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Alien Life Found On Earth?
Eris writes: "An interesting tidbit from a UPI story running on Environmental News Network: A Welsh/Indian team of scientists thinks that their high flying research balloon may have picked up actual alien bacteria dropped into the atmosphere by cometary debris. It remains to be seen whether this is any better than our old friend ALH 84001, the Martian Meteorite, and the researcher involved does have a history of pushing the life-from-outer-space theory. But this is just neat enough to merit at least a quick glance." So far, no Andromeda Strain reactions -- a good sign.
That is such a rip off of the movie Contact it's not even funny.
Allow me to quote from Good Will Hunting: "When you are 55 you will start to do some thinking on your own and you will come to two conclusions. One, don't do that (plagerize). Two, you wasted two-hundred and fifty grand in tuition getting an education you could have got for two-fifty in late charges at the library."
Blasphamy...
You must code.. you must hack perl...
How dare you prefer calculus to perl...
Nooo we must torment you....
Ok my minions.. discover the subject he is weakest on and force him to answer questions in that area...
Torment him when he is wrong.. and and force him to watch evil purple dinos...
Deprive him of his fav Si Fis...
and force him to watch the stupid mockerys of si fi by hacks (writing hacks BTW.. not computer hacks.. in publishing it's an insult)...
I don't actually exist.
I found "Diseases in Space" on a second-hand book stall a few months ago, and just finished reading it. It's utter bollocks. And it's certainly not good science.
ISTR Life Cloud was pretty shoddy too, read that about 15 years ago. This is the same old crap that these two have been producing for years.
Z.
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
It's "so different from _anything_ we've seen before", yet he calls it a "bacterium" not a "virus", or a "protozoa" or a "single celled self-reproducing thing" or a "non-cellular self replicating protein" or a ...
It's a fucking bacterium. We have seen them before here on this planet. Unfortunately this _non_-scientist comes from a different planet entirely...
FatPhil
I post as non-AC because I'm not ashamed of my opinions.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Is anybody planning to clean-recover previously sealed components from mir or ISS in the event of the penetration of a hermetically sealed device? Doesn't matter what the box is. It could be a hard drive for all we care.
Heh. "ALIEN BUG FOUND ON HARD DRIVE"
IF it happens, the daily mirror will be pleased.
I'm being silly here so don't take me too sereously..
Now the bacterea isn't very smart is it?
Wait if the whole colective of bactera is accually a single life force.. Then it could have intelegence. It's not really dependent on any given cluster of cells..
It's not in control of the mutations so occasionally it becomes harmful but the whole idea is to just live peacefully.. So it's not resentful when we kill off thousands of it's cells.
Now.. picture that we are basicly unaware it exists.. becouse it's diffrent etc.
Now picture.. it's just ammused by us and while it would like to say hello it's waiting for us to make first contact. (No crop circles etc)
Now picture it has a sense of hummor and all thies humans are looking for alien life...
Now picture. it's a prankster... a major prankster...
"Look at me.. I'm an alien..." hahahaha...
To be more realistic.. just seems maybe we have a lot of bacterea around the planet.. in the atmosphear etc...
I don't actually exist.
There's lots of other more subtle examples.
On earth there are a larg number of deity of such the Christian god is only one.
Of deity many clame to be "The one and only" many deity are still folowed today.
The Christian god was not allways in populare folowing. So we can not count on this as proof of validity...
Given a pure statistical analisis what are the odds that the christian god is valid?
Now... is this any way to handle religion? Not really...
But for those who enjoy running around saying "Repent" (such as the poster) well.. ok fine thats funny...
Those who are truely sereous about it... Who stand out infront of mass transit trains (such as BART in California or the Subway in New York..) I have a reply...
Repent now and be saved or Oden shall smite you...
(Please note I'm not an Odenist so it's likely the preveous statment is not consistent with that religion.. I wouldn't know)
I don't actually exist.
In this case, however, no one hinted at evidence of DNA structure -- given the ramifications you correctly point out, I don't think the researchers would have lightly dropped such a hint if they had evidence of it!
So they find a new species of bacteria, and they assume its alien? The only reasonable basis for such an assumption is if the bacterium displayed obviously alien charachteristics (e.g. silicon-based instead of carbon-based chemistry). This screams bad science, and I'll be surprised if we see this published in a peer-reviewed journal.
