Fossil Older Than Oxygen on Earth Found in Australia, page 3

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reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 01:23 AM by Ophiuchus 13

reply to post by Corruption Exposed

Snf, interesting find

. Are they anaerobic like water bears 1 wonders.

NAMASTE*******

reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 02:53 AM by MrInquisitive

Originally posted by camaro68ss

Originally posted by HawkeyeNation
Man just crazy to think about. I always wonder how the hell they are able to carbon date and all that jazz. I mean were talking about 3.5 billion years ago. Anyways...it just amazes me about what our Earth was at one point and what it will be one day.

Makes you wonder if carbon dating is a good means of finding the age of a fossil
edit on 3-1-2013 by camaro68ss because: (no reason given)

Carbon dating isn't much use for accurate dating for things much older than 20,000 years old, and the scientists who used radioisotope dating know this and use other isotopes to do older dating. There are a number of such isotopes to use, for different ranges of ages.

And people who don't think that radioisotope dating workd should also not believe that nuclear power or nuclear bombs work -- or trust in medical/dental x-ray images or tomographic imagery for that matter.

reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 02:54 AM by MrInquisitive

Originally posted by Ophiuchus 13
reply to post by Corruption Exposed

Snf, interesting find . Are they anaerobic like water bears 1 wonders.

NAMASTE*******

They would have to be in order to live in an oxygen-less environment, no?

reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 04:03 AM by gort51

3.5 billion years ago.........Ah yes I rememberit well, it was particularly cold in the year 1 billion and 2. Around 150 degrees from memory.....

What?? Well, the Earth is made up of exploded Star stuff and other Universal flotsam and jetsam.

Elements forged out of the super nuclear reactions of Stars over billions of years, distributed thruout the Universe to be reformed via gravity, into other Stars and planets etc.

My Human body is made up of all those elements, 80% being H2O, just one big pile of atoms vibrating together.
One day my atoms will be free again, to reform into some other atomic structure.

I am 4.54 (give or take a few) Billion years old...on Earth. But my atoms could be even older.......

How old are you?

reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 05:59 AM by missvicky

IDK but if you have a fossil from billions of years ago and your only explanation for it fits rather neatly into the Darwian evolution/big bang idea then you are grasping at straws. I just don't understand how someone can find a fossil this old and have a theory about its existance in about 10 minutes. I guess I'll have to wait for the sequel to "Forbidden Archeology" .

reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 07:43 AM by ngchunter

Originally posted by smithjustinb
This proves one of two things. Either life doesn't need oxygen.

We've known that for a long, long time. I can grow bacteria right now in a CO2 incubator. Some anaerobes actually have to avoid free oxygen.
en.wikipedia.org...

reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 08:17 AM by Helmkat

reply to post by Corruption Exposed

Very interesting considering Mars was wet at the same time. If some cross pollination occured there should be plenty of fossils to find on the red planet.

reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 08:22 AM by NavyDoc

reply to post by Corruption Exposed

That is cool and leads us to think that there may be much ore life out there if we can see that life can exist on many more things than the specific environment we have on Earth.

reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 09:27 AM by Blarneystoner

I had no idea there were so many different types of respiration... this thread prompted me to look it up on the Wiki.

Scroll down the page for the respiration chart...

Wiki - Anearobic Respiration

reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 10:22 AM by Dragain

Pre-dating oxygen? Then how did Oxygen get here in the first place, did it just appear on the planet?

Poorly written article.

On another note, this can also substantiate claims of life being able to develop on planets that we, as humans, didn't think were viable.

Go science!

reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 02:12 PM by iwilliam

Originally posted by Corruption Exposed

I just found it slightly rude on your behalf to advertise the other thread, then go on to admit that you are aware that it's in a different forum, so therefore that portion of your post was rather pointless as my thread falls within terms and conditions and that is where my rent-a-mod comment came from due to the redundancy of your thinly veiled off topic deflection.

I found it neither rude or pointless. Perhaps some people would like to read or contribute to the discussion in that other thread either instead of, or as well as in this one? Not everyone combs every sub-forum in this place, and I usually appreciate it when people provide links.

Deep breaths.

oooooh.....saaaaaaahhhhh

reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 02:31 PM by TrueBrit

reply to post by gort51

Technically speaking, all things in the universe are made up of its component parts, all singing with the echos of the detonation which lead to its current state. I suppose you could argue that on a deep, deep level, we are all as old as the universe, that even the briefest living thing is ages old. But that point of view, while potentially valid, is not helpful to science, since it does not improve our understanding of the time lines that we are attempting to fill in. It is a notional possibility, but provides no context of any importance in this specific scenario.

reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 03:59 PM by galadofwarthethird

reply to post by Corruption Exposed

Baring how they came to the conclusion and what methods they used to determine that the fossils are that old because I do not think there methods are as accurate as they think they are, but seeing that there are bacteria and other organisms which can survive and thrive without oxygen its not all that surprising that they may be from a period of time on this planet before oxygen was produced in any vast amount. But were you have bacteria and other microscopic creepy crawlers your bound to have other things like water and the bacterias and other microscopic creepy crawlers food sources, after all not even bacteria and all other microbes live in and of themselves and oxygen is a byproduct after all, so there was likely to be oxygen out there if not in the vast amounts it latter came to be, and that it is today.

But in a way it is kind of showing that we don't know nowhere near as much as we think we do, and its just educated guess, but ultimately still queses, and in 3.5 billion years many things can happen. Which going by the revisions all throughout science, I think one day there may even be a revision on the basic things we thought we knew, such as the way we date fossils and other things.

reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 09:52 PM by pauljs75

Interesting find.

However I do agree the semantics by the article writer could have been better.

If there was no oxygen, there'd be no H2O, and no CO2. Those compounds both need oxygen to exist. (Not to mention a whole lot of other minerals and chemical compounds.) Living things still need oxygen in some form, since that's part of biochemistry. (You know, the ol' CHNOPS thing?)

And if they really were older than oxygen on Earth, then they'd also be older than Earth itself.

It wouldn't take much to resolve the confusion with oxygen the chemical (O) and oxygen the compound (O2). They should have said fossils older than breathable atmospheric oxygen found in Australia. Then we wouldn't be prodding at them like this and making fun of them for it.

reply posted on 4-1-2013 @ 11:02 PM by OrionsWitness

Great thread Op, but what is perhaps truly amazing is Australia has the oldest fossils, yet prior to European settlement, the humans hadn't erected a single building.
Makes one wonder if Australia had a advanced civilzation other than the original Aboriginies, who perhaps departed, or were taken , to other worlds.

Aboriginal cave paintings depict strange things after all.

I have roamed the Aussie bush, and felt spirits, are they not remnants?

reply posted on 5-1-2013 @ 05:03 PM by Raist

The article I read the other day did not get into the poor wording of older than oxygen. It was pretty detailed though about the bacteria.

That's why Noffke and her colleagues corroborated their story by measuring the carbon that makes up the textured rocks. About 99 per cent of carbon in non-living stuff is carbon-12, a lighter version of the element than the carbon-13 that accounts for most of the remaining 1 per cent. Microbes that use photosynthesis to make their food contain even more carbon-12 and less carbon-13. That bias, a signature of "organic" carbon that comes from a living being, showed up in the Australian rock.

"It's always nice to have a number of different lines of evidence, and you definitely want to see organic carbon," says geomicrobiologist John Stolz of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

What wasn't preserved: any proteins or fats or body fossils that would clinch the case for life and identify what types of bacteria left behind this organic carbon. Most microbial mats today contain lots of photosynthetic cyanobacteria, which make the food that sustains the other bacteria. Named after the blue-green pigment they use for this process, called phycocyanin, cyanobacteria also make oxygen and are given the credit for creating Earth's atmosphere about 2.4 billion years ago.

Cyanobacteria living in microbial mats nearly 3.5 billion years ago could shake up the history of the air we all breathe.

Read more: www.smh.com.au...

While there might not have been free oxygen it seems likely that these bacteria helped to create it.

Raist

reply posted on 7-1-2013 @ 02:54 PM by SisyphusRide

reply to post by gort51

actually the source of the material you mention is still in question... Planet formation is quite logical, I love cosmology, but none the less questions remain.

with the years of information and readings I have absorbed the single point big bang theory just doesn't make much sense... I can't see how scientist with much more acquired knowledge can support the theory.

--

I believe it is the second law of thermodynamics... "You can't get something from nothing"

Thermodynamics of cosmological matter creation

edit on 7-1-2013 by SisyphusRide because: (no reason given)

reply posted on 7-1-2013 @ 03:04 PM by ModernAcademia

How old is this fossil?
How long has oxygen been around?

The answers is all educated guesses.
They change their minds all the time regarding how old the earth is

reply posted on 7-1-2013 @ 03:10 PM by SisyphusRide

reply to post by ModernAcademia

yes but if you don't answer the socially accepted norm you just might be shunned...

no wonder why aliens haven't visited, we're just not that friendly of a race.

it's even been politicized...

www.slate.com...

tread lightly