Interstellar Dust Could Be "Alive"

reezle writes "An international team has discovered that, under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organized into helical structures. These structures can interact with one another in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and with life. Not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. For example, they can divide to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbors. And they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma. 'These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,' said the lead researcher. 'They are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve.'" The research, published in the New Journal of Physics, was carried out using a computer model of molecular dynamics.

Comments

Black Cloud

[dhuff]

Ooooo...shades of Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud !

Hmm, life in the suns

[Colin Smith]

Lots of them out there... We could be the strange and unusual forms of life in the universe...

Re:Hmm, life in the suns

[Skreems]

They've also found altruistic behavior in the higher primates. The point is, a certain amount of selfishness is probably beneficial, but animals of any level of intelligence can do better if they have a certain amount of cooperation with the rest of the group. Evolution absolutely does not push creatures towards pure selfishness. A balance of the two is logically the most likely to survive, and observed behavior in the wild tends to back that up.

The actual article

[mopomi]

The New Journal of Physics, http://www.iop.org/EJ/njp is an open access journal.

The article is here:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1367-2630/9/8/263/nj p7_8_263.html

Something that bothers me about the article is this paragraph (which has no references, though he claims this to be a well-known problem):

"Self-organization of any structure needs energy sources and sinks in order to decrease the entropy locally. Dissipation usually serves as a sink, while external sources (such as radiation of the Sun for organic life) provide the energy input. Furthermore, memory and reproduction are necessary for a self-organizing dissipative structure to form a `living material'. The well known problem in explaining the origin of life is that the complexity of living creatures is so high that the time necessary to form the simplest organic living structure is too large compared to the age of the Earth. Similarly, the age of the Universe is also not sufficient for organic life to be created in a distant environment (similar to that on the Earth) and then transferred to the Earth."

Emphasis mine.

Sounds a little like this guy's been buying into "Intelligent" design a little too much...

Strangely, the rest of his article doesn't look terrible to me. I do not do plasma physics--slept through that class--but I do publish scientific articles for a living.

You hit the nail on the head.

[MoxFulder]

They are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve.

... But do they exist?

After all, this is just a computer model of some possible arrangements of particles. Even if the model is perfectly correct, it doesn't mean these living dust particles are actually out there in the universe.

For example, a computer model could tell you that a 12-foot tall flightless bird would thrive in New Zealand, and it would be right... except that they don't exist (having been hunted to extinction a few centuries ago).

Computer-simulated life is very exciting and cool, and can help scientists understand the evolution of living things (such as with the Avida system). But it can't PROVE that a particular kind of life actually exists in the natural world.