fueling panspermia

The Murchison meteorite, which crashed into Australia in 1969 and has been calculated to be roughly the same age as our solar system, was recently found to contain uracil and xanthine, two precursors to DNA. This discovery supports the idea of panspermia: that the basic components or “seeds” of life exist throughout the universe and may have been scattered to other planets as well. As always, we’re incredibly excited about the notion that life may exist elsewhere in the universe, and of course that we might also someday find it.

Note: My ability to turn out content for the Littoral Zone is somewhat impaired at the moment by the fact that my computer has gone wherever computers go when their time on this earth is up. Apologies for the slowness; I should have a new one soon.

daedalan feats

Robert Zubrin, a somewhat controversial popular scientist who has long been an advocate of human space exploration, in particular of a manned mission to Mars, calculated in his book Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization that (other obstacles, of course, aside) a human being on Saturn’s moon Titan could, due to Titan’s thick atmosphere and low gravity, strap wings onto his arms and actually fly under his own power.

For anyone who missed the memo, Titan is rather cool for other reasons as well. Its atmosphere is, like Earth’s, very high in nitrogen, and scientists believe they can study conditions on Titan in order to better understand conditions on Earth at the time when life first appeared. Titan is, however, too cold for life as we know it to evolve; in fact, it’s cold enough that methane, rather than forming a gas, is liquid and can be found in giant lakes.

Man, I love science.