Saturday, December 06, 2014

Where did the oceans come from?

TGD based vision about life has been developing rapidly thanks to the realization that hierarchy of Planck constants and dark matter could relate directly to criticality: consider only long range correlations, phase separation, and classical non-determinism near critical point as common aspects. Ulla's facebook group (maybe I dare to give the link here) has served as a valuable source of links to the findings which challenge the recent mainstream views and provide inspiration for developing my own views. One of the interesting links today was from Elizabeth Maas and to the popular article Half of Earth's water formed before the sun was born.

  1. Article represents first a standard argument in favor of late formation of seas. The collisions by astreroids and meteorites could have evaporated the water or blown off it in to space. Hence surface water at Earth should have emerged much later. Note that one can replace "water" with "life" in the argument. A related problem is Cambrian explosion: it seems impossible that the evolution could have occurred so fast that highly evolved life forms emerged suddenly.

  2. The researchers however end up to propose that the water emerged already before Sun, and also oceans did so rather early. Carbonaceous chondrites, which formed at the same time as Sun and well before the planets, could have served as a source of water. These meteorites were formed very early, already earlier than Sun. Their composition resembles that of bulk solar system composition. By studying basaltic meteorites from asteroid Vesta, which is known to be formed in the same region as Earth, the reaserachers found that they contain same hydrogen isotopic composition as carbonaeous chondrites.

    This motivates the proposal that chondrites contained the water. A further proposal is that the water reservoirs formed at the surface of Earth as it formed. Here I beg to disagree: the objection represented in the beginning is difficult to circumvent!

The article stimulates several interestig question in TGD based conceptual framework.
  1. Why not to assume formation of underground water reservoir? Here meteorites and UV radiation did not form a problem. And there is indeed recent evidence for the previous existence of large underground reservoirs. The formation process for Earth could have naturally led to the evaporation of of chondrite water from the interior of Earth and its transfer nearer to surface and getting caught inside reservoirs.

    Also prebiotic life could have evolved in the underground reservoirs and already in chondrites (DNA, RNA, aminoacids, tRNA represented as dark proton sequences at flux tubes) and transformed to the life as we know. Mother Gaia's womb was nice place: no meteorite bombardment, no cosmic rays, and metabolic energy provided by Mother Gaia as dark photons. Cambrian explosion as Earth's radius increased by a factor of two was the birthday of the life as we identify it, the (child;-) water burst to the surface and seas were formed and life began to evolve at the surface of Earth. The greatest stories have fractal structure;-).

    Recall that in TGD continous cosmological expansion at level of space-time sheets is at quantum level replaced with a sequence of phase transitions increasing heff and/or p-adic length scale of the space-time sheet - by p-adic length scale hypothesis most naturally by a factor of two. This kind of transition explains why the continents of Earth fit nicely together to cover entire Earth if the radius is half of its recent value, the emergence of gigantic life forms, etc... (see this).

  2. The basic objection relates to the basic mechanisms of metabolism. What replaced plants receiving metabolic energy from solar light as source of metabolic energy? What replaced Sun? Did the dark photon radiation generated by Earth - or maybe also Sun - and penetrating ordinary matter as dark radiation, replace sun light? Any critical system could generate this radiation and it should not be difficult to identify this kind of system: the boundary between core and mantle is the most obvious candidate for a critical system as also for a rapid self-organization process). I proposed for more than decade ago this option half-jokingly as metabolic sources of IT (intraterrestrial) life as I called it.


  3. Dark photon radiation would have had a universal energy spectrum - the spectrum of biophotons in visible and UV range. Part of it would have transformed to biophotons taking the role of solar radiation as a metabolic energy source. An interesting question is whether the life at the bottom of oceans could give some hints about the counterpart of photosynthesis based on bio-photons? I remember also that also quartz has been mentioned as a source of biophotons but cannot find the reference. The discovery that the metabolic reactions thought to require complex catalytic maschinery can take place in the environment similating ocean bottom (see this) supports the idea about the evolution of life from prebiotic life forms in the womb of Mother Gaia. In TGD framework these prebiotic life forms could correspond to dark proton sequences (dark nuclei) at magnetic flux tubes associated with the negatively charged exclusion zones discovered by Pollack).

Addition:Two days after I had written above I got link providing additional information. The conclusion of research described in the popular article is that (assuming the water was brought to Earth from somewhere, it was not brought by comets but could have been brought by asteroids.

As described above, the asteroid Vesta is indeed perfect fit in this respect, and suggests that Earth got its water very early. There is an intriguing connection Expanding Earth model motivated by the assumption that continuous cosmic expansion, which is known to not take place for astrophysical objects, occurs for them in discrete jumps increasing rapidly their radii by power of two as p-adic length scale hypothesis suggests. What I forgot to tell last time was that Mars has radius, which is half of that of Earth and has no oceans. When will it have the Cambrian moment when its radius increases by a factor of 2 and highly evolved life bursts out from the womb of Mother Mars?;-)

One can of course ask whether the water was really brought from somewhere. I have proposed that Earth was originally a ring of dark matter along its orbit - flux tube again: physics is mostly boring repetion of the same basic mechanisms;-). Gradual transformation or dark matter to ordinary matter also led to a condensation of the resulting ordinary matter to form Earth. Saturnal rings would be a modern version of the same phenomenon and should give rise to moons in future. At this stage also the water emerged and was associated with this stuff and eventually formed oceans. Note that the case of Vesta however supports the asteroid option but is consistent also with this option.

There is also the question about how water was formed? How the oxygen nuclei were formed? Also here TGD suggests new nuclear physics. Cold fusion is possible in TGD framework (large value of Planck constant, dark matter, and flux tubes again!) and could have generated a lot of heavier nuclei outside stellar interiors. One can find a book telling about work of a french amateur experimenter who concluded that biosystems produce routinely heavier elements: for instance, hens produce Calcium. Already the problem in understanding the amount of Lithium in cosmos in standard cosmology suggests that fusion could occur also outside the stellar interiors.

So the question is following: What generated the significant fraction of heavier nuclei: stellar interiors or dark matter at magnetic flux tubes or both?

For details and references see the new chapter Criticality and dark matter of "Hyper-finite factors and hierarchy of Planck constants" or the article Criticality and dark matter.

2 comments:

Ulla said...

A bit along this line of thought. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17191459

Ulla said...

The first link to your paper cannot be opened.