Hot Comet

Basic Information

A Hot Comet is a comet that has radioactive materials in or near it's core.

The Deep Impact (space mission) and Stardust (spacecraft) showed that the insides of such comets contain:

• Clay particles (the catalyst for life according to Clay Theory)
• Complex Hydrocarbons (building blocks of life),
• liquid Water (the biological solvent of all life on earth)
• Radiation (source of heat energy and random mutation)

In other words, they are a perfect incubator / spawning bed for early life.

See also:

• "Hot" Comets The Source Of Life?

Sources

Bibliography

1. Science-A-Go-Go

Game and Story Use

• Every time a hot comet hits a planet, it has a chance of spreading (or starting) life. The tail of a comet might eject complex hydrocarbons and Alien Amino Acids, effectively seeding an entire planetary system with life as it passes near planets.
  • The Blob, The Virus, or some other Alien Invasion can come from an impact or near-miss.
    • Asteroid mitigation strategies that involve nuking a comet and breaking it into little bits might actually just spread life further, or expose us to more alien single-celled organisms. Heck, if life can thrive in Chernobyl…
  • We may have a Shadow Biosphere already in place, made of Shadow Life that arrived in a second wave. It may have come as recently as the Tunguska Event, or it may have arrived as distantly as just a few million years after the first life appeared on Earth.
• The existence of Hot Comets support exogenesis, panspermia, and abiogenesis theories. Getting a chance to explore or retrieve data from one may be a big deal for an astrobiologist.
  • Of course, something will have to go wrong, so that the rest of the party has something to do. Perhaps there's already energy beings, or at least a hivemind of single-celled organisms on the comet? Given the clay core, perhaps it'll be silicon-based life?
• See Comet for additional story ideas, then add the complexity of radiation and primitive life.