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Are Aliens Living Among Us?
pickens writes "In recent years scientists have begun to view the existence of life outside of our solar system as ever-more likely. If life does emerge readily under terrestrial conditions, then perhaps it formed many times on our home planet. To pursue this tantalizing possibility, scientists have begun searching deserts, lakes and caverns for evidence of earth-bound 'alien' life-forms, organisms that would differ fundamentally from all known living creatures because they arose independently. Microbes have already been found inhabiting extreme environments ranging from scalding volcanic vents to the dry valleys of Antarctica. Other so-called extremophiles can survive in salt-saturated lakes, highly acidic mine tailings contaminated with metals, and the waste pools of nuclear reactors. Although 'alien' microbes might look like ordinary bacteria, their biochemistry could involve exotic amino acids or different elemental building blocks so researchers are devising tests to identify exotic microbes. If shadow life is confined to the microbial realm, it is entirely possible that scientists have overlooked it."
We ARE the Aliens!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I think we have enough problems with ourselves, to worry about aliens living among us. As a matter of fact, what sort of superiour intelligence, which could get here, would use earth as anything other than their own Botany Bay Colony?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Subject 117?
...and Eeeenglishman in New York... (Sting lyrics in post and in my sig)
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
There are some illegals at Home Depot whenever I go there.
I wanna see the following tags on this story: yes, no, maybe, iamone
Most of them are illegal.
And we commonly (although not always accurately) refer to them as Mexicans.
That's not a very good disguise.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Spiders have got to be extraterrestrial. I'm just sayin' -- they are really freaky looking compared to everything else.
Pedro
Reading this reminds me very much of reading your average Fox News report on illegal immigration, but with politer and more scientific language.
The headline and the article both muddily imply that the identification of life on earth fundamentally different than what we are already familiar with would, in itself, be evidence that the life was of 'alien' origin. I can't help but think this is deliberate in order to hype the story. Is there a chance that there is weird terrestrial life on earth we haven't yet discovered? Of course. Is there a chance there is alien life on earth? Yes. But which of the two would be a more likely explanation for the origin of something unusual? I think the answer is obvious, and I think it's exceedingly disingenuous to state or imply otherwise.
A-Bomb
...to welcome our new alien imperial overlords.
So there's a bunch of INS biologists asking bacteria and small plants for their green cards?
What a ridiculous idea. I'm sure we humans can all agree it's completely absurd to even wonder if there are extraterrestrials living amongst us humans. I suggest that we all ignore this article, and waste as little time as possible entertaining the laughable notion of aliens living on earth. On with your lives, fellow human friends.
:)
Here we have candidate #1: the home-grown favorite, familiar with the local chemistry, which has to propagate a maximum of 13,000 miles to cover every last spot on the globe, a jaunt that is relatively well protected from cosmic rays.
And here is candidate #2: the extraterestrial, which has to make a journey of at least 10^13 miles ( and probably one or two orders of magnitude more to give it a reasonable chance of existing ) through interstellar space, subject to cosmic rays. It has to travel fast enough to get here before the sun goes nova, yet enter the atmoshere at a slow enough speed to avoid burning up. And if it gets here, it has to adjust to a foreign chemistry, and it has to avoid being eaten by all the decendants of #1.
Those are phenomonal odds in favor of #1.
Sure, Hollywood loves to portray aliens as weird, mostly very ugly and very different, meanwhile, I think that actually real aliens are more likely to be quite similar to terrestrial life. After all, we evolved into these forms as a matter of effectiveness and survival. We reflect our conditions more than I think we understand. Therefore, given that physics is physics no matter where in the universe you are, I think people will look like people, horses like horses, fish like fish and so on ...
...
of course, more highly evolved beings likely have more style too
Words to men, as air to birds.
FTS: "Other so-called extremophiles can survive in salt-saturated lakes, highly acidic mine tailings contaminated with metals, and the waste pools of nuclear reactors.
Other so called extremophiles can survive in their parents' basements, the only light source emanating from an LCD screen, gorging themselves with Cheez-Its and Mountain Dew.
There...fixed that for you. No need to thank me.
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
Your kidney stones exist because they are feeding in you.
"In recent years scientists have begun to view the existence of life outside of our solar system as ever-more likely"
Oh yeah, I'm sure we all agree with that statement!
After 50 years of listening and looking we have, let's see, ONE suspicious signal that never repeated. Well if you consider that good reason for belief I'm not so sure why so many of you have trouble believing in God.... Having worked with several groups that are committed (and some should be) to the search of ET I'm less convinced than ever. Twenty years ago I was certain, now, not so much....
