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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.
They could have mentioned that somewhere at the beginning of the summary. I was reading the damn thing and my heart rate was increasing. And then I saw that it was all from an MD simulation :(
Great, I may live to hear some alien life form call us "ugly bags of mostly water." Just don't let them near the laser drill.
Ooooo...shades of Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud !
..that no one has yet welcomed our new dusty interstellar overlords!
Well if no one else does, I, for one, will.
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My god man, do they want tea?
Baboons are cute.
Under the "right conditions" interstellar pigs can also fly.
Organic doesn't mean biological! Organic chemistry, which is the bread and butter of modern chemistry, really has very little to do with life. It's the science of synthesizing new molecules which use carbon as its framework (as well as oxygen, nitrogen and other elements.) So things that are alive are always organic, but things that are organic are not always alive!
Because if you can't relate everything you learn to Star Trek, then does it really exist?
If the dust decides to invade Earth (the next John Carpenter flick, The Dust), duct tape your door and window seams and arm yourself with a Swiffer and bottle of Pledge.
That's it. I just wanted to make a post with "panspermia" as the subject. You've got to sieze such opportunities whenever they arise...
Maybe our universe is just a simulation, running inside a simulation, in a much bigger universe that itself is just a molecule in an even bigger universe that is just a molecule in that cloud of pot smoke you just exhaled. Ever think of that?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Lots of them out there... We could be the strange and unusual forms of life in the universe...
Deleted
Does it qualify under the Dave Barry definition?
Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
I'm pretty skeptical though. If evolving structures are so common that we see them even in a low-powered simulation, and every single star has so much freaking plasma, where are our plasma overlords? Or maybe that's hell, and those structures are just ... the souls of the damned! Oooh!
Do astronomers have any idea why the dust chose to be gay?
Intergallactic schools started requiring the reading of "Dusty Has Two Like Progenitor Strands"?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
The New Journal of Physics, http://www.iop.org/EJ/njp is an open access journal.
j p7_8_263.html
The article is here:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1367-2630/9/8/263/n
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.
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.
My bicyles
You can't fool me! It's turtles all the way down.
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
Another good example is that of the "dikironium cloud creature" from TOS.
d e)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsession_(TOS_episo
It's intelligent, travels through space and consumes matter to reproduce.
-Pi Geek 31415
Yeah! Blast it into bits of dust!
Oh, wait...
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
or EVIL!!!
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Maybe you just converged asymptotically on a world view that fits the news sources you choose to read. That seems like a good trait in terms of evolution since your 30's are the time where you're supposed to have kids. Parents are supposed to be stable and stability requires that you believe that you understand the world. You can also pass on your world view to them.
And it's not like you're stuck with it forever - I know people in their 60's who were forced to essentially go through the convergence process again because the world changed around them - e.g. politically going from a naive liberalism to a world weary, cynical conservatism. Or from being apolitical to being rabibly left wing.
So don't worry, as you get older you won't continue to believe the things you believe now. You'll still live in interesting times as the double edged Chinese phrase has it. Much of the things you believe now will turn out to be catastophically wrong and an greater exposure to the world will force you to accept this.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Its the remains of the crystalline entity.
There is a coming together of some interesting theories with regards to the origins of life in the universe that have not yet quite made it into the mainstream press, but which is evolving into a really interesting theory. Wallace Thornhill has been speculating for some time now that life originates inside of the atmospheres of brown dwarf stars. On the surface, this sounds pretty absurd. But, when you dig deeper, he makes some very good points, and his theory is completely compatible with the thesis postulated within the article in question.
Dusty plasmas tend to daisy-chain positive-negative-positive-negative, etc. This creates a sheath, and the right-hand-rule will tend to turn this sheet into vortex types of shapes, as the article mentions. This could explain the shape of DNA. Don't forget that the Urey-Miller experiment required electrical input also.
As for brown dwarfs, they come into the picture because their atmospheres should be low enough temperature to allow life to exist on planets traveling through them (which may sound kind of weird, but is an idea that has been proposed by mainstream astrophysicists in the past). Don't forget that we are inside of the Sun's atmosphere already. On such planets, the entire planetary surface would be bathed in a diffuse light and relatively weak electrical activity at all times. This would be the ideal setting for the formulation of both DNA and lifeforms because there would be no seasons, no tropics and no ice caps. Furthermore, L-type brown dwarfs have water as a dominant molecule in their spectra, along with many other biologically important molecules and elements. Its satellites would accumulate atmospheres and water would mist down from the sky.
He adds:
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Son, I can pretty much guarantee that when you are 50, you will look back and see the person you were at 30, at 35, and the things you believed, and you will decide that you had been a callow, strident numbskull.
Don't feel bad, it happens to lots of us. You're just a more definitive case.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Genesis 2:7 the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine