Re: Hmm... Why water?

[janos nagyapu <***>]

    Tim, I got news for you:
ICE   I  S  WATER.

You asked the right question and quoted a wrong answer
to it. Believe it or not, if that "life" you people
are talking about is really 'going on' in solid ice,
it is but a variant of the phenomenon with those
creatures Pasteur handled or Darwin dreamed about. In
(call it:) xerochemical processes (ie in solid phase)
the molecules - although more slowly - do similar
(chem.) transformations as in liquid - (or gaseous!) -
phases or in between such. 

You may think also about 'suspended' life, the still
viable grains in the pharao-tombs, or the spores
(which allegedly even traveled) through the
vacuum/cold space to us in the theory of the
"panspermia". (That's us.) 

Also you may list those sulfur bacteria and others,
living in the environment of anerobic volcanoes in the
deep sea. All this without overstraining your
imagination. Then you can use sci-fi or just 'fi' to
have even more esoteric "creatures" (if I may call
them so) about which - of course - you will not read
in RR's books written for the reductionst Darwinist
readers. 
I am sure a thinker of RR's level had concerning ideas
- I wonder if he spoke about such even to his little
girl? 

I touched the possibility of the hydrocarbon life on
that moon (I am lazy to look up of which planet and
name in methane gasphase and very cold climate, it was
praised with a deep silence on this list. 

This is why I kept my mouse shut when the "water"
fetish came up with the poorly identified 'life'. 

Thanks for your question, maybe there are better
replies out in the cold and dark Googlian space.

John M
(my mail client is still shut, this is a substitute, I
wonder if the server lets it through?)



--- Tim Gwinn <***> wrote:

> Since the topic of water came up, here is a link to
> a (tangentially) related
> paper. The author discusses the known and the
> possibilities of microbial
> life in extremely cold locations, such as deep
> within glacial ice, and
> proposes that such microbes can leverage various
> properties in order to
> persist in those surroundings. The discussion also
> relates to origin-of-life
> and exobiology on locations such as Europa.
> 
> Regards,
> Tim
> 
> http://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio.PE/0507004
> 
> 
>
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> ----
> 
> Quantitative Biology, abstract
> q-bio.PE/0507004
> From: Buford Price [view email]
> Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2005 20:44:39 GMT   (303kb)
> Life in solid ice
> Authors: P. Buford Price
> Comments: 21 pages, no figures, presented at
> Workshop on Life in Ancient
> Ice, June 30, 2001
> Subj-class: Populations and Evolution; Cell Behavior
> 
>   Some microbes appear to be able to metabolize in
> glacial ice or
> permafrost. The rate depends on temperature,
> nutrient level, and bioelement
> availability, among other factors. I have developed
> a plausible argument
> that they do this while confined in veins filled
> with acidic or saline
> solution that provides nutrients and elements
> necessary for growth. Here I
> develop this scenario further and discuss some of
> its implications for
> ice-covered planetary bodies and for the the origin
> of life. An accompanying
> paper in the conference proceedings (Bay et al.)
> discusses plans to test
> this hypothesis using epifluorescence microscopy of
> pristine, unmelted ice
> samples and an optical biospectrologging tool to
> assay living and dead
> microbes in boreholes in glacial ice.
> Full-text: PDF only
> 
>
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> 
>