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Author Topic:   Panspermia
extremophile
Member (Idle past 5594 days)
Posts: 53
Joined: 08-23-2003


Message 1 of 26 (76533)
01-04-2004 7:39 PM


Can panspermia be considered a type of creationist, ID, or it fit better in its own category? (I think that's the last choice, but sometimes everything is messed up).
Here's a site which defends panspermia: COSMIC ANCESTRY: Panspermia's evidence and implications.
- That's not propaganda! I'm not defending it at all. I just thought that sometimes is a bit tiring to refute creationisms again and again, so maybe we could refute a little bit of some other "opponent", even if there's no one here to defend it. Just to vary a little bit.

Replies to this message:
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extremophile
Member (Idle past 5594 days)
Posts: 53
Joined: 08-23-2003


Message 6 of 26 (76887)
01-06-2004 6:13 PM
Reply to: Message 2 by NosyNed
01-04-2004 7:50 PM


Re: Panspermia
There are several types of panspermia. The most scientific one, IMHO, is not much far away from the mainstream theories for origin of life... I supose that the only difference is that something more sophisticated than the regular life "bricks" came from space already formed at the time of Earth's formation, or maybe short time after...
There's also the called "direct panspermia" which implies in a kind of ID, not necessarily someone who invented the life forms, not necessariliy against evolution by natural selection; it simply states that life was put here by some sort of intelligent being... Earth as an alien's ant farm, or something more complex... it varies... (there was a movie few years old in which life began firstly in Mars then before something odd happened to the planet, spaceships scaped from it to many places, including Earth - that would be direct panspermia too, I guess)
But this link I put here seems to be something different than those theories. Apparently life simply allways existed, an abiogenesis never happened anywhere in the universe, or at least not on earth. I have no idea of how it is against evolution by natural selection (I didn't read almost anything yet of that site), but seems that at the same time there's something like a "bauplan" inehently to any lifeform on the universe, if that's not ID it's some sort of orthogeny... or maybe both
(I was surprised when I saw the original topic I posted blocked... I thought that it somehow became polemic with flames and such... :lol: )
[This message has been edited by extremophile, 01-06-2004]

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Replies to this message:
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extremophile
Member (Idle past 5594 days)
Posts: 53
Joined: 08-23-2003


Message 14 of 26 (105755)
05-05-2004 10:05 PM
Reply to: Message 13 by jar
04-29-2004 3:09 PM


"jar" writes:
if you look at the universe you do see sign after sign of replication. We see stars that are similar, galaxies that are similar, movement that is similar and an underlying basic set of rules that seem to define motion and form.
Given that, I would not be surprised to see things replicated at lesser levels as well. That does not imply that life, as we see it would be the same, I would expect to see similar diversity no matter where life was found. But I would not be surprised to find that the basic building blocks were not uncommon throughout the Universe.
Have you read or at least read about "Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution", by Gary Cziko? I haven't read it yet, but I guess that it's something in this way. This link seems to be the entire book online: http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/g-cziko/wm/
(doesn't seems to be piracy, but if someone sees that there's something wrong, tell me and I'll remove the link)

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extremophile
Member (Idle past 5594 days)
Posts: 53
Joined: 08-23-2003


Message 15 of 26 (105766)
05-05-2004 10:36 PM
Reply to: Message 7 by SUnderwood
02-21-2004 8:13 AM


Re: Panspermia
"SUnderwood" writes:
[...]Their mission, so to say, is not to provide an answer to the origins of life, but to instigate a paradigm shift away from the Earth-centric Darwinian perspective, to a more universal, inclusive, *open ended* view of lifes origins and its existance. Thanks to biotechnological advances and techniques, comet sampling satalites, space telescopes, mars rovers etc, their theory looks more and more accurate as the weeks pass!
That's the main thing I disagree from the few of what I've read from this site. Natural selection simply doesn't care how life has originated to work. Anything that is self-reproducing at the cost of environment, having heritable varieties (not necessarily Mendelian inheritance) with different levels of efficiency is unavoidably evolving under natural selecion. So I can't understand how darwinian evolution can be Earth-centered. May be (or surely is) Earth-based, but, for the sake of logic, must work anywhere in the universe, given the necessary conditions.
"SUnderwood" writes:
I could rant on but I need a break ;-) What are you thoughts? Especially I ask those who've read some of their material (ie, at least COSMIC ANCESTRY: Panspermia's evidence and implications. if not a book or two)
I've barely read few texts on this site, but as some people has already stated, that's an interesting thing to discuss about, we were just expecting someone to be the advocate for this (or a prosecutor, in the sense that is trying to blame the hypothesis, ).
There are several things I'd like to discuss about this, or at least see people discussing about, since it deals with a bunch of stuff that I don't understand so well. What about purposing a new topic on "cosmic ancestry"? To deal more with the side of evolution than origin of life... (since generic panspermia hypotheses don't affect the mainstream theory of evolution)
This message has been edited by extremophile, 05-05-2004 09:37 PM

