Of Water and Comets
November 12, 2014 — humanity landed a spacecraft on a moving comet for the first time. On Rosetta, the origin of Earth's water, and the seeds of life.
Admit it; we all wondered — at some point or another, where do we come from? It’s a childish question, much like “what are rainbows made of?” or “how many stars are there in the night sky?”
Most of us, including me (sadly), grew out of these questions already. We were too busy with our daily life to spend even a tiny amount of time feeding our curiosity. We had too many things in our mind that we have no more space for these kind of thoughts.
But not today.
Today, November 12th, 2014; after 20 long years of planning, humanity landed its spacecraft on a moving comet for the first time. Let that sink in for a moment.
It may seem ordinary at first, after all it’s an unmanned mission; perhaps it seems not as ambitious as the moon landing in 1969. But the question it’s trying to answer is a very ambitious one: where does all this water (and ultimately, life) come from?
More than two-thirds of earth’s surface is ocean; 66% of our body is water; our unicellular ancestors grew and evolved in it; and yet we’re still not sure of its origin.
And that’s why we turn to comets. They’re basically huge blocks of ice floating in space. Maybe in the early days of our planet these ice giants bombarded it and made the ocean. And maybe, just maybe, these comets contained organic matter and helped “seed” the life on earth.
How exciting would it be if #Rosetta found organic matter, or even DNA on the comet’s surface? That would be one huge revelation to mankind.
And one badass plot for a sci-fi novel.