It's a compelling idea, but what metric would be used to determine if a form of life arose independently? Wouldn't this suffer from the same problem as proving "Intelligent Design" - there is no metric for determining whether something is too complex to have arisen naturally, or too different to by related to known lifeforms. From TFA itself, life as we know it has been found everywhere on the globe, in radically different conditions than ours, which to me suggests that the related lifeforms on earth not only come in a huge variety of forms, but also will probably dominate any system they are in, including the hardest-to-reach ones that we can think of.
It raises an interesting question, however: if life can start, then it can have started more than once. In terms of probability, does this also mean that is has probably started more than once? And if life can start and stop, then does this also mean that life has probably started and stopped?
As the article mentions, bacteria - conventional, non-alien bacteria, which share a common ancestor with other conventional life like you, me and a tree - are found everywhere on earth.
Living things are, in general, very competitive, and very effective competitors. Otherwise, they wouldn't still be here. So the odds that a new abiogenesis event, if one occurred, would produce a lifeform that would actually be viable in the face of a billion years of evolution by the competition are, I think, remote.
Also, while living things may thrive under extreme conditions (for example, in a bath of deadly oxygen gas) this does not mean that abiogenesis can occur under such conditions.
Finally, while it is true that many lab techniques are specific to detecting conventional terrestrial life, others are not. So, unless this non-conventional life is *restricted* to some remote environment - which conventional life certainly is not, so this again seems unlikely - we would be expected to have seen it.
There are some exotic coincidences which might allow for this to be true - maybe this exotic life looks just like a bacterium under the microscope, but for whatever reason cannot be cultured at all. Maybe it can't live on sugar - maybe it requires some other exotic organic nutrient which is found out in the wild but no-one has thought to add to culture medium. All possible, but also all unlikely.
Nonetheless, problems of detection of this kind remain a serious and useful direction for inquiry, in preparation for serious efforts to locate alien life on other worlds, where we will need a wide array of avenues for detection to allow for a completely-unknown level of chemical diversity.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
FTFA:
Although 'alien' microbes might look like ordinary bacteria, their biochemistry could involve exotic amino acids or different elemental building blocks so researchers are devising tests to identify exotic microbes.
And:
On the other hand, an organism that employed the same suite of nucleotides and amino acids as known life-forms but merely used a different genetic code for specifying amino acids would not provide strong evidence for an independent origin, because the differences could probably be explained by evolutionary drift.
I think that people (Hello, ID'ers!) sometimes underestimate or misunderstand the power of allelic drift. Our world has incredibly diverse and interesting life forms. What may seem bizarre and "alien" on the surface is often simply the effect of random chance.
Since most organic matter originated from Stardust falling to Earth, I would say we are ALL aliens in some way, shape or form.
The best evidence for this is Star Jones.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Life probably arose on Mars first, because its smaller and geological stablized sooner. Many meteors from Mars have been found on Earth. Bacteria can live for a long time deep insted rocks. Rock is a great insulator and its interor would not get too hot during Earth atmospheric entry.
Stop illegal alien strains from taking the jobs of earthly bacteria! Vote Kodos!
it's also amazing how different forms of life can be reinvented
whales reinvented what fish do. bats reinvented what birds do
you can go down into deeper and deeper levels of reinvention of life processes too. for example, horseshoe crabs don't have iron-based red blood, they have copper-based blue blood. go deeper than that: there are bacteria that have completely reinvented photosynthesis from scratch according to an alternative methodology
of course the basest differences this article talks about is exotic, alternative forms of energy in superhot environments, superacid environments, weird chemical/ metal concentrations, etc. by necessity then, these animals have very exotic and bizarre biochemistry, but tehy are still in our family tree, because of the way they store their genes
so the deepest alternatives to life as we know it is to find some bugger somewhere who stores its genes in ways other than dna/ rna
find that bugger on earth, win the nobel prize
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Barack Obama
Bacterial infection of lunar landing sites is a serious concern. Here, read this.
