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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
...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
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"
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
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.
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.
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?
"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
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.
--
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
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...
Maybe they have been eating the ozone layer
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
"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..
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).
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.
-
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?)
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?)
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?
because I like calculus more than I like programming.
*dons asbestos armor*
-CoG
"And with HIS stripes we are healed"
-CoG
"And with HIS stripes we are healed"
Handel's "Messiah"
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.
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.