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Plasma Comes Alive
j_hirny writes "So, it seems that the widely acclaimed theory of how life begun, during hundreds of millions of years is, at least, not the only one which is being researched. As New Scientist report, a physicist managed to create life-alike beings made of plasma. They can replicate, grow and duplicate. They don't have amino-acids or DNA strains, of course, yet they may reveal something new about life's beginnings."
I for one, will welcome these new Plasma Blob overlords. Now, continue with informative comments, dear slashdotters.
So how does this help us discover plasma weaponry technology? I've played enough first-person shooters, i know its possible!
Just a guy with an opinion
...but will not sell more records than Frampton.
So what if they could do this to biological materials? Would it be possible to create cells from living things?
that living gas blobs exist, just watch the Anna Nicole Smith show.
Sanduloviciu says this electric spark caused a high concentration of ions and electrons to accumulate at the positively charged electrode, which spontaneously formed spheres (Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, vol 18, p 335). Each sphere had a boundary made up of two layers - an outer layer of negatively charged electrons and an inner layer of positively charged ions.
Plasma cells are an interesting idea, but I doubt it's time to rip up the old textbooks yet. The 'nucleus' was only a collection of gas atoms. It kind of sounds like the researchers had to jump through hoops to get these 'cells' to grow or divide. Still, it might give us some new insights.
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
This is interesting in the light of speculation about life-forms living on the surface of suns. (As described, for example, in David Brin's Sundiver.)
Considering that a the surface of a sun itself consists of plasma, it's not improbable that spheres like in the experiment get formed there all the time. The question is whether there is any way those spheres could attain a more complex form of internal organisation, or if they remain stuck at that basic level.
My florescent desk lamp has been looking at me funny.
Well, potentially life-like, anyway. Intriguing.
I don't really see how these are cells like biological cells. It just a bunch of particles following electrostatics. Just because it resembles what biological cells do in a few ways doesn't mean that it's the 'beginning of life' or anything like that.
Similar things happen with particles in water. If you go to any water treatment plant and look at the flocculation tanks you'll see tons (literally) of particles colliding each other, forming new particles. They have natural organic matter and other crud absorbed to their surfaces, and if coniditions are right, they can break apart (too much shear).
It's interesting still, in the sense that anything that self assembles usually minimizes the total energy of a system in a 'neat' way, but I wouldn't rewrite the theory on how life begin, because of it.
I'd consider that one of the definitions of "life" could be "a pattern that attempts its own continuance despite destructive obstacles".
Reproduction is simply a continuance of that pattern. Think about it:
1) loud noise == cat runs to preserve itself.
2) War == baby boomer generation.
ad nasueum. What we have is a curiousity of bare physics, nothing more.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Whether they were doing these things spontaneously (or in response to only environmental stimulii) would make a huge difference in how big this is.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
"the ability to replicate, to communicate information, and to metabolise and grow. He found that the spheres could replicate by splitting into two. Under the right conditions they also got bigger, taking up neutral argon atoms and splitting them into ions and electrons to replenish their boundary layers.
Finally, they could communicate information by emitting electromagnetic energy, making the atoms within other spheres vibrate at a particular frequency. The spheres are not the only self-organising systems to meet all of these requirements. But they are the first gaseous "cells".
Is a form of eletronic harmonic resonance communication? Is breaking apart in two and merging together reproduction? Given that water has surface tension (boundry layer), can communicate (ooh it vibrates), and reproduce (really vague definition here), water's alive by this vague definition.
Sanduloviciu may have found something interesting, maybe he didn't, but the wordplay and generalizations don't cut it.
-B
Kent: We're just about to get our first pictures from inside the spacecraft with "average-naut" Homer Simpson, and we'd like to -- aah!
[Camera shows a close-up of an ant floating in front of the three astronauts]
Everyone: Aah!
Kent: Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just lost the picture, but, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over -- "conquered", if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Marge: Mmm, don't worry, kids. I'm sure your father's all right.
Lisa: What are you basing that on, Mom?
Sorry, I think your first assessment is right. There are few new insights here. The phenomenon described in the article sounds roughly like the formation, "mitosis," and migration of bubbles in a lava lamp. Okay, you can call these things cells. That's somewhat reasonable. But the researcher said, "the emergence of such spheres seems likely to be a prerequisite for biochemical evolution." That sounds like serious pop science quakery to me. It is only correct with the loosest interpretation of "prerequisite," "bio," and/or "evolution," and even then it's highly misleading.
What, like ignoring the intellectual faculties given you by the Creator in favour of slavish devotion to some ancient collection of fairy tales?
No offence, but experiments with plasma aren't anything like as primitive as some of the things my Christian friends believe, such as the two creation myths in Genesis (although they never seem to have noticed that there are two, they just run with the cute serpent story).
Just my $0.02. You may now inform me that I am damned.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
It reminded me of one of those funny Stephen Baxter novels--wherein the main characters are so completely devoid of humanoid characteristics that one loses interest after the thirtieth page.
min(1-p,exp(1/(1-p))).
Some people even throw an integration over the spelling errors in the publication into this formula. (Seiberg's famous bad spelling trace integral.)
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
It's viscous, it's a psuedoliquid! It can migrate down gravitational potentials! It can replicate itself by splitting (and even ostracize OTHER forms of polymers who try to get in between)! It vibrates, oh it vibrates! It absorbs water, it's drinking, it's drinking!
...
MY GOD, IT'S ALIVE!
(Yes, this is a joke)
Physics itself produces some amazing phenomenom. While it might be cutesy that some plasma is splitting and vibrating synchronously (everything vibrates, sigh. Lasers vibrate synchronously), it is not 'Alive'.
Favorite
Dammit, now PETA is going to come after my new big screen.
Um, no. There are MANY other things that mean your time spent learning Klingon was wasted, but this isn't one of them.
This is about the same as blowing into a straw and watching bubbles come out of your soft drink and saying you've created life because the bubbles grow, shrink, split into two, and emit carbon dioxide energy when they bubble up to the top of the liquid.
Spider Robinson posited this kind of life in Telempath, a way-neato "vengence is stupid" story filled with the usual Robinson themes: Brotherly love, Tolerance and Good Weed.
No, actually in the episode where Spock got the flying fried egg stuck to his back and ended up temporarily blind because Bones used that really bright light to kill the thing, Spock said those exact words after analyzing one of them with his tricorder.
Besides, in the song "Star Trekkin'" by The Firm, you hear Spock's voice saying "It's life Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we know it, it's life Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, Captain."
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Well, they can 'talk' to each other can't they? EM waves and stuff? What the article doesn't discuss is whether this is a significant phenomenon or not... Nobody's ever put a microphone to bubbles in coke.
I think a lot of people are missing some of the implications too.
Before true life can occur, there needs, I think, to be a process, a method, a life cycle, where something like a plasma ball, a soap bubble, or a fatty lipid ball, can be produced and propagated. You need to be able to, in the absence of real life, create an environment that encourages, protects, and shields the life-activity from what happens outside the life activity.
So plasma balls that can cleanly separate inside reactions from outside reactions is important, all the more so if they are self assembling from nothing; given enough time and random variables it's likely that one or two of them will form with something *interesting* trapped inside, something that will further enhance the operation of the plasma ball, and over time that may "evolve" into something a lot like life.
But first you need the plasma balls to trap the "interesting" bits first.
GPL Deconstructed
Disclaimer: I am Christian, but I believe that the creation account in the bible is metaphorical.
This orchestration of life is almost certainly bullshit. Even if a life-form could evolve from his bubbles, it would not share many of the features of life on earth. These things are pretty much miniature ball lightning.
However, many of the experiments into the origin of life are quite reasonable. Scientists have a pretty good idea of the environment about the time that life arose (at least, the time it arose if you trust fossil evidence). So they try to simulate things like lightning strikes or tidal pools in a similar environment, and they find that it creates many of the prerequisites for life "as we know it," including amino acids, nucleic acids, and microscopic spheres bounded by structures siimilar to prokaryotic membranes (no, I'm not talking about the plasma experiments).
Such experiments do not have humans "designing" life, but merely trying to recreate conditions which could have started it.
In any case, development of life this way can still be consistent with a God that created the universe, and possibly guided the development of life.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
No crap. I have noticed that nobody here seems to be believing that the scientists involved in this experiment have created life, including the scientists involved in the experiment.
And the Universe is hardly random. It is, in fact, governed by strict principles of operation, those of which we currently understand and can manipulate we know as "laws of physics". Those principles not only permit the existence of life but may actively encourage life (as we know it) to develop. Whether you believe in God (or don't), understand that life developed as a direct result of the way in which our Universe functions, not in spite of it. Perhaps God designed the Universe: in that case he is responsible for life on Earth. Perhaps not. That question is best left to theologians. Science is only attempting to determine how the mechanics of the physical world apply to how life came about on this little planet, and how that life changed over time.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Gee. Why am I not surprised by this. Perhaps because I've heard of ball lightning ages ago. I find it odd that this article on Sanduloviciu doesn't even mention anything about it either.
n .txth tml
More interesting references.
http://www.amasci.com/tesla/ballignt
http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/tesla/ballgtn.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
... outer layers of ions with hot gas trapped inside. Actually, only simulated politicians since in real ones the hot gas is rarely trapped inside for long.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I agree with iCat. Go get an education. A real one this time.
Anyway, on to something on a slight side note. Here's a great rant by esteemed author Ben Bova. He gives a good argument on why teaching creationism is a load of bull, and that all the agguments against evolution and for creationism are ultimately flawed. Very enlightening.