus Express mission, which will investigate the planet's atmosphere, is due for launch in 2005. Meanwhile the Swedish Space Agency is looking for international partners to develop their idea for a mission to return a sample of the atmosphere from Venus around the turn of the decade." (((Or, y'know, we could just drill real deep. And pay more attention to the microbial life in our own clouds.))) O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O |
