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Compounds Necessary For Life 'All Over Space'
Kupek writes: "The Washington Post is carrying a story about how simple chemicals, when in space, form structures that resemble the membranes found in all life on Earth. "This discovery implies that life could be everywhere in the universe," said Louid Allamandola of NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. Instead of the life process happening entirely on a planet capable of supporting life, it is proposed that some of the process takes place in space."
Why would it have any impact? Right now, the story is just in the realm of "Isn't that interesting," not "Look, it's undeniable proof that God is dead and evolution is true!!!!"
Frankly, it doesn't benefit anybody to start making grand assumptions about the data until all of the facts are in. The article itself states,
John Hayes, a biogeochemist at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass., who was not on the discovery team, said the work is significant in that it provides a mechanism "in the right place at the right time to deliver a lot of complicated organic material to early planetary surfaces."
But he cautioned that there are "a lot of banana peels" between there and the rise of living things, and that "a lot more study needs to be done" on the nature of these structures.
Remember Johnah ? He was easily the best evangelist of his time. He could woe whole nations. He was also drafted and forced to go to what was arguebly the most sinfull city around. (An ancient equivalent of LA?).
"To each acording to his need. Why send your sun to die in a suciety that isn't even bad enogh to kill him?
After studying creation on this planet, I don't notice a lot of waste. God seams to have made everything with a purpose. Life also shows up wherever it can.
As for angels being the only other life. My reading of the bible sugests that Angels are rather boring creatures. Perhaps even mechanical. ("Niether male nor female"). Would you want to only have Data around or would you prefer a visit from LaForge, Warf and Troy?
God made us in his own image. Looking around the variety of human forms sugests that this image has more to do with the soul than the body. I.e. HE probebly has some of the same emotions.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
if you put enough monkeys in a room with enough typewriters, you will get Shakespear's sonnets. Life is out there kids.
...
Are you implying that we're the result of monkey work? This would explain a lot of things
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
These compounds are building material of God's "body" witch we haven't been able to see earlier
Or maybe more like dandruff.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
This reminds me of the old SF book, The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle, in which a black cloud (an "interplanetary" life form) voices his surprise, when reaching Earth, that intelligent life had evolved on a planet's surface.
- Tal Cohen (see my SF reviews page)
- Tal Cohen
now all we need is a starship on a five year mission to accidentally fly into it's stomach and spend the next 3/4 hour making a dramatic last minute escape.
Spock out
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The behaviour of lipid molecules is no more mysterious than the behaviour of a bimetal strip or the self-organization of crystals. The molecules that this article describes are elongated, and have their charge distributed such that there is a positive, hydrophilic (water-attracting) end and a negative, hydrophobic (water-repelling) end. Common soap has the same property.
When you get a lot of these molecules together, and place them in water, think about what's going to happen. The molecules are going to point their hydrophobic sides are towards each other, and their hydrophilic sides away from each other, organizing into two-dimensional sheets. Lateral attraction becomes surface tension, and voila, it wants to be a sphere instead of a sheet.
So these molecules are still very simple, and nothing anywhere near as complex as an amino acid or DNA. And no, it is not surprising. You make lipids, you put them in water, you get tiny bubbles. The author seems to imply we expected something else.
I recommend interested persons read an introduction to cell membranes.
I can see the fnords!
Despite all this talk about biological chemicals
in space and exponentially increasing databanks
of biochemical compounds, no one has succeeded
in constructing living matter from raw chemicals.
That would be the ultimate understanding of life.
Yes it does. It is aimed at survival. There are numerous survival strategies, of which physical strength, stealth, speed and intelligence are examples.
On some planets, you won't need much intelligence to survive, but on earth you do. The most intelligent species are eradicating the no-so-intelligent species. For example: humans are more intelligent than apes. The number of humans is rising, the number of apes is declining. I believe that when apes had an IQ of 180, humans would get a very tough time...
