Extraterrestrial Octopus Origins - Fake or Maybe?

[Cikomyr]

So i have seen many news articles about "Science say life may have originated from extraterrestrial sources!!"

So i first go and do a bit of fact checking. The articles they are reffering to is a new one named "Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?", Published about 2 months ago.

Snopes is debunking the same kind of news, but about an article that was published in 2015, pointing out that the original article never mentions extraterrestrial origins. But this new article does.

So.. can this be maybe legit?

[Lord Torath]

Maybe. But I haven't heard of any non-debunked claims of micro-organisms found in meteorites, which is one of the supporting claims listed in the article's (http://www.panspermia.org/causeofcambrianexplosion.pdf) abstract. And I follow a couple of astronomers, who would love to draw attention to such a find.

The publisher, Elsevier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier) is the company that publishes The Lancet, which (Andrew Wakefield not-withstanding) is generally considered a well-respected medical journal, but I don't know what kind of peer-review process this particular article underwent. Until I hear some validation or corroboration elsewhere, I'm going to take it with a large grain of salt skepticism. Extraordinary claims and all that.

[Palanan]

That is one of the worst-written abstracts I’ve ever come across, and I used to be an editor for a research journal.

As for the article, it seems to be some interesting theorizing, which by itself is fine. The issue is news writers who twist the ideas into sensationalized headlines. They don’t care about accuracy, only bylines.

I'd be interested to see if anyone has written a response to this, either as a letter or an article in reply.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Why are you mentioning octopuses in the title?

Panspermia is not even that weird a theory, I could see it work. Although I think it's a stretch to think of interstellar panspermia, and within the solar system I'd sooner expect life to start under the great conditions on Earth and then move out to other places than the other way around (although a very early Ceres or Europa could have been a or the source, and I guess even something like Venus' atmosphere could turn out to be the chemical furnace required to create the first self replicating biological structures, which would go a long way towards explaining the Fermi paradox, making complex life a lot less common as it needs to planet-hop to develop).

However, life on Earth does seem all to come from the same tree of life. It's not like there are two radically different forms based on different chemistry, like say a group of creatures with completely different DNA-like and protein-like molecules that are stable at much higher temperatures. So if life on Earth is descended from life coming in from another planet, it's very likely that all life on Earth is descended from it.

So that's why I asked that first question: octopi are related to us. If they're panspermic aliens, so are we.

[Mechalich]

That particular paper is extremely poorly-written and includes a lot of very weasel heavy terminology such "organism-like morphologies." It involves a whole lot of theorizing throwing back to citations of the authors' various previous papers and other dubious sources (they cite freaking Wikipedia!) and is overall extremely terrible in just about every way, with several hypotheses extending into the realm of outright fantasy - such as frozen octopus eggs arriving from space.

Panspermia as a contribution to the origin of life on Earth is one thing. That's a viable hypothesis one can talk about. That's not what the "Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?" paper posits. Those authors are claiming a continual and ongoing bombardment of the Earth by extraterrestrial organisms to the point of including complex multi-cellular animals.

It is not clear if this is simply a weird conspiracy theory or a bizarre sort of back-door Creationist publication (the appendix is suggestive in the latter direction)


The publisher, Elsevier is the company that publishes The Lancet, which (Andrew Wakefield not-withstanding) is generally considered a well-respected medical journal, but I don't know what kind of peer-review process this particular article underwent. Until I hear some validation or corroboration elsewhere, I'm going to take it with a large grain of salt skepticism. Extraordinary claims and all that.

Elsevier publishes over 2500 journals, which vary vastly in quality. This article was published in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, a fairly obscure and low impact journal that seems to carry a combination of highly technical molecular biology material and wildly theoretical articles. Their 'most downloaded (https://www.journals.elsevier.com/progress-in-biophysics-and-molecular-biology/most-downloaded-articles)' list includes such workmanly titles as: 'Optogenetic targeting of cardiac myocytes and non-myocytes: Tools, challenges and utility' alongside 'East-West paths to unconventional computing.' Seems like an ideal target for this sort of dubious speculation.