-NOC Monkey (OOK!) Experience is what allows you to recognize a mistake the second time you make it.
oh yeah... wildfire alert!
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Curses! Spiffy bugs-from-space agrument foiled once again by Occam's Razor...
...not known it? This may sound a bit strange, but it always struck me as odd that we always assumed that alien life would have DNA and would be cellular in nature, simply because everything organic we see here on earth is cellular. However, what if something is alive, intellegent and rational and is not cellular? That reproduces, is damanged and repaired on a compleatly different way then our DNA based cells. Anything could be intellegent alien life, we just didn't bother to or know how to hear it/talk to it. It could just be that the comet itself is intellegent, and has manufactured biological tools to handle certian aspects of space travel, and all we are finding is the comet's spare parts.
The Internet is generally stupid
Take it to the tv. *sigh* I'm American, too. :(
Any extrasolar comet passing through the solar system would move in a hyperbolic orbit. To the best of my knowledge, no one has seen even a single one.
An almost infinitely more likely possibility is that it some form of earthborn life blown into the atmosphere, or perhaps some weird type of bacteria that lives its entire life in the high atmosphere. Wierder things have happened.
At the moment we would consider life alien if from another planet than earth inside the solar system, to throw something new in, the asteroids might come from the breakup of a big planet.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
[scratchy old broad's voice] "RAAAAAGWEEEEED POLLEN!"
(The first thing I think of whenever I think of the film version of Andromeda Strain).
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
-The Professor, Futurama
> The question is: if there are so many intelligences in the universe, where are they?
Easy answer: Not here...
How are we going to find life on other planets while we are trapped on this one?
Only human arrogence would assume alien life would think like we do...
The desire to make contact with alien life is a human desire.. It may be unique to us...
That again.. assuming it's even POSABLE.. and the chances are pritty good it's not...
I don't actually exist.
An old man and a crying baby were the only survivors of a town, where everyone else mysteriously died off.... :)
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
the first time we have had direct evidence for the hypothesis that comets seed life on other planets
:) It's still a hypothesis, no? Perhaps they've found supporting data, but not evidence.
:)
Direct evidence for a hypothesis huh? What good is that?
Basically it's hypothetical evidence... an oxymoron if you will, they cannot exist in the same reference...
That's all for my annoying corrections
Remember not to get them wet, or they'll multiply!
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
...has been around for a while (cf. Fred Hoyle). Given the researcher it's going to be a nearly religious argument within the scientific community.,
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
...and there is evidence that such a cloud-borne ecosystem does exist, and might even have considerable importance in driving the earth's climate. Here is a quote from a the abstract of a presentation made by Dr Roland Psenner of the University of Innsbruck.
"...we show that bacterial metabolism can play a measurable role in the production and transformation of organic carbon in cloud droplets collected at high altitudes, even at temperatures at or well below 0 C. Although bacterial abundance and biomass in cloud water is low compared to other aquatic environments, growth and carbon production rates per cell are approximately as high as in warm and eutrophic lakes. We consider the atmosphere not only as a conveyor of organisms but as a site where significant microbial processes take place already during transport. Since ca. 60% of the earth surface is covered by clouds, with a still increasing trend, we hypothesize that microorganisms suspended in cloud droplets could play a crucial role in the transformation of airborne organic matter and the chemical composition of snow and rain."
The entire abstract is here.
I once tought I discovered proof of alien life on Earth, until my mother assured me that she was indeed my sister.
Burn Hollywood Burn
The question is: if there are so many intelligences in the universe, where are they?
Sometimes I think that the surest sign that intelligent life exists somewhere else in the universe is that none of them has tried to contact us - Calvin.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Every time you hear about these arguments, it seems the people claiming the bacteria are from space base their claim solely upon the observation that the bacteria could survive in outer space. This is a logical fallacy on more than one ground(induction, as opposed to the logically sound deduction for starters). Just because my computer could hurl through space and still be functional, does not mean it necessarily comes from space.
:)
Interesting nonetheless, though
-CoG
"And with HIS stripes we are healed"
-CoG
"And with HIS stripes we are healed"
Handel's "Messiah"
---
---
Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
A few decades ago, one might have postulated that bacteria whose metabolism is based on sulfur as fuel and had no connection to creatures that utilized the power of sunlight would be genetically unrelated to anything on earth. Scientists, whose only experience was with creatures that lived within a very narrow range on the surface of the earth, might believe that a creature like this might be extraterrestrial. That is until the Alvin finds colonies of these things clinging to black smokers at the bottom of the Galapagos Rift.
If further study of such a creature revealed a genome that was totally unrelated to anything on the surface of the earth, would this point to an extraterrestrial origin or highlight an example of parallel evolution in a closed system that has remained separated from the surface ecology.
If we find something that is totally non-DNA based, we might have something to talk about, but could we know for sure? Maybe there are non-DNA based creatures thriving in some nook or cranny deep within the crust of the earth. Maybe there are non-DNA based metabolisms thriving unnoticed and undetected right under our noses, perhaps even within us and around us. Would we even know what to look for?
We are currently limited in what we can know with our incomplete knowledge of even the single planet we reside on. After we get some planet hopping under our collective belts, we should have some limited basis for proving that some form of life might be extraterrestrial in origin whether it's based on DNA or not.
"Extraordinary claims," she said, "need extraordinary evidence."
It will be no problem for us as long as we do not see the bactreria in "X-Files Movie" around us.
You're obviously trolling (amino acids have come into existence in simulated primieval conditions in a lab), but actually if you multiply the tiniest probabilities of intelligent life by the number of planets in the known universe, you still get a hell of a lot of intelligence. Meaning that the universe isn't a total waste which it would be if we were all there was.
whoah! quite hardcore stuff this is. well, there's so many unknown species on earth that i don't think so
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
this post was gay.
Radicaly different doesn't automaticly mean "from outer space" and if it where ailen, it would have to be adapted for space travel, be fit enought to survie entry into this planet, and also able to live and reproduce in the upper atmosphere. but it if where "earth-home" it would just have had to get up there and could slowy adpat and don't forgot that our planet has many many different types of sepicies, I belive the true test will be to look at its DNA and for the love of god don't nuke it!!!
"Slashdot, News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." After reading your post, I am convinced that you are an illiterate asshole.
Yes, doubtlessly there is other life in the universe, and so doubtlessly there is also other intelligent life out there. The problem however is time scale.
It is only the last two centuries that humans have made any scientific advances towards space travel. For millions upon millions of years before that, humanity was just sitting there doing nothing, and for billions up on billions of years before that, there was no humanity at all.
With regards to other intelligent life, quite likely:
a) It still has to evolve, and will do so in a few billion years
b) It has gone beyond being human-like a few billion years ago and evolved into Goddess knows what
c) It has managed to destroy itself a few billion years ago with its own pollution and/or weapons of mass destruction
And even if there's a planet out there that chances to have intelligent life in a human-like stage of evolution, it's most likely that:
a) it will reach the space age in a few million years
b) it hass already gone beyond the space age a few million years ago
And even if there's one species out there that is human-like in evolutional development and just beyond our current space age, presuming they have faster than light travel to reach us, they will still likely be so different that we'd never have any hopes of communicating with them (I mean, come on, we can't even understand dolphins yet, let alone creatures from another planet). And that's the least of the problems. Maybe they'd die instantly in our atmosphere - and even if that's all compatible, then our common cold may be their ebola. Any alien race with enough intelligence to actually be able to reach us will also be intelligent enough to avoid us like the disease we'll probably be.
)O(
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
Hum....
This sudden change could have had something to do with a severe lack of sleep lately, though...
No... Remember those nuclear tests the French did? They shipped some samples over to Metz to see how call centre agents would react to it.
)O(
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
Even if it is of terrestrial origin, the fact that it has been living and evolving in low earth orbit means it no longer has terrestrial citizenship. If we suddenly found your (for the sake of argument) IBM computer floating miles in the sky having transformed into an Amiga, then we could safely hypothesize that whatever its origin, it is now an alien species.
-- Anne Marie
""only two possible explanations. [...] organisms have been lifted from the earth to great heights in the skies and have somehow multiplied there and changed over time." The second, he said, is "that this is an example of primitive alien life."
I fail to see what the first explanation is not the more reasonable!"
And I fail to see why a scientist (who's ideas i am supposed to find credible) refuses to admit that the most probable explanation for his findings is CONTAMINATION! No matter how incredibly stringent your reqirements for having sterile sampling equipment are, it must be noted that the expirament was carried out ON EARTH. you know....that place where there are on average Billions of living organisms per square meter.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Among their ideas->insects are smarter than humans-flu epidemics come from space-Archaeopteryx was a fake.