I think it is extremely unlikely that when life exists on other planets, none of these require intelligence for survival but earth. Also, I think it is unlikely life only exists on just one planet. Therefore, given the sheer number of stars and planets, many intelligent species must exist in space.
However, since a lot of planets were created in roughly the same timeframe, there is a good chance we can't detect them yet.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
You're missing the point. I did not say "Aquinas is superior to Aristotle because he was a Christian." What I'm pointing out is that the stereotype of "Christians can't be skeptical scientific inquirers because they use Faith not Reason" is exactly contradicted by the historical examples of Aristotle and Aquinas. After Aristotle wrote his treatises, his followers (pagan, Muslim, and even some Christian) practiced "science" for centuries as an appeal to the authoritative writings of Aristotle. After Aquinas wrote his treatises, his followers for centures practiced skeptical inquiry into natural phenomena without deferring to the authority of ancient authors such as Aristotle, or even Aquinas himself.
So, it's exactly relevant to note that Aquinas is Christian, and perhaps the most influential Christian philosopher of the last millenium.
I certainly did not claim that Aquinas never got anything wrong (although use some perspective; alchemical theory looked a lot more tenable on the basis of available data in the 1300s than it does today), or that Aristotle never got anything right. Or that Aristotle was "evil" simply because he was a pre-Christian pagan. Please do not put words into my mouth.
Belief in a supreme creator, superstitions, irrational phobias, etc. are all part of the frail human psyche. No rational logic or argument will ever eradicate it completely. You may as well ask your dog to prove Fermat's last theorem.
The BBC ran this article yesterday; their version is a little less in depth however.
~caliban
Evolution is not a mostly random process; if it were, we'd be as likely to see animals shift to a less-fit-to-survive state as to see one shift to a better-fit state. This may or may not be true on an individual level (speciation is a hot topic of debate); it is definitely false on a species level.
Why?
Because all the animals unfit for their environment die off, leaving only those better-fit. The better-fit pass on their advantages to their offspring, resulting in a general promulgation of the better-fit over the lesser-fit.
..don't panic
What impact will this have on people that believe in god? This can be proof of the ability to have e.t. life. Not proof per se, but that its possible. Does anyone that reads slashdot even believe in god?
I have some ideas about GOD (a symbol) but i don't have any beliefs on the subject. If GOD is really infinite, there is no way a finite human mind can possibly hope to encapsulate that infinite being in a book, or creed, or any other set of rules. No matter how much we may be able to infer about GOD (still a symbol) we must rest assured that there is INFINITELY MORE TO GOD THAN WHAT WE'VE DISCOVERED!
I'm of the opinion that the reason the major religions seem to contradict each other is because of this reason!
A Parable in Paraphrase:
Four people were blindfolded and led into a room with an elephant. When they came out they were asked to report on what they found.
One said it was like the trunk of a tree, another said it was like an enormous leaf, the third said it was like a solid wall and the last one said it was more like a big snake.
Each was correct, but only in part. They were all relating accurately their experience of the same thing, from different perspectives. None of them had the whole picture, so their facts seemed to disagree with each other. Same with religion.
GOD is that entity/force/energy that makes up our universe. Any attempts by anyone or anything WITHIN that universe to describe that which MAKES UP the universe will be flawed from the start.
That being said.... any universe as large as ours is bound to be full of life.... and that life is just as much a "child of GOD" as humanity is (as are plants, animals, insects, bacteria, etc.)
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
=(.\')=
Yeah--someone who, through his research, effectively proved that God DOES play dice with the universe!
Let's not forget that this comment was a refutation of his own conclusions.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
If you read Richard Dawkins' "Climbing Mount Improbable" you'll find what I think is a very cogent answer to this query. Basically, complicated systems like human intelligence are not specifically aimed at, but instead the steps to get there contain their own advantages. So that something increasing the quality of a creature's responses to stimuli can give it a slight advantage, which will lead to a tendency for it to succeed, and thus drive evolution.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
"It is not irrelevant to note that Aristotle was a pagan and Aquinas was a Christian"
yes it is. it's as irrelevant as noting that Aristotle had something like the hydrologic cycle(in his writings "meteorology") all but figured out; while several treatises on the false theory of alchemy are attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. The point is, it does not matter what the religious beliefs of either person were, the correct insights they gained stand on their own. Your implication that since Aquinas was christian, therefore his ideas must have been superior to that oh-so-evil-pagan Aristotles' are plain old post hoc ergo propter hoc and guilt by association logical fallacies.
and uhm.. hello? how could Aristotle be considered a pagan if he lived before christianity existed.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Kaaaahrk!
