Life's Building Blocks Found on Dwarf Planet Ceres

The dwarf planet Ceres keeps looking better and better as a possible home for alien life.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has spotted organic molecules — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it — on Ceres for the first time, a study published today (Feb. 16) in the journal Science reports.

And these organics appear to be native, likely forming on Ceres rather than arriving via asteroid or comet strikes, study team members said. [Photos: Dwarf Planet Ceres, the Solar System's Largest Asteroid]

Life's Building Blocks Found on Dwarf Planet Ceres

I didn't really know what forum to post this on , I Have not posted in a long time, I would have normally posted in breaking news or space forum , I did a search and could not find an article , If one has already been posted Elsewhere I apologise in advance.

Great news above , I have always been of the thought that either A. Life will be incredibly rare. or B. Life will be abundant in the universe. from what I have seen of the resilience of life at ALL levels of size and the evolutionary spectrum, Life does norm find a way for better or worse So my guess is the latter .. B.

Exciting times and I thought this would make a decent post , sorry its not political, or doom mongering or war mongering.. I guess it wont get much attention.

PEACE!

QS

a reply to: Quantum_Squirrel

In 2015 someone predicted we will find life in Ceres

www.abovetopsecret.com...

originally posted by: starwarsisreal
a reply to: Quantum_Squirrel

In 2015 someone predicted we will find life in Ceres

www.abovetopsecret.com...

I know I actually just congratulated them on the Original post if its the same one, couple years out i guess ( it came up in my post research to see if this topic had already been done)

credit where its due

Prediction life on Ceres

QS

If we find a place that has all the right conditions for life and there is none then wouldnt that really give us very bad odds of there not being any life out there at all?

originally posted by: PhoenixOD
If we find a place that has all the right conditions for life and there is none then wouldnt that really give us very bad odds of there not being any life out there at all?

I would agree with you 100% if Ceres was in the 'Habitable zone' around our sun , ofc only with life as we know it, and this is new hopefully as it is not in the zone I say that gives us some chance that life still might be common again I stress as we know it.

Maybe its the start of some type of life , maybe its the end .. would love to take a peek and find out.

QS

originally posted by: PhoenixOD
If we find a place that has all the right conditions for life and there is none then wouldnt that really give us very bad odds of there not being any life out there at all?

That'd be kindof like determining whether or not there is life in the ocean by testing a single water molecule... Completely inconsequential. The area of the universe in which we are able to find things is absolutely tiny compared to the entire thing.

originally posted by: PhoenixOD
If we find a place that has all the right conditions for life and there is none then wouldnt that really give us very bad odds of there not being any life out there at all?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

From NASA:

So far, astronomers have found more than 500 solar systems and are discovering new ones every year. Given how many they have found in our own neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy, scientists estimate that there may be tens of billions of solar systems in our galaxy, perhaps even as many as 100 billion.

From Mario Livio, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore:

While estimates among different experts vary, an acceptable range is between 100 billion and 200 billion galaxies

That means there could be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (ten sextillion) solar systems in our observable universe... and that's just we can theoretically see. There's a whole lot more we can't see. We are currently searching our one for life. Not finding it on Ceres would be proof of absolutely nothing except that there is not life on Ceres (which technically would itself would be extremely hard to prove).

a reply to: scojak

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

has nothing to do with the question i asked about probability.

Its Life Jim...But not as we know it......

Is Dead Jim....Jim Its Dead.......

Maybe its sentient Fungi?.

Exciting either way.....but I go with the thought process, that Life is everywhere in the Universe, that is capable of starting and harbouring life, just as it is on Earth.

Hey, boy! Hey, boy!
I got a message for you!

originally posted by: PhoenixOD
If we find a place that has all the right conditions for life and there is none then wouldnt that really give us very bad odds of there not being any life out there at all?

I don't think that's the way statistics works. The only thing it does is determine that there's no life on that particular planet.

As it is, we are the only known planet with life on it in the portion of the universe we know about. If there are some out there that we don't know about, what difference does it make?

I don't think that's the way statistics works.

Probability deals with predicting the likelihood of future events, while statistics involves the analysis of the frequency of past events.

originally posted by: PhoenixOD
a reply to: scojak

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

has nothing to do with the question i asked about probability.

It actually has everything to do with what you asked about probability. Please read up on The Problem of Induction and The Black Swan Theory

With what you are talking about, probability is inconsequential. Life (as of now) is not a replaceable science experiment. It's not like you add 1 part water, 1 part light, 1 part organic carbon molecules and - BAM - you get life. The creation of life is not something standard or even something we can comprehend at this time.

Just because all the elements are present for life to be created does not 100% mean it will.

Also, the fact that we as a species cannot create life from nothing proves that we don't know the recipe for life, and as so, we can't definitively even say that all the elements necessary for the creation of life are present on Ceres.

Plus, you are talking about a sample size of one. Perhaps wait until we've checked out a million or so habitable planets with organic molecules before saying the odds are not as good.

Hopefully you can at least see how some of that relates to your question on probability.

originally posted by: PhoenixOD

I don't think that's the way statistics works.

Probability deals with predicting the likelihood of future events, while statistics involves the analysis of the frequency of past events.

Great, so instead of the probability of life existing elsewhere being 1 in 100,000,000,000,000, it will be 1 in 99,999,999,999,999.

a reply to: Quantum_Squirrel

this part:

...NASA's Dawn spacecraft has spotted organic molecules — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it — on Ceres for the first time, a study published today (Feb. 16) in the journal Science reports.

And these organics appear to be native, likely forming on Ceres rather than arriving via asteroid or comet strikes, study team members said.

I take issue that these carbon oriented , organic molecules.... or snips of longer chains of evolved organic molecules are Native on Ceres...


I submit the life building-blocks were rained upon Ceres... as a molecular cloud enveloped this Solar System and the Gravity and stillness of the Ceres environment allowed these space-borne building-blocks to lay there undisturbed for ~who knows how long~


the building-blocks on Ceres might be from the same molecular cloud that eventually started life in the more hospitable crucible-for-life here on planet the Earth... as Earth had day-night/seas/ hot spots & cold spots with the frontier edge of these areas of the diverse landscape which offered a wide range of conditions for single cell life to develop itself

The carbonaceous chondrites (meteorites), that have been falling all over the Earth, since it solidified from the nebulae, have the same organic compounds and amino acids as what is suspected on Ceres. They originate from the crusts of long ago destroyed planets, planet-oids and resulting asteroids.

I'm very intrigued by Ceres and I've seen this new information.

Now most of us are intrigued by the glowing craters at Ceres. After I was searching for the explanation from NASA that salt could be giving off this glowing effect of the craters.

However now that they discover the basic elements and building blocks for life and starting to ask myself how could salt give off so much light it could be seen from Earth by telescopes.

I started searching about amino acids and minerals that some of those minerals seem to glow under given circumstances caused under ultraviolet light.

Now salt I believe doesn't work that way and only seem to light up if electrons come into play. And if I understand this well then electrolytes can be produced by amino acids .

Could this be a possibility that because of amino acids the ammonium salts starts glowing due the cause of amino acids produce these electrons in combination with water that seems to be abundant under surface of Ceres?

a reply to: scojak

With what you are talking about, probability is inconsequential. Life (as of now) is not a replaceable science experiment. It's not like you add 1 part water, 1 part light, 1 part organic carbon molecules and - BAM - you get life. The creation of life is not something standard or even something we can comprehend at this time. Just because all the elements are present for life to be created does not 100% mean it will. Also, the fact that we as a species cannot create life from nothing proves that we don't know the recipe for life, and as so, we can't definitively even say that all the elements necessary for the creation of life are present on Ceres.

I agree The creation of life is so mind numbingly complicated that it could be with all the conditions correct it might just take a practically unique event or series of unique events for it to happen.

I didnt mention Ceres i said if we were to find a planet with all the conditions perfect for life. I didnt specify any planet.