Here's an excerpt:
I always thought the most significant thing that we ever found on the whole goddamn Moon was that little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever said shit about it. -- Pete Conrad On April 20, 1967, the unmanned lunar lander Surveyor 3 landed near Oceanus Procellarum on the surface of the moon. One of the things aboard was a television camera. Two-and-a-half years later, on November 20, 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan L. Bean recovered the camera. When NASA scientists examined it back on Earth they were surprised to find specimens of Streptococcus mitis that were still alive. Because of the precautions the astronauts had taken, NASA could be sure that the germs were inside the camera when it was retrieved, so they must have been there before the Surveyor 3 was launched. These bacteria had survived for 31 months in the vacuum of the moon's atmosphere. Perhaps NASA shouldn't have been surprised, because there are other bacteria that thrive under near-vacuum pressure on the earth today. Anyway, we now know that the vacuum of space is not a fatal problem for bacteria.Weaselmancer
rediculous.
That's not a very good disguise.
:D
Exactly! That's why it's the PERFECT diguise!
Lets see you claim 50 years of listening to aliens with just one BLEEP. Okay. Now for the other side. A minimum of 5000/6000 years with NADA, ZILCH, NOTHING.
That is not even comparing the size of the searches. So explain to me, if you believe god exists, where is the evidence. If you are willing to forgo evidence in the case of god, why do you demand evidence in the case of aliens?
Offcourse neither proves a single thing. Just because we don't see a god, doesn't mean there isn't one. And just because we don't see any aliens doesn't mean there aren't any.
But if you believe in science, then the thought that life might exist elsewhere ain't so hard. If you believe in science and think there is a beard in the sky... Aliens can be explained, god can't.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
First of all, we would not just come out and announce our presence.
Second of all, we would be sure as hell smart enough to hide proof.
Three, we would never ever just announce it on slashdot by not-so-clever usage of the word "we" or "us".
Peace out ya'all.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Which some call nanobacteria...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Hey, that mod is not fair. The response is obligatory. OK, mod me down but here goes:
"All of our alien bases are belong to us."
You mean Dennis Radaman?
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
"It vas Khan, he put cleatures...in our ears!"
Someone needs a hug. Or perhaps a tightly wound garrote.
I live less than 100 miles from the southern border of the US, and there are aliens all around.
But damn, their restaurants make some of the best damn enchiladas in the world.
/* No Comment */
So aliens may already be living in the tinfoil that I make my hats with!?!?!?!?
Word game?
This has been on my mind a lot lately, for some unfathomable reason. Insects are so wildly different from other creature archetypes on the planet, that a small, pixie-dust, unscientific part of me believes that they must be exactly this type of alien: the ongoing result of a process of evolution that arose independently from some origin separate from the organisms that gave rise to quad-limbed Earthlings.
Perhaps they are the 'true' earthlings, and the quadruped lineage is the aberration. But it is my fervent belief that Insects were created by the Old Ones. I swear it. Ia.
I always wondered if my gastrointestinal pain and bloating were some kind of microbial SETI experiment.
Yes. One of them is a doctor.
Any hard evidence?
Anyone?
"Twenty years ago I was certain, now, not so much..."
Well perhaps you might reconsider after watching The Disclosure Project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vyVe-6YdUk
Where hundreds of high ranking military, government & NASA staff went on national television (2001) to state that there is a cover up going on.
Unfortunately, (coincidence??) 9/11 happened only a few months after this TV broadcast and all attention was diverted away from it.
Or Perhaps this Nov 12th, 2007 Larry King Live set of clips on UFOs where previous high ranking deniers at NASA and military are now coming forward saying that there really are UFOs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBVoIT3KRYI
Or how about a separate major public disclosure occured just this week where 14 senior officials of various countries came forward to testify of their experiences on international TV and are pushing governments for full disclosure: (Official Website): http://www.freedomofinfo.org/national_press.htm
Youtube Video clips:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCGO7Iser4g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vymLxCgGKM4&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YPZAso2eSI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9ttSXYwZsg&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhqJZ47mf24&feature=related
And lastly, there's always the video where prior astraunaults, Retired colonels, physicists are discussed & interviewed "the most accurate investigation of UFOs": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBtVOhAl2ks
The truth is out there, but I wish they'd hurry the hell up and open this up to public.
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Great MIB Ref :D
I also happen to be highly amused by that particular pair of sigs...
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Life has evolved more than once on Earth! Mitochondrian and cells were separate creatures until they formed this symbiotic relationship and out-competed both of their non-hybrid ancestors.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
the INS is politically pressuring biologists to reclassify mexicans as silicon based life forms
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Our evil plan is becoming known to the outsiders as we speak! Quickly brothers, we must put everything in motion. We have no more time to prepare. The stars are right. Our destiny awaits.
