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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