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Correct, Tolland said. This species would have collapsed under its own weight if it walked around on earth. bads brow furrowed with annoyance. Well, Mike, unless some caveman was running an antigravity louse farm, I dont meet how you could possibly conclude a ii-foot-long bug is earthly in origin.Tolland smiled inwardly to think corky was missing such a simple point. Actually, there is some other possibility. He focused closely on his friend. Corky, youre used to looking up. Look down. Theres an abundant antigravity environment right here on earth. And its been here since prehistoric times.Corky stared. What the hell are you talking about?Rachel also looked surprised.Tolland pointed out the window at the moonlit sea glistening beneath the plane. The maritime.Rachel let out a low whistle. Of course.Water is a low-gravity environment, Tolland explained. Everything weighs less underwater. The ocean supports enormous fragile buildings that could never exist on land-jellyfish, gian t squid, ribbon eels.Corky acquiesced, solely scarcely slightly. Fine, but the prehistoric ocean never had giant bugs.Sure, it did. And it still does, in fact. People eat them everyday. Theyre a delicacy in most countries.Mike, who the hell have giant sea bugsAnyone who eats lobsters, crabs, and shrimp.Corky stared.Crustaceans are essentially giant sea bugs, Tolland explained. Theyre a suborder of the phylum Arthropoda-lice, crabs, spiders, insects, grasshoppers, scorpions, lobsters-theyre all related. Theyre all species with jointed appendages and external skeletons.Corky of a sudden looked ill.From a classification standpoint, they look a lot like bugs, Tolland explained. Horseshoe crabs resemble giant trilobites. And the claws of a lobster resemble those of a large scorpion.Corky turned green. Okay, Ive eaten my last lobster roll.Rachel looked fascinated. So arthropods on land stay small because the gravity selects naturally for smallness. But in the water, their bodies are bu oyed up, so they can pay off very large.Exactly, Tolland said. An Alaskan king crab could be wrongly classified as a giant spider if we had limited fossil evidence.Rachels excitement seemed to spend now to concern. Mike, again barring the issue of the meteorites apparent genuineness, tell me this Do you think the fossils we saw at Milne could possibly have come from the ocean? Earths ocean?Tolland felt the directness of her gaze and sensed the true weight of her question. Hypothetically, I would have to say yes. The ocean al-Qaeda has sections that are 190 million geezerhood old. The same age as the fossils. And theoretically the oceans could have sustained life-forms that looked like this.Oh please Corky scoffed. I cant believe what Im hearing here. Barring the issue of the meteorites authenticity? The meteorite is irrefutable. Even if earth has ocean floor the same age as that meteorite, we sure as hell dont have ocean floor that has partnership crust, ridiculous nickel di scipline, and chondrules. Youre grasping at straws.Tolland knew Corky was right, and yet imagining the fossils as sea creatures had robbed Tolland of some of his awe over them. They seemed somehow more familiar now.Mike, Rachel said, why didnt some(prenominal) of the NASA scientists consider that these fossils might be ocean creatures? Even from an ocean on another planet?Two reasons, really. Pelagic fossil samples-those from the ocean floor-tend to exhibit a plethora of intermingled species. Anything living in the millions of cubic feet of life above the ocean floor will eventually die and sink to the bottom. This means the ocean floor becomes a graveyard for species from every depth, pressure, and temperature environment. But the sample at Milne was clean-a single species. It looked more like something we might find in the desert. A brood of uniform animals getting buried in a sandstorm, for example.Rachel nodded. And the second reason you guessed land rather than sea?Tolland sh rugged. Gut instinct. Scientists have always believed space, if it were populated, would be populated by insects. And from what weve observed of space, theres a lot more dirt and rock out there than water.Rachel fell silent.Although, Tolland added. Rachel had him thinking now. Ill admit there are very thickheaded parts of the ocean floor that oceanographers call dead zones. We dont really understand them, but they are areas in which the currents and food sources are such that almost nought lives there. Just a few species of bottom-dwelling scavengers. So from that standpoint, I suppose a single-species fossil is not entirely out of the question.Hello? Corky grumbled. Remember the fusion crust? The mid-level nickel content? The chondrules? Why are we even talking about this?Tolland did not reply.This issue of the nickel content, Rachel said to Corky. Explain this to me again. The nickel content in earth rocks is either very high or very low, but in meteorites the nickel content is within a specific midrange window?Corky bobbed his head. Precisely.And so the nickel content in this sample falls precisely within the expected range of values.Very close, yes.Rachel looked surprised. Hold on. Close? Whats that suppositious to mean?Corky looked exasperated. As I explained earlier, all meteorite mineralogies are different. As scientists find new meteorites, we constantly need to update our calculations as to what we consider an acceptable nickel content for meteorites.Rachel looked stunned as she held up the sample. So, this meteorite forced you to reevaluate what you consider acceptable nickel content in a meteorite? It fell international the established midrange nickel window?Only slightly, Corky fired back.Why didnt anyone mention this?Its a nonissue. Astrophysics is a dynamic science which is constantly being updated.During an unbelievably important analysis?Look, Corky said with a huff, I can assure you the nickel content in that sample is a helluva lot at hand(predicate) to other meteorites than it is to any earth rock.Rachel turned to Tolland. Did you know about this?Tolland gave a reluctant nod. It hadnt seemed a major issue at the time. I was told this meteorite exhibited slightly higher(prenominal) nickel content than seen in other meteorites, but the NASA specialists seemed unconcerned.For good reason Corky interjected. The mineralogical proof here is not that the nickel content is conclusively meteoritelike, but rather that it is conclusively non-earth-like.Rachel shook her head. Sorry, but in my business thats the kind of faulty logic that gets people killed. Saying a rock is non-earth-like doesnt prove its a meteorite. It simply proves that its not like anything weve ever seen on earth.What the hells the differenceNothing, Rachel said. If youve seen every rock on earth.Corky fell silent a moment. Okay, he eventually said, ignore the nickel content if it makes you nervous. We still have a flawless fusion crust and chondrules. Sure, Rachel said, sounding unimpressed. Two out of three aint bad.83The structure housing the NASA central headquarters was a mammoth glass rectangle located at 300 E Street in Washington, D.C. The building was spidered with over two hundred miles of data cabling and thousands of tons of computer processors. It was home to 1,134 civil servants who oversee NASAs $15 billion annual budget and the daily operations of the twelve NASA bases nationwide.