Are carbonaceous asteroids the
precursors of life or the wreckage
of life?
NASA plans to launch the Origins
Spectral Interpretation Resource
Identification Security Regolith
Explorer mission, also known as
OSIRIS-REx, in 2016. The spacecraft
will orbit the Near Earth Object
(NEO) 1999RQ36. After a year in
close orbit, the probe will gather a
sample of material from the object’s
surface and bring the sample back to
Earth.
1999RQ36 is over 500 meters in
diameter, about a third of a mile.
Its orbital period around the Sun is
1.2 years. Observations indicate
that its surface contains quite a
bit of carbon, so astronomers
classify it as a carbonaceous
asteroid. Its orbit crosses the
Earth’s orbit, and it will come
close to the Earth—a few times the
Moon’s distance—several times during
the rest of this century. Mission
scientists are hoping to gain some
insight into how to deflect it if it
should threaten to collide with the
Earth.
The primary goal of the mission
is to get a sample of “asteroid
dust” and to examine it in a lab.
According to presently accepted
theory, asteroids were the leftovers
when planets condensed out of the
solar accretion disk that formed the
Solar System a few billions of years
ago. Astronomers expect to find
“pristine organic material that …
might have seeded the sterile early
Earth with the building blocks that
led to life.”
Judging from previous missions,
what the astronomers find will
“surprise” them and send them “back
to the drawing board.” They will not
have collected a sample of “pristine
material” but a sample of
unquestioned presumptions from an
obsolete theory. The nebular theory
of planet formation never worked;
astronomers abandoned it at one
time; but they resurrected it
because they could think of nothing
better.
So they ignore the contradictions
and spend their time—and taxpayers’
money—following their faith in their
textbooks, much as the Medieval
priest-scholars did, albeit with a
different textbook. Their work at
the drawing board will be an ad hoc
addition to the unwieldy contraption
that is presently accepted theory.
It will enable them to interpret the
surprising new data in an acceptable
way, or at least in a way that will
excuse attention to unorthodox
ideas.
If they had more confidence in
the scientific method than they do
in textbooks and peer pressure, they
would consider the evidence left by
ancient astronomers. People around
the world at the dawn of history
were obsessed with observing and
recording the movements of bodies in
the sky. Modern astronomers accept
the ancient astronomers’
identifications of those bodies as
planets when remarking on their
observational skills. When the content
of the observations reveals
a sky and movements that contradict
the textbooks, the ancient evidence
is dismissed out of hand as
fantasies about gods.
If astronomers treated historical
data with the same rigor and
attention to detail with which they
treat present data, they would
consider that that evidence
indicates the occurrence of events
only a few thousands of years ago
that reorganized the Solar System
and resurfaced the Earth. Instead of
taking for granted their speculation
that 1999RQ36 is a pristine sample
of billion-year-old proto-life, they
would consider that it might be a
space-fried fragment of life
recently blasted from the ruins of
the Earth.
Mel Acheson
A video documentary that could
change everything you thought you
knew about ancient times and
symbols. In this second episode of
Symbols of an Alien Sky, David
Talbott takes the viewer on an
odyssey across the surface of Mars.
Exploring feature after feature of
the planet, he finds that only
electric arcs could produce the
observed patterns. The high
resolution images reveal massive
channels and gouges, great mounds,
and crater chains, none finding an
explanation in traditional geology,
but all matching the scars from
electric discharge experiments in
the laboratory. (Approximately 85
minutes)