Thursday, August 30, 2012

Astrobiology within the confines of the Oort clouds: A short questioning essay




I’ve been fascinated with the idea of life swirling about the solar system within Oort clouds since reading the Dragonriders of Pern series Anne McCaffery as a teenager. In her books a “mycorrhizoid spore…periodically rains down on the planet due to the orbit of the Red Star [passing through] a Sedna-class inner Oort cloud"[i]. The idea that life could exist suspended in a frozen form in space, only to become active as it is heats up in a passing planets’ atmosphere, on the surface, seems plausible, especially since the Oort clouds are believed to be made up of a mixture of water, methane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide and nitrogen ices. In my mind the idea seems very much like a frozen t.v. dinner: defrost and serve.
                If possible, I would love to study the clouds and the chemical make-up within them to see if those frozen shards of liquid and rock could possibly hold fragments of extraterrestrial life. Our own Solar System seems to hold two such clouds and it would be fascinating to compare the findings between them. Do the inner (Hills) and outer cloud differ in composition than their far-off brethren or do all clouds within our galaxy share the same building blocks from the beginning of time? Are there other clouds out there? One would assume so since Nature abhors a vacuum and those bits left over from the Big Bang have to have gone somewhere. And if the clouds were created when the other stars in our cluster were close enough to exchange materials, what’s to say that the beginnings of another solar system’s life forms weren’t frozen in the bits our clouds stole?
                My question is if the combination of liquids and gases in the Oort clouds came into contact with an electrical source, could the combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen be sparked into creating amino acids that would be similar to those found here on Earth, or would the combination create something entirely new and ‘alien’? Would they even be in the right quantities and combinations to create anything at all? We say over and over again that life has the strongest chance of surviving in an environment that houses water. According to the research comets, and the Oort clouds they are born from, meet that criteria and even have a few added bonus chemicals to spare. It would be interesting to see if they might possibly be the cryogenic storage centers of the solar system.


[i] Dragonriders of Pern. (16 August 2012). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonriders_of_Pern

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