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Is SARS From Mars?
lupulack writes "A news item at CTV.ca asks whether coronaviruses such as that implicated in SARS are in fact completely terrestrial in origin. It's not as clear cut as you might think !"
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This guy's reasoning seems to go something like this:
"This showed up all of a sudden, we've never seen anything like it, so it must be ALIENS! "
True, he is not suggesting that SARS is the first step of global domination by an actual extra-terrestrial intelligence, but he is saying that SARS came from a comet.
OK, let's break out Occam's razor. (strop, strop, strop. Hmmm, good and sharp.)
The explaination that requires the fewest ad-hoc assumptions is the most likely to be correct (as it has the fewest places to break).
Scenario 1: SARS is ET in origin. Required ad-hoc assumptions: there are viruses in space. Those viruses can infect humans. Those viruses can survive transport on a comet or other body from their point of origin and earth. None of those assumptions have much evidence to back them up.
Scenario 2: SARS is a naturally occuring virus that we have not seen before. Required ad-hoc assumptions: none.
OK, kids - which of these scenarios survives Occam's Razor?
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I'm happy that science is alive and well in this world. Viruses, fortunately, are very likely not alive out of this world. I'm not even sure where these authors get off even suggesting that viruses come from outer space. Reasons:
1. Viruses are delicate. Being in outer space, crashing to earth, and infecting someone. A difficult task by itself.
2. Viruses evolve jointly with hosts. All evidence suggests that viruses have a very close (evolving) relationship with their hosts.
3. There are perfectly good theories with lots of evidence that explain new virus infections. For example, SARS may have come from a little evolution by a virus in a cat-like species of civet. It didn't help that the viruses new host happened to be a delicacy.
4. There may be lots of evidence that life exists outside of our planet, but (like #2) viruses require evolution from a similar host. That suggest the virus would have to get into space from earth first. That makes it extremely unlikely (IMO) that a virus could go to space get back and reinfect the same (or similar) species of host without being damaged.
5. Finally, (AFAIK) A VIABLE VIRUS HAS NEVER BEEN FOUND/CULTURED ON A METEOR!!!!
This theory is a little like suggesting that crop circles come from aliens even after the people who admitted building the first ones have come forward. It is possible, but very, very unlikely. (Personally, I hope that the rest of cosmological theories are attached to better evidence than this)
-Sean
The scientists quoted in the article don't provide a shred of evidence. They argue that it is possible that the pathogen responsible for SARS fell out of the stratosphere. They don't have any evidence to suggest it actually happened. Furthermore, they can't show any examples of living things falling from that altitude and surviving, nor can they even really provide a mechanism by which such a thing might be possible.
We already have an explanation of where SARS and other viruses come from: mutations of other human diseases or mutations of similar animal diseases. We already have an explanation for why many of these come from China: China has a large number of people in close proximity to farm animals, and most of these people do not have good sanitation. From the plague to influenza and even HIV, we can identify the animal links by which humans first became infected. These explanations have been tested and correctly predict future results: for example, immunologists look at pigs and ducks in Hong Kong when they decide which three strains of influenza the annual flu shots should protect against.
In contrast, a few British microbiologists are proposing that viruses fall from the stratosphere. It's certainly possible that they're right, but we're a long way from throwing out our current theories.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
The World Health Organisation are now saying it's likely to have originated in civet cats
I expect the author of the theory that 'The Lancet' printed in their letter page will now follow up with an equally believable theory that the cats flew here from Mars.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I heard an interesting discussion about viruses/plagues being trapped in glaicers. AS the glacier thaws, it is reintroduced to the world, which as since lost much of its resistance. Im not sure what evidence they have, but it is a neat idea.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Coronavirus is from Mars, Chlamydia is from Venus.
The complexities of it also tend to suggest human manufactured.
I wouldn't use complexity as any sort of argument for a human's hand in this. If anything, I would argue that complexity would point away from an artificial source and towards a natural one.
For all our advances in understanding of molecular biology, we still know far less than we don't know, especially about protein structure and fuction. If we knew enough about that, then most diseases for which we have identified the genes involved would be cured by now. Sequencing genes is relatively easy, identifying what the gene does is harder, but figuring out exactly how the protein product of the gene actually works (and how a mutation affects that functioning) is by far the hardest.
Human intervention in creating a virus would most likely take the form of "let's take this gene from another virus or organism and put it in this other virus". Things like that aren't too hard to identify by DNA sequence analysis (relatively simple pattern matching, after all). I'm sure after they sequenced the DNA of the virus, they started comparing it to other known sequences. (Interesting side note - I actually had a class with one of the people who sequenced the virus DNA - he was taking a few qualifying courses before starting his grad studies in molecular biology, and I was finishing my undergrad in biochemistry. It was funny to see the name and recognize the face almost 12 years later.)
Is your Brainus in Uranus?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
To put a couple of things straight first. Professor Wickramasinghe hasn't said that SARS comes from space. In the Lancet letter (free reg required), he says "With respect to the SARS outbreak, a prima facie case for a possible space incidence can already be made". Note the word "possible". Note the words "prima facie" (roughly="sufficient to warrant further investigation").
This isn't some crackpot who's just heard of SARS, can't understand epidemiology and therefore thinks it must have come from outer space without thinking things through. Along with Fred Hoyle, he's long been a proponent of panspermia - the theory that life originated in space, rather than on Earth.
There is plentiful evidence of complex organic molecules in cometary and interstellar material. The environment on periodically warmed comets is every bit as suitable for the generation of life as the alternative theory of the primordial soup. Organic compounds, quite tightly concentrated, intermittent energy, water. The theory is that life on Earth originated Out There, so it would be no surprise that DNA/RNA from space would fit earthly organisms - they share the same origins.
In his letter, Prof. Wickramasinghe estimates that "a tonne of bacterial material falls to Earth from space daily, which translates into some 10^19 bacteria, or 20 000 bacteria per square metre of the Earth's surface". It would be surprising if none of these found a viable host. On the rare occasion that there is a good match, a pandemic could result. We don't know if SARS started this way or not.
Note that meteors aren't involved. Nothing gets burned up on re-entry. The stuff just drifts in.
I don't know what the answer is, but I know that it's not as clear cut as some would like to think. It's just possible that data from Beagle2 this Christmas might help shed a little more light.
It's more likely that the SARS virus quantum tunneled to earth through the dark matter membrane between our universe and a parallel dimension transversely embedded in subspace when intelligent negative energy beings empathicly remodulated the inverse temporal phase variance beyond the cubic Plank threshhold condensing the quark-gluon plasma into a metastable yet highly pourous and heterotropic configuration.
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What's wrong with that theory is not the idea that viruses and microbes may rain down onto earth from space. It still doesn't seem particularly likely, but it's possible.
But a virus that infects human cells and evades the immune system sufficiently long to kill has to have evolved in vertebrates. So, unless the universe is filled with vertebrates and they have a habit of coughing in our general direction, that doesn't seem particularly plausible.
More likely, the SARS virus belongs to the viruses that we have never bothered to identify before: among viruses and microbial life, we have identified and characterized only a tiny fraction so far.
The masked palm civet cat in Southern China is largely a herbivore. When I was scouting in many years ago, the rangers in Hongkong forest park taught me how to spot these animals. They leave indigested seed/fruit skin with their faeces. They are dubbed as "fruit ferret" in the local language.... Having said that, when transforming to a largely urban life, there are lots of habits that needs to be given up. Some activities make perfect sense in farming society no longer apply in industrial region... I think the consumption of wild animal is one of the example... Hunting is probably the other... Both western and oriental society need to go through these phases.... give us some time.
Info on Civet Cat, Found to Have SARS
* TRAITS: Of the family Viverridae, the civet cat is a primarily nocturnal animal closely related to the mongoose. There are several species. Some are carnivores that live on the ground, while the animals with SARS in China are masked palm civets, which live in trees and eat fruit.