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extremophile
Member (Idle past 5594 days)
Posts: 53
Joined: 08-23-2003


Message 16 of 26 (105771)
05-05-2004 10:52 PM
Reply to: Message 9 by Brad McFall
04-07-2004 6:32 PM


"Brad McFall" writes:
[...]
Part of the falisfication process would require seperation of colonial organics on MARS AND VENUS or stations orbiting hotter and colder than here.
But wouldn't it tell us only that panspermia is possbile, but yet maybe what has occurred was an abiogenesis at our solar system level? (would it be a "weak" panspermia already?)

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extremophile
Member (Idle past 5594 days)
Posts: 53
Joined: 08-23-2003


Message 19 of 26 (145327)
09-28-2004 10:02 AM


"panspermiability"
Ressurecting my old topic...
But what about the "panspermeability" of the life we know, frin Earth? How likely is the possibility of natural spreading through other planets, after impacts? There are organisms that could survive, or at least, significant parts of organisms (such as DNA) that could infect other planets and spread? Or most of the DNA of actual organisms is much adapted to their respective organisms to be "useful", in terms of genetic code, to a pre-biotic stage of some planet? I'm not even thinking in this DNA producing something highly similar to what it did originally, but only to code for something, in a more organized way...

Replies to this message:
 Message 20 by coffee_addict, posted 09-28-2004 10:28 AM extremophile has replied
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 Message 26 by Alfred Maddenstein, posted 05-31-2012 11:56 AM extremophile has not replied

  
extremophile
Member (Idle past 5594 days)
Posts: 53
Joined: 08-23-2003


Message 23 of 26 (145492)
09-28-2004 8:39 PM
Reply to: Message 20 by coffee_addict
09-28-2004 10:28 AM


Re: "panspermiability"
But what about just latent genes? That wouldn't be exactly a "survival", but just "conservation".
There's the already mentioned in this topic idea of Hoyle (or someone else... maybe a bit derived from someone other's idea) that's more or less like this, except that he/them put this as a frequent event, with genes coming from the space, being responsible for great part of evolution, or even "driving" the evolution (and I don't see that happening). I thought that the most polemical part of this idea is the part of genes everywhere in the universe, existing "since forever ago", in a stationary universe; but the survival of genes I thought that was more or less possible (but maybe it just doesn't look that odd compared with the whole rest of the hypothesis).
I remembered of this with this news about sugar being found in the center of the milky way. Abiogenesis is thought, at least as a possibility, to maybe having made some use of compounds, such as sugar, coming from space... and since DNA is more or less like a complex sugar... I thought if it could remain more or less intact like other simpler compounds maybe did. The main problem I guess was the conditions of the earth when these compounds came here (if that happened)... perhaps it only could reach due to atmospheric conditions that differ from the expected atmospheric conditions of a stage which the arrival, or the "insertion" of a genetic code could be useful... wow, there are many things to account to answer this..... =-/
But, anyway, despite of the problem of reaching another planet intact (or at least some "meaningful" sequences), I was thinking what a genetic code (or a fragment), evolved elsewhere, would do if inhited horizontally by some organism, or arrived at a pre-biotic stage, with "already-done" metabolisms "waiting". The DNA basic instructions itself are universal, but would be the genetic code itself reasonably "compatible", because of that? Of course I'm not expecting phenotypical equivalence in other thing than the proteins coded (if so... I really don't understand that much)...
... so, basically, my question is if that somehow manages to happen, would a alien genetic code be "used", in something like accelerating the ability of self-reproduction, if arrived in a pre-biotic stage, or the code would be completely discarded, and the DNA would be decomposed and used as simple sugar?
This message has been edited by extremophile, 09-28-2004 07:41 PM
This message has been edited by extremophile, 09-28-2004 07:44 PM

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