05-17-2014, 12:07 AM | #1 |
Join Date: Mar 2013
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[Space] Panspermia and the Campgaign
OK, in a campaign setting I'm working on for a Space game involving a single multi-star system I'm planning on using Panspermia as an explanation for why there are so many habitable plants.
This neatly solves two problems: Why are all these planets inhabitable and why can they interact with them (In other words why can we eat the plants and animals that evolved there) But from the look of things there might be a few problems with that. While Bacteria, fungi and other single celled lifeforms. But what about slightly bigger lifeforms, could plant seeds have made interplanetary or borderline interstellar trips clinging to the side of a meteorite? And the big one: If I assume the planet that humanity evolved on is the one where life first arose on, the planet closest to that, at a mere 1.28 AU, has a high chance of have sentient or near-sentient life. What do people think are the chances of that happening? And what are the odds that people realize it before things are too late? And is any sort of communication possible? |
05-17-2014, 02:08 AM | #2 |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: [Space] Panspermia and the Campgaign
Magic 8 ball: Answer hazy, ask again later.
We have one world known to have life. And only one intelligent species on that world in the past 4.54 billion years. We can't know much other than it seems that human level sapience is damn unlikely.
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05-17-2014, 02:10 AM | #3 |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
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Re: [Space] Panspermia and the Campgaign
Panspermia seems a bit silly. Unless you expand it to include simple amino acid seeding by meteorites.
But for a setting, you can just hand wave it with the law of really big numbers. After enough material exchanges eventually one will contain viable life.
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05-17-2014, 03:01 AM | #4 |
Join Date: Mar 2013
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Re: [Space] Panspermia and the Campgaign
I'm pretty sure that there was a rock found from Mars that showed signs of carrying bacteria, that turned out to have come from Earth to begin with (The rock went from Earth, to Mars and then back again) so it's possible
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05-17-2014, 03:59 AM | #5 |
Join Date: May 2013
Location: Ellicott City, MD
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Re: [Space] Panspermia and the Campgaign
Planets being habitable is not explained be panspermia; that's just being the right distance from the parent star. As for being able to eat plants on other worlds, that's just luck. Billions of years of evolution are more than enough to create large differences, as well as planets having differing chemical compositions.
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05-17-2014, 04:40 AM | #6 |
Join Date: Mar 2013
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Re: [Space] Panspermia and the Campgaign
It being in the right temperature zone means the planet has the POTENIAL to support life. It also has to be big enough to retain the right elements and an atmosphere. Once those criteria are meet an interesting paradox arises, life begets life, in basic terms you need the first beginnings of life to kickstart the entire thing to higher and higher levels. In simple terms if you kill off all the trees on Earth, it will soon be life less
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05-17-2014, 05:06 AM | #7 | |||
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: [Space] Panspermia and the Campgaign
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05-17-2014, 07:26 AM | #8 | |
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Vermont
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Re: [Space] Panspermia and the Campgaign
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e.g. on every planet, some strands of the original extremophile bacteria (that have seeded so many planets) tend to evolve into photosynthetic plant life--whenever that happens, animals evolve to take advantage of the oxygen surplus and the potential food source represented by the autotrophs. This is hand-wavy, of course, and ignores the random nature of natural selection, but it would explain why there's edible plant life where ever you go without having to posit seeds that survive the trip through space. I would even suggest that the extremophile bacteria (likely the first life-form) evolved on a comet, and was spread to other comets and planets by collisions.
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05-17-2014, 07:47 AM | #9 |
Join Date: May 2013
Location: Ellicott City, MD
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Re: [Space] Panspermia and the Campgaign
If your star system has some ice ball planets and/or moons at the outer reaches, life could evolve in the oceans underneath icy crusts, and occasionally be thrown out into space via geysers. I mean, there has to be a reason tardigrades can survive floating around in space and such...
Also, if any microbial life could go dormant and float around in space for a period of time without needing to hitch a ride on an asteroid or comet, they could feasibly float into an atmosphere without being roasted. |
05-17-2014, 08:03 AM | #10 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: traveller
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Re: [Space] Panspermia and the Campgaign
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Panspermia would most likely work on the scale of bacteria and other single-celled organisms, not more complex life. The result would be ecosystems descended from the same progenitors, but not necessarily more closely related than, say, humans and the tube worms that live in black smokers on mid-ocean ridges. Last edited by thrash; 05-17-2014 at 08:10 AM. |
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Tags |
evolution, space, system generation |
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