Life on the moon? Seeds are there, scientists say

Life on the moon isn’t totally of this world and one scientist has the evidence to prove it.

While this isn’t the first time that such a claim has been made, it’s not as far-fetched as when former NASA scientist Richard C. Hoagland claimed there were aliens living on the moon watching over us.

We know that the moon holds significant amounts of water, which is required for life.

But does the moon have what’s required to cook up some organic life from scratch? Based on work by Sarah Crites, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and her team, the answer appears to be yes.

Crites and her team modelled the icy chemistry, using radiation data from lunar orbiters, and concluded that cosmic rays striking lunar ice are indeed powerful enough to spark the reactions that would turn basic molecules into organics. Their simulation suggests that up to 6 percent of the simpler molecules in the moon’s polar ice, such as carbon dioxide and ammonia, could be converted into organic compounds, such as methane, after being bombarded by cosmic rays for a billion years. That sounds like a long time, but it is only about a quarter of the moon’s age.

The work by Crites and her team suggests the building blocks of life are much more prevalent in the universe than anyone previously thought.

But don’t go crazy speculating about alien life forms.

Michael Callahan at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland says the organics created in these simulations would need to become even more complex to be biologically useful.

Via NewScientist

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