You're Literally Made of Stardust — But That's Not the Weird Part

Forget the little green men. The serious version of "what if the aliens already got here" is much weirder. Every carbon atom in your body was forged inside a dying star older than the Sun. Roughly 30 to 50 percent of the water in your blood predates this entire solar system. The galaxy is full of amino acids — they've been falling on Earth inside meteorites since 1969, and the man who co-discovered DNA wrote a real, peer-reviewed paper in 1973 proposing that life on Earth was seeded from somewhere else on purpose. We've been pointing telescopes at the sky for sixty years looking for the aliens. We are the aliens.

This video covers panspermia: the chemistry of meteorites (Murchison, 1969), Crick & Orgel's "Directed Panspermia" paper, the molecules astronomers have detected drifting between stars (including a cloud near the galaxy center that contains the molecule that gives raspberries their flavor), the tardigrades who survived 10 days of raw space in 2007, the Martian rocks that have made it to Earth, and the inconvenient fact that panspermia doesn't actually solve the origin of life — it just moves the question.

Sources
• Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler & Hoyle (1957). Synthesis of the Elements in Stars. Reviews of Modern Physics 29, 547.
• Kvenvolden et al. (1970). Evidence for Extraterrestrial Amino-acids and Hydrocarbons in the Murchison Meteorite. Nature 228, 923.
• Schmitt-Kopplin et al. (2010). High molecular diversity of extraterrestrial organic matter in Murchison meteorite revealed 40 years after its fall. PNAS.
• Furukawa et al. (2019). Extraterrestrial ribose and other sugars in primitive meteorites. PNAS.
• Crick, F. H. C. & Orgel, L. E. (1973). Directed Panspermia. Icarus 19, 341-346.
• Elsila, J. E., Glavin, D. P. & Dworkin, J. P. (2009). Cometary glycine detected in samples returned by Stardust. Meteoritics & Planetary Science 44, 1323.
• Belloche et al. (2009). Detection of ethyl formate and n-propyl cyanide in Sagittarius B2(N). Astronomy & Astrophysics 499, 215.
• Jönsson, Rabbow, Schill, Harms-Ringdahl & Rettberg (2008). Tardigrades survive exposure to space in low Earth orbit. Current Biology 18, R729.
• Cleeves et al. (2014). The ancient heritage of water ice in the solar system. Science 345, 1590.
• Djokic et al. (2017). Earliest signs of life on land preserved in ca. 3.5 Ga hot spring deposits. Nature Communications 8, 15263.

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#panspermia #astronomy #originoflife #murchison #curiosity #science
Every breath you take contains an immense number of carbon atoms, many of which are older than the sun itself and were forged in a dying star. This cosmic journey of matter connects us to the vast universe, from the formation of stars to the potential for alien life. It's a reminder of how interconnected everything truly is, making us ponder our place in the grand scheme of astronomy. ✨

New curio every Mon / Tue / Wed.

#science #cosmic #universe #stars #spacefacts

Видео You're Literally Made of Stardust — But That's Not the Weird Part канала Curio