[Fri]

You can read this review by a biologist showing the crank parts of the journal and what kind of cranks the writers are.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/04/19/squids-from-spaaaaaaaaace/

[wumpus]

The biggest argument for panspermia is that there does not appear to be any range of Earth's history where life is possible and fossils evidence such life are possible and said fossils/other evidence are found. So either RNA-like material sprang into existence faster than you might otherwise expect, or Earth was seeded by extraterrestrial sources.

The biggest argument against panspermia is that we still haven't found any evidence of extraterrestrial life. You would expect any planet that could support life (over the course of a few million years) to support life, at least during the times possible. According to the above posts, this paper isn't worth bothering about to see if they can overcome this issue.

One side effect of the highly recommended book "Godel, Escher, Bach" is that it makes you really question how self replicating molecules could jump into existence so fast. Moreso if life started around volcanic fissures (one theory that is strong on how life kept surviving, but weak on how it got started).

[Andor13]

I did a napkin back assessment of panspermia once.

Given that:
We know some terrestrial life (spores, bacteria, viruses) are capable of surviving in space, that we know they can get high into stratosphere, and it seems plausible (but not yet investigated) that they can be lofted higher.
The solar wind constantly strips small amounts of our atmosphere away from the earth.

It seems easily plausible that the solar wind sends earthly life (Microbial, or at least large viral RNA fragments) out into the Galaxy at large at some rate dependent on how much life it present in the upper atmosphere.

I did rough calculation based on assuming it left at 1/10th the speed of the solar wind, and the 3 billion year age of terrestrial life, and found that even if life began here first, we ourselves should have seeded the entire galaxy several times over.

[Lord Torath]

Did you by any chance look at how the solar wind from other stars would interfere with the microbes propelled by our own solar wind? It's kind of like pointing two fans directly at each other. The more powerful one will push harder than the other, but there's a limit as to how close dust sent from one can get to the other.

[NRSASD]

My biggest problem with panspermia is that it just punts the ball into another court. So what if life didn't evolve on Earth. Where did it evolve then? It still evolved somewhere right?

[Mechalich]

My biggest problem with panspermia is that it just punts the ball into another court. So what if life didn't evolve on Earth. Where did it evolve then? It still evolved somewhere right?

It does and it doesn't. Yes you still have to have an abiogenesis event somewhere at some point - but you're increasing you chances. Something that has a one in a billion chance of happening on one planet is much more likely when you've got tens of billions of chances by having a galaxy full of targets.

Panspermia is also an important concept to keep in mind in the scenario where humans do encounter extraterrestrial life (probably microbes) since it's something that biochemical evidence could support or deny. It's certainly something we'll need to think about if we ever do find microbes on Mars or Ceres or Europe.

[Andor13]

Did you by any chance look at how the solar wind from other stars would interfere with the microbes propelled by our own solar wind? It's kind of like pointing two fans directly at each other. The more powerful one will push harder than the other, but there's a limit as to how close dust sent from one can get to the other.

Well the Oort cloud extends outside the Solopause, so dust seeded comets still provide a distribution method for slipping past the exo-stellar wind. Good point though, it would slow things down.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Andor13
Well the Oort cloud extends outside the Solopause....

Is that when Han Solo is frozen in carbonite? :smalltongue:



(The term is heliopause, not "Solopause.")

[Brother Oni]

Is that when Han Solo is frozen in carbonite? :smalltongue:

No, just the technical term for the level of suspension of disbelief required for when he got launched by nuclear explosion in a refrigerator. :smalltongue:

[NRSASD]

It does and it doesn't. Yes you still have to have an abiogenesis event somewhere at some point - but you're increasing you chances. Something that has a one in a billion chance of happening on one planet is much more likely when you've got tens of billions of chances by having a galaxy full of targets.

Panspermia is also an important concept to keep in mind in the scenario where humans do encounter extraterrestrial life (probably microbes) since it's something that biochemical evidence could support or deny. It's certainly something we'll need to think about if we ever do find microbes on Mars or Ceres or Europe.

We only have a single data point from which to base our theories on. We have no idea how conducive Earth is to creating life, only that it didn't have life and then it did. For all we know, our solar system could be unusual in its lack of life. We have lots of things that are suggestive and look promising, but we have never found a singular cell of life that didn't come from Earth. The second we do is the second we can have a serious discussion of Panspermia, but until then we are just speculating with zero evidence.

[Andor13]

(The term is heliopause, not "Solopause.")

So solar system, solar wind, solar radiation and days are "Sols", but it's heliopause. Damn it science you need to make up your mind on this Latin/Greek thing.

[NRSASD]

So solar system, solar wind, solar radiation and days are "Sols", but it's heliopause. Damn it science you need to make up your mind on this Latin/Greek thing.

If it helps, biology is even worse at this. The common crow's scientific name is corvus corax, otherwise known as crow (Latin) crow (Greek).

[Fri]

If it helps, biology is even worse at this. The common crow's scientific name is corvus corax, otherwise known as crow (Latin) crow (Greek).

Say hello to grizzly bear, aka ursus arctus horribilis, aka horrible bear bear.

[Mechalich]

The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature explicitly allows a genus name and specific epithet to be the same, allowing for Bufo bufo, Rattus rattus and similar constructions. The International Code of Botanical Nomenclature forbids this. Both systems of rules trace to the works of Linnaeus, so feel free to blame him, his legacy can take it.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

If it helps, biology is even worse at this. The common crow's scientific name is corvus corax, otherwise known as crow (Latin) crow (Greek).

Geography is even worse, as the La Brea tar pits will attest ("the the tar tar pits").

I used to also reference the torpenhow hill (which I was told meant "hill hill hill hill"), but it seems that might not be accurate. According to wikipedia, it's "merely" "top of the hill hill hill".

And if what offends you is the mix of languages, well, geography also has you beat. Take the Río Guadiana river: Río is river in Spanish, gua is valley in Arabic, ana is duck in latin and of course River is river in English (for a combined "river of the valley of the ducks river").

Grey Wolf

[brian 333]

An interesting note on Panspermia:

It appears that our Oort Cloud is chock full of organic molecules which appear to form there as stray atoms are gravitationally attracted to clumps of ice. If this is true, then every star with a cometary halo is generating the building blocks of life every day since forever.

Now, let us consider the origin of our oceans. The event which created our moon virtually guaranteed any water which was present and not ejected into space was purified via being converted to steam. The result of this impact was to turn Earth into a giant smelter which was hot enough that the rocks were separated by density, with the most dense material like iron settling at the "bottom" of the gravity well and the slag floating to the top. At this point it is safe to assume Earth was completely sterile.

Lots of debris slapped Earth and Moon around during the Noachian age, including, (theoretically,) comets. Comets jam-packed with organic molecules. The first standing water on Earth was pools of hot organic soup. Add salt, generously sprinkle with lightning, and complex organics form. This has been replicated in the lab and it doesn't take long to occur. Long before a chance encounter with extraterrestrial life, Earth would have established its own organic soup, and the one extraterrestrial invader would have faced billions of terrestrial residents who were very hungry for free organic food.

Now, there is a side issue often brought up, including by Will Smith in the new "One Strange Rock" show. Add a flavor pack to an ocean and the result is not a nice cup of ramen. Well, we didn't get "instant oceans" either. The accretion of oceans of cometary ice would have taken millions of years, (a geological eyeblink in time,) but from the moment the first self replicating polymer came into being in the first hot pools of water their rate of growth, even if replication required decades, would have insured that every time the "infected" pools joined the sterile ones due to the rise of water levels, the contagion would expand into the new soup of organic molecules so that by the time of H2O Maximum, self-replicating organics would have permeated every body of water on Earth. What we would see now is that wherever there was water, there were the building blocks of life from the very begining.

One spark starts an inferno, one leak breaks a dam, and one self-replicating protein creates a worldwide infestation of life.

The only unreasonable hypothesis is that life has not started in the same way in a million other places in our galaxy because the conditions that start the chain of events which lead to life are present around every star we know.

[Grinner]

There's a research group in the UK which has been doing studies on panspermia. Their method entails sending a sanitized fly-trap like device in a seal box into the upper atmosphere via weather balloon, remotely opening and closing the box, and parachuting the box back down to Earth. Then, they use a clean room to look at what's trapped inside. Their results seem to indicate that there are organic molecules floating about in space.

[halfeye]

For the original question, the octopus is related to the squid, and the cuttlefish, and the nautilus and all the other molluscs, there were ammonites and blemnites before there were dinosaurs, the idea that the modern octopus came from anywhere but Earth is very silly indeed.

It's pretty clear that all life on Earth came originally from one scource species.

It's unknown whether that species arrived from space, the odds seem to be pretty strong that it didn't, but there can probably be no absolute proof of that.

[Bohandas]

Wasn't this the premise of At the Mountains of Madness?


There's a research group in the UK which has been doing studies on panspermia. Their method entails sending a sanitized fly-trap like device in a seal box into the upper atmosphere via weather balloon, remotely opening and closing the box, and parachuting the box back down to Earth. Then, they use a clean room to look at what's trapped inside. Their results seem to indicate that there are organic molecules floating about in space.

Organic molecules are nothing special

[NichG]

We only have a single data point from which to base our theories on. We have no idea how conducive Earth is to creating life, only that it didn't have life and then it did. For all we know, our solar system could be unusual in its lack of life. We have lots of things that are suggestive and look promising, but we have never found a singular cell of life that didn't come from Earth. The second we do is the second we can have a serious discussion of Panspermia, but until then we are just speculating with zero evidence.

We only have one datapoint for life-as-we-know-it, but in terms of replicating chemistry, we do have multiple datapoints. At the very least, autocatalysis as a phenomenon is pretty common - I think the number of chemical self-replicators that have been discovered is somewhere in the 20s right now, many of which can occur in nature in a variety of environments (there's one in Titan's atmospheric chemistry, there's one in the fusion processes in the sun, etc).

So if there's a rate-limiting step or difficult/picky step, getting some sort of self-amplifying chemical mix isn't it.

Going from chemical self-amplifiers to sequence-based replicators does seem to be trickier, though we've made a few synthetic ones that just use shape-based templating, so you don't need the full enzymatic replication mechanism in place to get sequence replication. Similarly, the formation of self-assembling cell-like structures (vesicles, etc) is a pretty common chemical phenomenon as long as you've got amphiphilic polymers in water.
The translation apparatus (going from a sequence of chemical family A to a corresponding sequence in chemical family B) seems to be the current challenging thing, as well as perhaps the integration of all these parts in a synchronized process (e.g. that the cells don't merge/split on their own independently of the internal autocatalytic or sequence-based replication mechanism).

In terms of timescale, chemical evolution would almost certainly be faster than e.g. bacterial evolution due to a much shorter 'generation time' (by several orders of magnitude), plus the ability to more easily re-use failed 'offspring' across their degradation path to extend the search for functional molecules. So I won't be surprised if e.g. we went from scratch to the ribosome in only a few million or tens of millions of years, even though in terms of complexity it's something that looks on par with much of what came after.

[Finback]

If it helps, biology is even worse at this. The common crow's scientific name is corvus corax, otherwise known as crow (Latin) crow (Greek).

Biologists were disappointed when the boa constrictor,Boa constrictor, was renamed as the boring Constrictor constrictor.

But we'll always have Gorilla gorilla gorilla.

[Eldan]

Biologists were disappointed when the boa constrictor,Boa constrictor, was renamed as the boring Constrictor constrictor.

But we'll always have Gorilla gorilla gorilla.

We also have the best names, though. I point you to Tyrannophasma gladiator.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

We also have the best names, though. I point you to Tyrannophasma gladiator.

Although Gyrodactylus salaris makes for some pretty rich jokes as well, while sounding like a crossbreed between a pterosaur and a gyrocopter.

[Grinner]

Organic molecules are nothing special

I trust you won't mind if I press you to present some reasoning?

[georgie_leech]

I trust you won't mind if I press you to present some reasoning?

On their own, organic molecules just refers to hydrocarbons. Would need more context to see if it's interesting, or just gasses a little more exotic than hydrogen. Like, Titan is covered in literal oceans of organic molecules: methane.

[brian 333]

On their own, organic molecules just refers to hydrocarbons. Would need more context to see if it's interesting, or just gasses a little more exotic than hydrogen. Like, Titan is covered in literal oceans of organic molecules: methane.

In general we are referring to complex organics, which are not much more than polymer strands composed of simple organics. While not as common as methane, they aren't rare by any means, even in the vacuum of space. The natural affinity between hydrogen and carbon plus their polygamous ways with other atoms and molecules makes for "interesting" molecules pretty much anywhere we look.

The trick is containing them in a cell where they can propagate and a mechanism for splitting the cell without popping the bubble. That may be a development that happens once in a billion tries, which means that for every billion worlds in a Goldilocks zone we get life once. Or it may be much easier, and over time and billions of generations the development is virtually inevitable.

The thing is, until we go and look we'll never know.

[halfeye]

The trick is containing them in a cell where they can propagate and a mechanism for splitting the cell without popping the bubble. That may be a development that happens once in a billion tries, which means that for every billion worlds in a Goldilocks zone we get life once.

Your maths here is very far off the target; e.g. the work rate of catalase is 6MHz:


one catalase molecule can convert millions of hydrogen peroxide molecules to water and oxygen each second.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalase

So a billion tries, in an ocean of relevant molecules, would probably take seconds. The odds against life are almost certainly much higher than that, even if it happens everywhere, and higher still if we are unique.

[Lord Torath]

So a billion tries, in an ocean of relevant molecules, would probably take seconds. The odds against life are almost certainly much higher than that, even if it happens everywhere, and higher still if we are unique.Pretend he said "a gajillion tries" instead of a real number. The intent was to say that it could be an exceedingly rare event, rather than to provide real numbers.

[brian 333]

I meant each Goldilocks planet as one try, but yes, as Lord Torath said.

But as Halfeye said, billions, trillions, of opportunities are easy to achieve in an ocean of organic soup. Since we have no real data from which to base projections, we simply don't know how often this has happened.

It may be that on Earth it happened exactly once. Or it may have happened millions of times, but one time it worked better. Given the ready availability of organic polymers and how common we are discovering Goldilocks zone planets to be, there will have been billions of suitable locations for life as we know it to begin.

The odds would have to be truly astronomical for life to have only gotten started once in our galaxy, and there are more galaxies than there are grains of sand on Earth.

Panspermia may be a thing. It may be inevitablle that life eventually crosses thd interstellar wastelands to reach distant oasis planets like Earth. But my hypothesis is that when such a life form succeeds it will arrive on a world already brewing its own organic tea.

[Bohandas]

Your maths here is very far off the target; e.g. the work rate of catalase is 6MHz:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalase

So a billion tries, in an ocean of relevant molecules, would probably take seconds. The odds against life are almost certainly much higher than that, even if it happens everywhere, and higher still if we are unique.

1.) Most things are slower than catalase 2.) the action of catalase is to convert things into less complex molecules 3.) catalase itself is a very complex molecule; something that in this scenario we'd be waiting to be produced, not relying on to produce other things

[S@tanicoaldo]

The guy who wrote this was a Lovecraft fan. There is no other way.

[Bohandas]

I trust you won't mind if I press you to present some reasoning?

They're just hydrocarbons, not necessarily complex or impressive

[Bohandas]

The guy who wrote this was a Lovecraft fan. There is no other way.

Yeah, like I said this is straight out of At the Mountains of Madness