The problem I have with this:
Using God to explain this and sitting back contentedly just pushes up the problem one level. It explains nothing. You've moved searching for the reason the giraffe's neck was long from a scientific search to "God did it". As I said: nothing has been explained, the problem has merely been shoved up a level and forgotten.
But who created God? Surely if it takes an intelligence to give these set of "nudges", then how did God get there in the first place?
If it were proved tomorrow that God exists, I would be no more satisfied that we've found where we come from: I'd want to know where God came from, too.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
We believe that there are on the order of 10 to the 21st power stars in our Universe. If you write that number out, it looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This is a lot of stars.
It is quite probible that with all the pre-organic matter floating around that the SETI boys may have a point: It ain't IF there's life out there, it's how far away and do they have radios yet.
Seriously, if you put enough monkeys in a room with enough typewriters, you will get Shakespear's sonnets. Life is out there kids.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
We are a science experiment. The entire universe is simply one gigantic quantum computer that runs the same simulation over and over again.
The point where they stop the simulation is when some form of "life" exists that figures out wha
*UNIVERSE HALTED. *REBOOTING SYSTEM.
------------
Naeser's Law:
So they figured out how cell membranes can be created. And it falls on earth(and other objects) all the time. But how the DNA molecules could get control over membrane creation. DNA reproduces itself by chemical reactions, with or without membranes. But at a special state this reproduction of DNA has to trigger the reproduction of membranes, and more improtant, control special attributes of the membranes.
Cathalytic effects?
I'm confused.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
It seems that a fair few people on sadsloth/dashlots have some acquaintance with Stuart Kauffman's At Home In the Universe - complexity theory and autocatalytic sets:
"It is not necessary that a specific set of 2000 enzymes be assembled... Whenever a collection of chemicals contains enough different kinds of molecules, a metabolism will crystallize from the broth."
Concrete evidence for spontaneous complexity:
"Random selection" wouldn't get organisms very far. Fortunately for us, there's no such thing in evolution.
Even if we accept selection in this way, we are left to wonder about structures like the retina, which require a staggering number of precise conditions (proteins, cell types, etc.), and according to the one gene one enzyme principle, couldn't be brought about by a single point mutation. However, if any of these chemicals, cells, etc. are missing, the retina doesn't work. That is, we would have to posit millions of years of non-working retinas that still managed to naturally select until they got to the point of a working retina. The fossil record doesn't bear this out.
This is another common misconception of evolution that creationists keep ladling up, even in the face of logic (note that I'm not blaming you for it; it sounds reasonable to many people who read it in books like those of Morris). The retina (an imperfect "design," by the way--why the blind spot where the nerve bundle goes through the retina?) of today is the end result of billions of years of change. Its precursors were light-sensitive receptors that slowly (remember, it took billions of years) changed into what most mammals have today.
-Legion
'Favorable' conditions do allow a certain degree of scope. Among the archeabacteria on this planet, for example, are species which exist perfectly happily at extremes of heat (volcanic vents), cold (antarctica), radioactivity (nuclear waste has proved most suitable), pH (acid or alkali, in different cases) and more. 'Archea' means ancient - ie, these have been around as long as anything we know of. Therefore they must have been started up early, and to extrapolate from this it would not be difficult to imagine at least monocellular life evolving on other planets to suit the conditions there. And under other conditions, who knows what happens next?
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
This shouldn't really come as a suprise to anybody who has given serious thought into the problem of time scales in the development of life, or who has read about the experiments in which amino acids can form spontaneously from their components in an electrical field, conditions analogous to those found on primordial Earth.