I'a I'a Cthulhu Fhtagn!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
no (tagging beta)
Pi Ran Out
but not as we know it.
The Illuminatus' Kraken is more appropriate. (And still not very appropriate.)
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
But his orginal Just-So Stories were amusing, and fun to read to the children.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
We shouldnt be searching deserts and volcanos for this alien life, we should be searching Hollywood. According to MIB Al Roker, Isaac Mizrahi, Danny DeVito, Barry Sonnenfeld, Chloe Sonnenfeld, Sylvester Stallone, Dionne Warwick, Newt Gingrich, Anthony Robbins, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg are all aliens. Please investigate DeVito first as anyone who has viewed such classics as "Throw Mama from the Train", "Junior" and "Renaissance Man", he cannot be human.
i did not know about that fungus. that truly floors me
but to me that has to be a dead end for life, perhaps even non-DNA/RNA based life. i would think you cannot successfully pass on the traits to survive and thrive and evolve under gamma radiation when the molecular mechanism of inheritance itself is being decimated by said same gamma radiation. so it is truly an exotic dead end little niche, but amazing nonetheless
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i shall posit that persons responsible for pebkac type errors are the cromagnons that are the original inhabitants and that those who instruct them are the alien life forms.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
- Given the substantial difference between human male and human female, I propose the following hypothesis:
One gender arrived on earth a substantial time ago. Their race was having difficulties, they were looking for help. They couldn't leave. They partially adapted to earth. One of the arriving species' genders died out; native humanity was adapted (partially) to take its place. The "native" duplicate gender died out also. Perhaps that departure was helped along. One consequences of the partial adaptations is that both genders breed true to their "original" form. Thus, the two humans, native and arrival, are both so different and somewhat similar.
- Can I prove this, not a chance.
- Is the possibility interesting for speculation, definitely. In the interest of speculation, which gender is native and which the noob?
- Let the flaming begin.
Well, back to Mexico with you.
What? Oh. There's a difference?
What were we talking about then?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
As far as I know, compared to the universe, as we know it, the whole Earth is totally alien.
Technologically advanced aliens would take over the universe at near light speed.
well at least one, and she(it?) released the following material
1993 Debut
1995 Post
1996 Telegram
1997 Homogenic
2000 Selmasongs
2001 Vespertine
2004 Medúlla
2005 Drawing Restraint 9
2007 Volta
Don't forget Tyra.
This is almost a text book example of the scientific method isn't it? Some one has a theory "Life is very likely to arise on any Earth-like planet." You can test this and prove it right or wrong by observation. All you need are a large number of earth-like planets you lok at each one and see if there is life. OK darn we can't test this theory. So we have a usles untestable theory. Oe so we thought for for year it was untestable.
What they are saying here, is that if life is likely then maybe here on Earth it started, was wiped out, started again, wiped out again and then we are the product of the 3rd or 100th try. Each of the others being wiped out by some natural disaster like a comet impact or whatever. So here finally is a way to test the theory that life is "likely" if we can show that it happen not once but many times on Earth then it was not a one in a trillion chance but a certainty.
To prove this they only need to find one microbe that is not decedent from the same common ancestor is we are. The microbe does not even have to be living. A fossil would be as good if it could be shown not to share an common ancestor with us.
The odd thing is that there could be 100's of these right in plain sight and we'd never know it and even if we did find it how can we be sure.
Don't you watch SG-1? Smallville?
We ARE the Aliens!
If by "we" you mean US Americans then that would explain a lot since I always wondered why I and my fellow human beings were classed as aliens when living in the US. Now I know!
Anyone who has used the NYC Subway knows there are aliens among us.
Wouldn't be irrational to find an organism that hasn't adapted to its environment? C'mon elemental Darwin101, it is called Evolution.
No matter the origin it may had, probably it mutated to adapt to the present earthy conditions. If it is still hard to believe, go to the museums they already have aliens at display, but they are named with less funky names, they are called dinosaurs.
It is alien is as long as its environment is. Once an alien lived long enough in the foreign environment they become citizens... oh wait
>Science has done nothing for society but make you into selfish music thieves and pornography downloaders
Can't argue with that one.
...I still think Duji (Rover's morning glory) is an alien! UFO traffic is common over the lake near Cleveland and I think it all makes sense.
No, no - that's completely wrong!
Let's approach this scientifically:
So, the true test of whether (or not) a person is an alien is to see if they weigh as much as a duck. Anyone who does is obviously made of wood, and therefore a witch^D^D^D^D^Dalien!
Anyone failing this simple test can safely be burned at the stake, as their extra-terrestrial nature has been conclusively demonstrated.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
...disguising as Microsoft CEO several times, wonder why noone realized.
...Only a fraction of a percent of soil-living microbes can actually be grown and analyzed in the lab, let alone some alien species. How will you find them otherwise? PCR? This would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) with current technologies and what happens if their DNA is not DNA but another nucleic acid or something else entirely?
Nice idea and good luck!
Like in that movie K-Pax ... oh wait.
The summary:"Although 'alien' microbes might look like ordinary bacteria, their biochemistry could involve exotic amino acids or different elemental building blocks so researchers are devising tests to identify exotic microbes."
Here's the thing: there's unlikely to be a discrete line in the sand, beyond which life occurring on Earth can be called alien. In humans, we have DNA that transcribes into RNA and then translates into protein. Viruses just use RNA, dispensing with DNA, so they have a different elemental building block. Even in humans there are different building blocks: the RNA->protein translation for our main DNA has a different code than our mitochondrial DNA. Likewise, there are many bacteria that use amino acids not seen in the rest of the animal and plant kingdoms, and extreme thermophilic bacteria use ether-linked phospholipids (as do more common bacteria), that act like rivets holding the cell membrane together, rather than the bilipid membranes other bacteria, plants, and animals use. And once you start looking at metal-ion-based coenzymes, you can't stop finding weird and unusual things, especially if it involves moving ions or specific molecules around. Once you get past things that have either fur or flowers, there are more exotic chemistries than normal ones, it seems like.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
They should look around the Ft. Harrison Hotel in Clearwater.
This explains my ex-wife and her parents!
I knew there was something different about them!
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
I was disappointed when I got my SciAmer magazine in the mail with this article as the cover story. The reason being is that this isn't a story. All it talks about is some scientists who are interested in finding life that didn't derive from the same source as all the known life on Earth. Ok, that's nice, but it's no front page story and is certainly nothing new.
They ARE among us:
The Vidiians, Malon, Talosians, Kazon/Ferengi hybrids occupying the white house. Maybe we need to SAVE this green planet
(a reference to Save the Green Planet:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0354668/
http://www.kfccinema.com/reviews/horror/savethegreenplanet/savethegreenplanet.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_the_Green_Planet!
http://www.indiewire.com/movies/movies_050419save.html
http://www.koreanfilm.org/kfilm03.html
It's funny, serious, nutty, and more. One reviewer said this is one film that packs virtually every known film genre into one sitting.
But, I better stay low, and to borrow a phrase from Janeway, "... Steer us a course clear of that... I'm in NO MOOD to donate organs today..."
)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
i have proof that she evolved from something NOT of this earth...
sig goes here!
There are at least five totally different types of life on earth that have nothing in common.
http://www.google.se/search?q=Five+kingdoms+of+life
Also, I find spiders to be highly suspicious what with having no muscles and using hydraulics instead and all.
And the verdict is still out on viruses, whether they are alive or not and whether they would be an own lifetype.
Living things are, in general, very competitive, and very effective competitors. Otherwise, they wouldn't still be here. So the odds that a new abiogenesis event, if one occurred, would produce a lifeform that would actually be viable in the face of a billion years of evolution by the competition are, I think, remote.
...
Finally, while it is true that many lab techniques are specific to detecting conventional terrestrial life, others are not. So, unless this non-conventional life is *restricted* to some remote environment - which conventional life certainly is not, so this again seems unlikely - we would be expected to have seen it.
There are some exotic coincidences which might allow for this to be true - maybe this exotic life looks just like a bacterium under the microscope, but for whatever reason cannot be cultured at all. Maybe it can't live on sugar - maybe it requires some other exotic organic nutrient which is found out in the wild but no-one has thought to add to culture medium. All possible, but also all unlikely.
The undercurrent of thinking in the above (which is the historically dominant one addressed in the opening paragraphs of the article) could be summarized as: "If a fundamentally distinct form of life existed, we should of seen it by now, since science has by now pretty thoroughly explored all of the Earth's environments, and its organisms. So our current status of non-observation is very strong evidence of non-existence."
If this premise of thorough characterization of the biosphere is correct, then we shouldn't have had any radical new discoveries about the diversity of conventional life in, say, the last 30 years either.
In fact there have been quite a number of truly astonishing discoveries of this nature. Most prominent was the discovery of the third kingdom of life on Earth, the Archaea, in 1977 by Carl Woese. The Archaea is a branch of life as different from the other two branches (Bacteria and Eukarya) as they are from each other. Yet science, well advanced by any standard at that point, had failed to notice it. See, for example Virginia Morell's write-up on the Woeseian revolution in Science, 2 May 1997, Vol. 276. no. 5313, pp. 699 - 702, or Carl Woese.
Another example concerns the very extensively studied kingdom of Bacteria. It stands to reason that by the later 1990s the bacteria in any common soil sample must have been pretty well characterized, right? After all, these are ideal subjects of study, readily available, conveniently small but not too small for study. Microbiologists had been culturing and classifying them for a few centuries by then. Except that when examinations of how many bacteria could be visually counted in a typical sample was compared to the number that could be cultured, it turned out that less than 1% of the bacteria could be grown for study. And when it became possible to do mass screening of DNA fragments in the environment it turned that less than 1% of the fragments from a common soil belonged to organisms known to science. So it transpired that biology was familiar only with the bacteria that could be easily grown in the lab, which turns out to be hardly any of them. See for example: A Molecular View of Microbial Diversity and the Biosphere by Norman R. Pace in the same issue of Science above (pp. 734 - 740).
Other examples. It was discovered in 1977 that pelagic bacteria, previously unnoticed, accounted for most of the biosphere mass in the oceans, and most of its biolgical activity. Here we had the largest component of the entire biosphere of Earth escaping notice! Similarly, the most prevalent organisms in the oceans turns out to be viruses (but are lower in mass since they are much smaller), yet these escaped notice until 1989. See: "Microbes, Molecules, and Marine Ecosystems" by Farooq Azam and Alexandra Z. Worden in Science 12 March 2004: Vol. 303. no. 5664, pp. 1622 - 1624.
A
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
First of all, I think it's cool people are thinking about looking. I've got no problem with this, and it might even be a good idea.
But I haven't heard of any observation that even suggests there are aliens present. Surely the wackiest of extremophiles have already been DNA-analyzed, and found to be related to us.
This seems to me, to more "pre-science" than science itself: collecting observations, trying to look harder, but not really testing any theories. There just aren't any theories of aliens, yet. And while the "mood" or "prevailing view" about aliens has changed in the last 30 years, the science hasn't. Nothing has happened that points to the existence of aliens, here or anywhere else. Nothing except our imaginations, have really increased or decreased our expectations. There just aren't any new observations.
And maybe that's a good reason to do it.
But this kind of reminds me of string "theory." ;-) It's a neat idea, and maybe searching will find a hint that justifies it, but it isn't very "sciency" right now.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
i want to see the buggers that can survive on cosmic rays ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's interesting that people are starting to discuss the problems with our current definition of life. I strongly recommend that people check out Autopoiesis and Cognition by Humberto R. Maturana, Francisco J. Varela. These 2 brilliant scientists put together a remarkable definition and then argue it in truly astonishing ways.
The gist of their definition is that life is any set of cyclically arranged processes that, through their enactment, create and sustain themselves - ie it has to be recursive, and a closed network, and create it self. They argue that our current 'bullet point' definition of life is flawed because there is no way of knowing when we have enough points, and that this 'listing of features' is merely a fudging that has served us until we actually come up with a proper definition. They talk at great length about organisation as opposed to physical characteristics. They even hypothesize that their definition covers things like social networks ( though they argue between themselves somewhat on this point ).
They are quoted at length by Fritjof Capra ( another true legend ) in Web of Life, and for good reason. Actually Capra's discussion of their ideas is the reason I decided to track down and by Autopoiesis and Cognition.
Anyway, this book is truly fascinating. It's written in a slightly difficult language, but it's WELL worth it. I certainly can't do their ideas justice ( particularly since I haven't read their work in a while ). Check it out for a very fresh take of the Organisation of the Living.
there's no reason to insult me like that! ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
you got me.
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
How would you know what jesus feels, knows or wants from us Atheists? Let the man speak for himself, you are not his mother! He didn't die so YOU could go and tell other people what to do in HIS name.
... and all those other not so nice things? I think god knows perfectly well what he's doing, being almighty and all and definitely won't need your help...
PS.
You do know that it was god who created Lucifer,right? And that place he resides, whatyamacallit, oh, right: hell.
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
If I correct this 1338 into 1337, am I a grammar Nazi?
Ignore this signature. By order.
modded troll for your whining. go outside.
so basically it will be around 70 years worth of our civilization that will broadcast any sort of intelligible signal. So it will be a sphere 70 light years thick expanding out from us that will be detectable, of hopefully somewere in the hundreds of thousands of years of human society... That's pretty thin odds of a SETI type scan finding us.
Now if you assume aliens want to contact other races, and intentionally broadcast a "here's how to reach us" signal (i.e. in the movie _Contact_), then there's some chance we'll find them. But I suspect if they're just minding their own business, their transmissions will devolve to pretty much white noise from any distant observers position just as ours are doing.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
And I for one welcome our alien overlords
Then this can prove evolution.
It's a rain of red cells that multiply like yeast yet have no detectable DNA. All earth based-life contains DNA, these cells do not appear. And this is just the tip of their unusual properties:
http://education.vsnl.com/godfrey/
http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1337&category=Environment
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/2c21c0f98d07b010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_rain_in_Kerala
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/06/02/red.rain/index.html
Alien life, in some sense, has likely already found us.
And on a side note, I would encourage everyone to take a look at Linda Moulton Howe's work at Earthfiles.com. As is always the case, if there is an interesting phenomena on the planet, she does a more in-depth, facsinating job reporting on it than anyone else dare.
Crack open those eyelids!
http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=wreckerpecker
...welcome our metal eating, chlorine breathing, sulfur farting microbic overlords
It's just that he's so bad at it. Besides, his robot dog is way cooler.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
One of them's a doctor.
Although 'alien' microbes might look like ordinary bacteria, their biochemistry could involve exotic amino acids or different elemental building blocks so researchers are devising tests to identify exotic microbes.
That criterion has already been satisfied, on a small scale. There are a number of bacteria known that have a few DNA encodings that are slightly different than ours. Usually it's just 1 or 2 encodings, and not all of them produce unusual amino acids.
There's an example in humans: Our mitochondria encode UGA to tryptophan rather than the usual "stop" signal as in our nuclei. So should we conclude that our mitochondria are an invading alien organism that has colonized our cells? Maybe, maybe not.
In any case, a few hundred variants like this are already known. Googling for "unusual DNA amino-acid encoding" gets 1.7 million hits. Many are for artificially-modified ("gene-engineered") bacteria, but a good number describe variants discovered in natural organisms.
Of course, these are all organisms whose DNA encodings are mostly identical to ours. Nothing has been yet reported to be mostly unusual encodings. This isn't really conclusive of anything, of course. There might well be a good reason that our encodings are as they are, and it may turn out that most of the universe's life uses approximately the same set of encodings.
I'd expect that any serious researchers would know all this, though a journalist (even one with scientific training) might not.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
In Infinite Play the Movie http://infiniteplaythemovie.com/ the one that is claimed to blend with reality, and does so in an uncanny way.
One of the many themes is that we are extraterrestrials.
That earth is a big social experiment, a form of infinite play.
Read the "Who are we" page. It does blend with the reality read the Masters List published in 2004 and look at what is and has happened.
The reason we don't have direct contact, is we are not supposed to know as part of the experiment.
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
Is there any way I can filter this type of crap out?
If there are aliens out there they are ignoring us.
Come on, if they wanted to come to our planet, they would have already. If we're talking organisms and whatnot, then they're already here.
However, if we're talking ET's, then I doubt that they want to meet us. why?
1) We're way to warlike and violent
2) we've polluted our planet, and if they took us to theirs, they'd regret it and we'd probably pollute their planet.
Some examples of aliens that we've encountered.
V the series: reptilian. conquerors. evil. with the exception of the fifth column.
Star Trek: Vulcan, Klingon, Borg, Romulans, Elasians, and others. Klingons, Borg, and Romulan; all conquerors, all warlike, with the exception of the klingons, all evil.
Star Wars: Wookie, Aqualish, and others........dunno what to say to that.
I'd put others up, but if I did, I'd be here for 24 hours or longer.
the point is, if we did encounter other aliens, we'd either end up with vulcan type bozo's or something based off of V. I'd rather have the vulcan type, even if it meant peace.
Course, till we develope our space travel, we don't really need to worry.
The Orion geneticists mixed their dna with original earthers to make a race of slaves. Darn. I got to this post way too late.
Fear the rathful Jehovah slaves!
Just go back to what you were doing.
--
make install -not war
If our alien Adam or Eve ancestors mated with dumb animals that would explain that recessive gene humans have that causes some of the rural humans to mate with dumb animals... ;-)
Or perhaps our curiosity or arrogance in placing human genes into dumb animals and plants for experimentation has an inherited source or is simply characteristic of our level of development?
I'm for whatever story gets the scientists funding to do real work.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Are Aliens Living Among Us?
Ask the INS.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Some rocks have been excavated which contained resisters and "spark plug-like" devices which, while compatible with our electronics, are not of any known make (and sometimes not of any known metal/alloy!) on the planet.
Add to this various megalithic sites composed of stone not found for thousands of miles (one of those cases is thousands of miles of ocean) and dividing the earth exactly along 3 meridians, and there are definite signs of at least one previous advanced civilization.
Whether it was us in a past we collectively forgot or some other creature is unclear, and because of how sparse such finds indicating this are, many scientists see fit to ignore them as "anomalous".
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
YES!
Daniel
I'm pretty sure my wife is not from here.
I think it's obvious that life will exist in any favorable place in the universe. Finding extraterrestrial life on Earth would be great to promote that idea, but it'll never be credible unless it's found frozen in a meteorite.
Still the best way to determine if life is out there, is to find it somewhere other than Earth.
Spiders, humbug. I have a pet crayfish, and they really take the cake -- more legs and pincers and feelers and eyestalks and other weird parts than you can shake a stick at.
Mine's cute, too. When he's in a chipper mood, he spends the day rushing from one side of his tank to the other, spreading his arms and opening his pincers as widely as possible to menace whoever's closest to him in the room.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
and all aliens speaks english naturally.
should they bother? why are they here? we kill our own kind
I am an alien... tuned into a Nerd... to avoid publicity !!!!
There is a petition online to convince aliens to contact us: http://www.alien-petition.org/ Then we will know...
Not to post this article J & K! See, now we have slashdotters curious about us.
Damn!
As far as I'm aware (although admittedly I'm only a casual observer) we still haven't found the entire trail from non-life to us. Considering that, at any given point in time, conditions over most of the planet are grossly similar (water, oxygen, sun et al), it seems very likely to me that life did start at several places at once, and that the way to achieve life in similar circumstances is also very likely to be nearly indistinguishable and probably even sufficiently compatible to end up banging each other when they finally evolved sexual reproduction.
I will be very surprised if one day we manage to do a full trace of earthbound life's family tree, and we end up with only one ancestor/place of origin.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
When using Wikipedia as a source of facts, it is a good idea to browse the talk and history pages. In this case, most of the discussion points out that all the external references go against the conclusions in the page.
Basically, it looks like some personal opinion piece, that nobody has got around to cleanup yet.
If a life form originated here on Earth, it isn't alien in any sense of the word - if life started up several times the different forms are all native, but may be called 'polyphyletic'.
And, on the other hand, how long does one have to stick around to no longer be alien? Are those currently called 'Americans' still aliens? If life came to Earth from outer space 4 billon years ago, shouldn't it qualify as 'native' by now, after having been shaped by the local environment for so long?
I knew Hillary must be a Skrull!
I mean, I vaguely recall something like that..
Insert
I submit it's unlikely an alien life form would be an extreme-o-phile. Extreme conditions are tough to survive in, by definition.
What are they thinking? Alien life forms couldn't compete, and thus would only exist if they came, pre-evolved, to exist in some situation where they'd receive little or no competition?
I would hope they aren't thinking "alien life = weird, extreme-o-phile = weird, therefore alien life is probably an extreme-o-phile." Does not compute.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I forget where I read this, I'm thinking Scott or Douglas Adams, though the closest I can find online attributes it to a "Bill Bryson", but one posted a funny way of predicting the future with a "which is more likely" game. For aliens, which is more likely, that they travelled many many light years to get here and shove probes up our rears, without making diplomatic contact, or that they're here all the time and we don't know about them.
The author then goes on to point out how we'd recognize such an advanced species, the world's best chocolate, neutral in all wars, the trains always run on time and very secretive. The upshot is that the Swiss our the aliens, once a year putting on lederhosen and inviting people in for festivals to keep the misdirection going.
You know? Personally I think the smarter ones. You know? That, that are capable of detecting our. You know? Noise are probably. You know? Hiding from us. You know? I would, wouldn't you? :) You Think?
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
What if they discovered a vastly superior evolutionary potential here on Earth in the form of a hyper-active Japanese school girl?
Oops, wrong site...
- Francis Ocoma
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