See http://www.talkorigins.org/scripts/search/query.id q?Cmd=Chandra+Wickramasinghe&How=sim ple
for more info. The enthuastic tone Wickramasinghe takes in the article is not indicative of a scientist--especially when dealing with such a potentially important discovery.
> If the DNA is really ET DNA - that is it is
> truely genetically unrelated to anything on
> earth, it would mean that the universe must be
> full of DNA for it to just land on Earth.
Why does the fact that it's ET DNA mean that it's genetically unrelated? Different by four gigayears of divergent evolution, maybe, but it's entirely possible (and the idea of panspermia is) that we come from the same gene pool, at some point.
I've had this sig for three days.
Couldn't it just be some kind of newly discovered bacteria that lived in a cave someware on a remote mountain in the Himalaya and escaped on a little breeze and eventualy landed on a rock from outher space, liked it and made it their home.
Until you people found some bacteria that came in little spacecrafts I am not confinsed...
Mark
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
- if you love something, set it free; if it doesn't come back, hunt it down and kill it
Cool, a universe so hugely massive that we could never hope to explore even 0.0001 percent of it. All for us! Seems like overkill to me.
There's a reason that the people that discovered the DNA molecule got the Nobel prize. (name escapes me at the moment, and I'm too lazy to look). But before you all speak completely out of your asses, do you know how special DNA is? Do you know why DNA is shaped the WAY it is? It is an entirely valid and reasonable hypothesis that ALL life capable of self-reproduction makes use of DNA because of some very interesting properties that come about because of it's structure - and that those properties are the result of the component elements, and one could assume that there's nothing special about those elements.
PLEASE could you look at the science before saying stupid things like "microbe - I think it would be very unlikely that a true ET would just happen to be DNA - though it's possible". You sound like a moron to anyone with half a clue.
While I am not a genetist (can I even spell it?), my dad IS a Ph.D genetist, and we've had this discussion before, and it's EXTREMELY likely that DNA is the only mechanism in organic chemistry - the chemistry of life - that could sustain any advanced lifeforms, ET bacteria included. Viruses are a special case, becuase you could argue they're not really "alive", per se. Chemistry doesn't change anywhere in the universe, as it's all based on the same physical principles that apply to non-nuclear reactions.
Sorry, haven't had my coffee yet, and this stuff is important.
..don't panic
I recall a geothermometer paper published earlier this year about some recent Canadian meteorite. The internal temperature stayed well below 100C (from the chemicals still existing).
While its certainly a fallacy to suppose that something came from space just because it was found in space, thats not induction its a reverse implication (assuming a=>b is the same as b=>a).
For something to come from space its necessary for it to be able to survive in space, but not sufficient.
Incidentally, induction may be logically unsound, but it or something equally unsound is the only way to make correspondences between the world as we percieve it and our formal models of it.
As I recall, DNA, although a complex molecule, is a fairly normal development of protein evolution. However, TERRESTRIAL DNA is based on 4 amino acids: Adenine (A), which pairs with Thymine (T), and Guanine (G), that pairs with Cytosine (C).
Other amino acid pairings are theoretically possible, although not found on Terrestrial life-forms. The discovery of a non-GATC based DNA would be strong evidence of non-terrestrial origin, although probably not sufficient of and by itself. . . .
Of course, a TOTALLY different method of genetic encoding would be pretty much conclusive. . .
An excellent book on how it might have happened on earth is Seven Clues To The Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story by Alexander Grahm Cairns-Smith.
No, as far as I know there are traces of bacteria found in places like Greenland with no less than 3,4 billion years old. And there seems to exist indirect evidence that bacteria lived already 3,8 billion years old. Nuclear cells seem to have existed at no less than 2,5-3 billion years ago, and it seems these are traces of algaes. Meanwhile at 1 million years ago there seems to already exist a very large community of animals, plants in morphologies that today are equaled to SF nightmares. These groups were all gone by the end of Archaic, when probably 99% of species were slandered by a possible cosmic impact or something else.
The morphologies of Archaic beings are so weird that it would be possible to say that they are quite alien to us. Or maybe WE are the aliens?
So unless the comet is made out of some sort of nitrogen-carbon-oxygen mixture that could support life, which it isn't, I don't understand how any life could realistically survive that. Not to mention the fact that a comet is, to say the least, incredibly hot, and 90% of bacteria are killed by excessive heat.
Their major claim is that just because the bacteria is "so different from anything [they've] seen before" it must be extraterrestrial or strangely mutated. Please.. we're still discovering species of birds, let alone all the weird and creepy little bacterium on Earth.
~ The Irony is, The only reason I'm not at Berkeley right now is because I was on acid during my SAT's..
The question is: if there are so many intelligences in the universe, where are they?
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
"actual alien bacteria dropped into the atmosphere by cometary debris. It remains to be seen whether this is any better than our old friend ALH 84001"...
I'm confused, isn't alien bacteria growing in outter space on the MIR space station?
Is this so hard to believe???
Ace
This is OBVIOUSLY not a true finding. EVERYBODY knows aliens are big, green, and ugly. Sigh.....scientists always seem to botch things up. This time, they really screwed up.
I could see it being possible that simple terrerestrial life forms could exist at high altitudes. I think the main problem would be lack of water vapor, and high levels of solar and cosmic radiation.
--
I would be much more interested if it's genetics were non-DNA (A COMPLETELY alien replicator).
Not all life on Earth is DNA-based - some viruses are RNA-based. Replication doesn't need DNA or RNA, and replication doesn't necessarily mean "life".
Yeah, well, I'd rather be rich than stupid.
Really? You'd rather be rich than stupid? Why, fancy that! Imagine giving up marvellous, wonderful stupidity for something as boring as wealth. I assure you, you'll regret it. Never again will you be able to watch Baywatch or the A-Team without puking, but you _will_ feel compelled to spend gross sums of money on personal computing hardware and pleasure cruises, where big-breasted bimbos will felate you constantly. Oh, the sacrifice!
Are you _sure_ that you would rather have millions of dollars instead of a few dozen brain cells?
Oh, wait, you already _are_ stupid, which is why you were willing to make the trade. Wait, no, if you already are stupid, willing to trade your stupidity for wealth, that would make you clever, which causes a terrible paradox!
I feel the universe imploding! Ah-hh!
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
I couldn't get it to look like L'Hospital's rule. I even tried squinting at it. One thing's for sure, it's not a symbol from the Propositional Calculus, which would have been the right calculus for the job at hand.
Our species has only been able to communicate by means of radio for less than 100 years. So our existence has been visible to at least one other star for a mere 2.2 X 10^-6 % of our planets history. Currently, any ET spaceship within 70 light years would have absolutely no problem determining our existence and location.
Each year the amount of Radio energy we send out at least doubles. So given the Law of Mediocrity and the fact that any other space-age civilization is more likely to be several million years older, we would expect to be awash in ET radio signals. When we look up into the sky with a radio telescope, we should be blinded by incoming reruns of alien sitcoms and documentaries.
And yet, all we see with our most powerful radio arrays is noise, all we hear is static. If a space age civilization is just 1000 years more advanced than we are, their star should shine more brightly in radio than in all other parts of the spectrum combined.
If just one of those ET civilizations managed to last a few million years, then they would have been able to colonize every solar system in the galaxy several hundred thousand years ago (all assuming an average expansion of 0.05 c/yr).
Furthermore our own existence on this planet is due to a list of exceptionally improbable events: Jupiter?s mass sucks up or slingshots out of the solar system, most space junk that would otherwise go into the inner solar system (also forms the asteroid belt); a Mars sized planetesimal smashes into the Earth during the Hadean (ca 4.3GA) which forms the moon, which in turn protects us from most incoming asteroids/comets that Jupiter misses = this allows for a more complex cycle of bacterial evolution that eventually leads to the explosive Cambrian Adaptive Radiation (ca 570 MA) ; a series of cooling events caused by Antarctica making splitsville with Australia in the Late Cretaceous (ca 70MA) and the formation of the Isthmus of Panama during the Pleistocene (ca 3MA), led to an expansion of savannas at the expense of woodlands = our ancestors finally had to get out of the trees. And since we didn?t have any talons, claws, fast legs or any type of natural protective gear to work with, we had to develop our brains in order to survive. Oh, I forgot to mention the Extinction of the Dinosaurs at ca 65MA.
Don?t get me wrong, I am a Strong Life proponent (Life at the bacterial and simple multicellular level probably exists on many millions of worlds for at least part of that worlds history); it just seems highly unlikely that there are many other lifeforms out there that could actually contemplate whether they are alone.
A: DNA is one of the very few molecules that can be used as a code carrier. The other is RNA but it is less reliable.
B: Some proteins may be considered also as code carriers but there are some serious doubts on how reliable they can be.
C: There are several hypotesis considering other combinations but they demand other termodynamic conditions, far from those on Earth. One of these hypotesis concerns a more Titan-like environment with a hint on a silicon based life. However, if a living being from such world would fall into ours, he would be momentarly desintegrated.
D: Your question is good and bad. Good because it asks if we may not find something else. Bad because it's too Earth bound. DNA is not a "Earth property" it is an Universal property. Specially if we consider that there are clouds and clouds of the DNA's basic construction blocks floating in Cosmos. However we should not search only for DNA like beings. With a good level of craftsmanship it is possible to create "the other silicon beings" (apart of Tiatan-like ones) much similar to what we see on computers. This is no SF. But it is a hint on artificiality...
However, if the organism's "universal code" (i.e., how the DNA is translated ultimately into proteins) is exactly or mostly similar to the predominately form found on Earth, then it would tend to imply one of two things:
1) There exists a common ancestor for both Terran life and the life from wherever this came from. See the "life from space" theory.
2) It came from Earth.
Ok. Let me just have a conversation with myself for a minute. The bio def (he he... bio def...) for life is something that reacts with its enviornment... well, lots of stuff appear to react with the enviornment, but can I be for sure? Not really. So, to make the next big assumption: Life in space... Ok. Why not? Mir is now a fungi farm, and they are not sure if it came from earth or from space... and it's obviously in space now... so there you have it... life, in, space... And where do you draw the line from earth and space?... and isn't earth in space,... wait Russian space station... OH SHIT, there ALIENS!!! Damn, I always thought they were rather dull, Russians. Anyway, we're looking for smart life, so we'll move on... Is fugi smart? If it stays away from me it is. Damn well better stay in space or I'll go to that ass! It probably smells what the rock is cooking. And if a rock cooks, it's obviously intelligent, so there we are. come again.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Can anyone enlighten me as to the real author of the above (Black Lawyers, Slavery, And Inutterable Weariness Maybe Some Things Aren't Somebody Else's Fault), and when and where it was published?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
If I were an alien, and i saw the way we(they) Humans treat our(their) planet, I'd put a big four-dimensional sign on the north Pole saying "Thank you for dumping your trash here".
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
If the comet is big enough, and I mean like really big. It's quite possible the very core of it would be hardly affected by the impact. OTOH, if it was that big, those bacteria might get really lonely on earth...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
And I fail to see why you fail to consider all possibilities, no matter how unlikely they might be. That is what science is all about, looking beyond the obvious...not that I believe for one second that those bacteria are really alien, considering they were found in the higher atmoshphere, not in space. But I'm not a scientist.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
From his point of view, or mine?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Hmmmm... the Daily Mail is a UK tabloid paper.... need I say more?
Maybe they have been eating the ozone layer
well this sure trashes the Adam and Eve story.
So the theory of the primordial soup stirring up life has now a plausible contender. If they determine the age of the materials by carbon dating.maybe a clearer picture.
The sample can be just earth life forget not cause bacteria have been foind in deep down sea trenches and ice holes chugging away to glory.
how small is infinity?
Such bacteria probably wouldn't fare too well if it drifted down to ground level, which could explain why we haven't bacteria like this before.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
Move over, Ebola! Time for a real plague! :)
Wouldn't any fragment from a comet burn up in the atmosphere?
No. Not if it's small enough. If it's small enough it'll reach terminal velocity in
it's fall long before it reaches speeds where friction would cause it to burn.
And remember, we're talking about comet dust here -- no entire comets were
caught in the probe filters. =)
J
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
If you're s'darned geek, why don't you write != instead of making us puzzle out that your =/= is a crossed equals sign?
Humph.
-C#
"the first time we have had direct evidence for the hypothesis that comets seed life on other planets."
Wouldn't any fragment from a comet burn up in the atmosphere? And if it was too big to burn up, wouldn't that make it create hostile conditions which would destroy small forms of life? (i'm thinking ice age)
I'm probably and idiot, but I'd like to know..
When Chris (aka Dr. McKay, Astrobiology) says "yup", believe it. Until then...
Take a small icy moon of a large gas giant. The tides heat up the ice to form a liquid ocean under a small layer of ice. Under the ice is nice water, above it is vacuum, or what passes as vacuum, perhaps a very low atmosphere, like our moon has. (Look up Europa, for an example.) Lets say life evolves in this nice wet world. On Europa, the ice sometimes splits, letting the water contact vacuum, where it both boils and flash freezes. Probably, most of the time, any life forms in that water die, but suppose one has the adaptation that allows it to survive in a vacuum. Maybe it has a harder crystaline "shell" that protects from the effects of a vacuum. Maybe its something else. Perhaps it would go in stasis, in which bacteria can survive thousands of years in a low energy state. Sooner or later the ice is recycled back into the "ocean" of the planet, it melts, and our vacuum hardy friend survives and goes on to make the next generation, with a blessing by Darwin himself. Let some time pass and now we have the surface ice on the planet loaded with millions of freeze-dried stasis creatures. Lets give another one of these a random mutation so it doesn't need to go into stasis, instead it finds some way of "eating" the ice in the vacuum, and lives off a combination of photosynthesis for energy and impurities in the ice for building materials. We just need a meteor to come along at the right angle and speed to knock a few of these into space, where they spend long periods of time in stasis, only becoming active when they "bump" into cosmic dust or any other thing they use for food while at the same time using photosynthesis for energy. Heck, give them enough time, they might be able to drift between stars (the starlight would be dim though, energy might be a problem). And, of course, there is no reason why they have to remain one-celled.
We have life forms on earth that survive inside of rocks, by hot geothermal vents, in the cold antartic, and buried thousands of feet down. Some bacteria can survive intense amounts of radiation. I'm seeing no reason why it shouldn't be possible for them to conquer space.
I fail to see what the first explanation is not the more reasonable!
This is an old argment - they a whole web site: http://www.panspermia.org/
R.
These bacteria, being advanced as they are, have evolved into lawyers and descended upon the state of Florida. News reports have greatly overestimated their abilities though. They seem to have problems with propagating their species, since the only thing they seem concerned about is pregnant 'chads' and how they should be counted. They do have a sense of humor, and most of the world, except the members of the two major parties in the US, are laughing at the daily media circus they keep feeding.
All comments are my own (Unless I am having a out-of-body experience).
and there have been several hypothesized additions to GATC. If life is in fact on other worlds, and in fact used DNA, then you are left with the simple argument of when do new 'genetic bits' appear. This has been a mainstay of SF for years. From Anne McCaffrey's Pern (triple helix) to the X-Files having a hybrid human-alien with a new pair GATC XF (dum-dum dum [shocking surprising music sound])
As for DNA being the only means of complex information transmission... Why would life be based on organic chemistry? Orgainic chemistry has a certain set of assumptions (STP anyone) that may not be valid on other worlds. Yes, I know life lives under extremely varied conditions, but it formed under a specific set and adapts to others. This of course still leaves that implication that all life based on organic chemistry uses DNA, or more specifically GATC, but it could be far different, or would be. examples...
a) each double helix is only one gene, leading to a much higher rate of mutation, or redundancy.
b) mitochondria totally control the cell, no DNA in nucleus, implying many more mitos inside a cell
c) only RNA in cells.
d) no mitochondria, other source of energy
e) 'animal' cells have plant wall
f) DNA floats free in cell, not contained in nucleus
g) additional pairs, say KY and BP
there is always room for near infinite variation given the scale you want to apply DNA too.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
Well, the article says:
"Researchers said that in the filter of a high-flying balloon operated by the Indian Space Research Organization, they found a strain of bacteria unlike anything on Earth."
I rest my case.
Your case is only taking a nap, jitenpai; just because they said this doesn't mean it is actually unlike anything on Earth. We haven't seen even a significant fraction of all the bacteria that likely exist on this planet, and they haven't had enough time to determine if it even matches one we have seen, much less one we haven't.
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I think people just say `Silicon' because it's below Carbon on the periodic table ,and should have similar properties. In reality, Silicon has markedly different properties due to the presence of d orbitals, and a much larger size (covalent radius is 1.11A versus 0.77A for Carbon). The low electronegativity for Silicon also hinders formation of covalent bonds necessary for complex chains. Silicon does not like to bond to itself either, which is quite necessary for making molecular chains (i.e. DNA). In short, Silicon only works as basis for `life' in computers.
I think a more likely candidate for life molecules would be Boron. This atom couples well with Nitrogen, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Carbon, and halides. Boron forms long chains (boranes) similar to Carbon's alkanes, and with nitrogen, makes structures nearly identical to some more complex carbon molecules (benzene, polymers, etc.). The problem with Boron-based life forms on earth is that most Boron-containing molecules are explosive in the presence of molecular Oxygen or water, which the earth's atmosphere is filled with. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem on a different planet.
Oh, and I'm a phd student in theoretical chemistry, so I'm not completely talking out of my butt.
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
They didn't find anything, this was all based on the spectroscopic data for the light of a Leniod meteor buring up in the atmosphere. Try the actual website for the Astrobiology Dept. referenced.
--
James Michael Keller
"Linux is not our destination, it is simply the open road to tommorow"
This morning I looked in the mirror and saw something mankind has never seen before. Therefore I am an alien. I will have to refuse any attempts at proving this though, as I'm afraid of needles.
This sudden change could have had something to do with a severe lack of sleep lately, though...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Sure, and I'd think so too if he was claiming to have found penicillin from outer space... but the scientist claims to have found an entirely new species of bacteria, unlike any previously known. The odds of getting your sample contaminated with a previously unknown species are pretty low -- but still probably higher than finding alien bacteria.
It's still a bit too early to say anything for sure, but assuming that an independent team verifies that these critters are indeed unique in some way, then I'd wager on there being bacteria in the upper layers of the atmosphere. If it turns out the bacteria have evolved to be able to live high up in the atmosphere permanently, it would also mean that odds are they didn't just come off a comet...
Cheers,
-j.
I'm no biologist, but I've got a couple of possibilities to throw up:
Could somebody with more knowledge than I have comment?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'm sure I've read somewhere (maybe Science&Vie or maybe Science&Avenir), a dozen years ago, that there was a "probable possibility" of a chemistry similar to the one of carbon, but based on silicon ; the article went on doing quite a lot of comparisons, but did not fail to point out the pressure and temperature parameters would be much, much higher for a hypothetical silicon-nased life than for the carbon-based one.
A larva has no idea that butterfly phase even exists. It does not have senses to perceive the larger world yet. This is one of many possible explanations.
Our attempts to discover civilizations using optical and radio astronomy could be naive at best, given the FTL issue. Our own civilization may be unrecognizable in just 100 years (everyone is a cyborg, datasphere etc.) - and we are talking about civilizations distributed in time frame of millions of years!
I could be wrong, but I heard that this has now been shown to be impossible - complex "silicon chains" are far too unstable to be the basis of any kind of life.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
This would not be a very good idea - vacuum does not move heat very efficiently (as in: not at all), so your OC'ed processor would be unable to lose its heat by any means but infrared radiation, which is not very effective at the low temperatures that would allow a processor to operate.
I've heard of seas of liquid nitrogen on Titan - now THAT has potential :-)
Black holes are where God divided by zero
If people are concerned that a comet could contain traces of alien life, why are they dropping Mir into the ocean? Seems like it just might have come into contain with alien bacteria if it is out there... Then we go and drop the thing in the middle of earths womb? Great idea guys... *shrug* Anyone else been thinking along these lines?
What are you American's going to do when it asks you to take it to your leader?
</Lame joke>
"The good thing about Alzheimer's is that you can hide your own Easter eggs."
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
The article implies that it is DNA based microbe - I think it would be very unlikely that a true ET would just happen to be DNA - though it's possible - I would be much more interested if it's genetics were non-DNA (A COMPLETELY alien replicator).
If the DNA is really ET DNA - that is it is truely genetically unrelated to anything on earth, it would mean that the universe must be full of DNA for it to just land on Earth.
Can you say Andromeda Strain?
It makes a lot more sense than thinking that our complex ecosystem could arise from nothing more than the hydrogen + nuclear fusion that formed the rest of our solar system.
Its also interesting because it would imply that if there is substansial life elsewhere in the universe, it is likely to be remarkable similar to life on earth.
How would a tiny bacteria make it lightyears away from home? The odds as I see it make it much more resonable that its some kind of mutated earth-based bacteria fitted to live in the outer spheres of earth..
Whilst life on earth is something like 4 billion years old isn't cellular life much younger at something like one billion years old? To my mind this makes the likelihood of these bacteria not being from space much lower.
"...their claim solely upon the observation that the bacteria could survive in outer space."
Well, the article says:
I rest my case.
____
Sometimes the voices in my head speak over each other. This is one of those times.