Hopefully we're now coming to the end of the humanocentric period of our history in which we view life on Earth as something unique, rather than the almost-inevitable consequence of the way the Universe has been ordered. There is nothing special about humanity per se, rather it is Life itself that is the miracle, and findings like this serve to drive home just how amazing it is.
The question of whether or not this means we are alone in the Universe has not really changed, but this discovery makes it more likely life will be found elsewhere in some form. And although I doubt it will happen in my lifetime, I envision a future where humanity discovers life in the most unlikely of places, just as it was meant to be.
What impact will this have on people that believe in god? This can be proof of the ability to have e.t. life. Not proof per se, but that its possible. Does anyone that reads slashdot even believe in god? And if you do, do you believe in macro evoloution?
Fight censors!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
Why is it assumed that life always requires the same things (water, air, etc..) to grow and adapt? Isn't it possible that there are other forms of life with entirely different requirements?
Yet again, the tired old "conflict" between Christianity and (capitalized) Science(tm). A little reality checking is in order here:
Air was understood as being a distinct thing from "ether" for a long time before the Michaelson-Morley experiment showed that the ether theory to be untenable.
You really need to look into the history of scientific inquiry a bit more. The idea of ether was a holdover from Aristotle, who held that the Universe needed an absolute frame of reference. For a long, long time, Aristotle's viewpoints were held sacred and unchallengeable. Eventually, along came Thomas Aquinas who said that instead of holding to the tradition of Aristotle's teaching, we ought to simply look at reality and accept that what we observe is the way it is, regardless of whether it contradicts Aristotle or not.
It is not irrelevant to note that Aristotle was a pagan and Aquinas was a Christian
C. S. Lewis covered this quite well back in the '50's with his essay "Religion and Rocketry," where he discussed the (non-)implications of extraterrestrial life on Christian belief. (You didn't specify Christian, but I'm hardly qualified to comment on the implications of ET life on other religions.)
A few points to keep in mind about Christian doctrine on the subject:
The critics of Christianity for decades now (this is documented by Lewis, and it hasn't let up since) have been enjoying the hobby of taking whatever the latest discoveries and theories on ET life and using them as a stick to beat Christianity with. "The Universe is cold and lifeless! Therefore God is dead!" "The Universe is teeming with life! Therefore God is dead!" While this may be fun for the critics, it's not terribly logical and it ignores the actual teachings of Christianity on the subject. Ecclessia delanda est, I suppose.
So, the bottom line should be "no effect, really." It's really quite a straw man that gets set up, and I've never understood why people seem to think that the possiblity of ET life sets up some sort of religious crisis.
Benzene is a rather difficult molecule to make, but once made, is extremely stable. A common chemical engineering problem is to try to make benzene from cyclohexane (C6H6 from C6H12); it's not too hard to extract 4 hydrogen atoms to leave cyclohexadiene (C6H8), but that last pair of atoms to convert to C6H8 to C6H6 is impossible to extract under the same conditions used for the first two steps; fortunately, elevating temperature and other factors gets the job done. Similarly, trying to add two hydrogen atoms back to 'saturate' the benzene is very tricky to get going, but once it's no longer benzene, it rapidly converts all the way back to cyclohexane.
In addition, we're talking about the formation of carbon-carbon bonds, nearly the most difficult and most stable bond that you can make. There is research that is trying to take carbon {mono|di}oxides and hydrogen and convert these to pure organics, thus requiring some C-C bond formation, but it is very slow even under intense conditions.
This all boils down to the fact that if the results that the astromers observed is true, then all we are seeing is that there a area in space that was sufficient in carbon content, temperature, and the like, for benzene to be formed, which is a very difficult reaction, but one necessary that would eventually lead to amino acids, and the possibility of life. All I think this would do is help to quality the possibility of life term in that one equation, the name which I forget, but goes something like "Number of stars in the universe, x fraction of stars with planets..." etc.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST: