Slashdot Mirror
Why Scientists Think Completely Unclassifiable and Undiscovered Life Forms Exist
An anonymous reader writes: In a new paper published in Science, researchers at the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute note that "there are reasons to believe that current approaches [to discovering life] may indeed miss taxa, particularly if they are very different from those that have so far been characterized." They believe life forms exist that don't fall into the established eukaryota, archaea, or bacteria kingdoms. They argue that there may be life out there that doesn't use the four DNA and RNA bases that we're used to; there may be life out there that has evolved completely separately from everything that we have ever known to exist; there may be life that lives in places we haven't even looked.
A self-reproducing system that does so perfectly, with no errors won't ever change, and isn't really alive.
If it is successful at surviving, why would it need to adapt to be alive ? Maybe it's already perfectly adapted to its environment.
Indeed. We have enough trouble finding certain DNA-based life forms. Plenty of life forms we only know about because we leaned how to copy DNA, and started grinding up samples and amplifying the DNA. Many of those refuse to grow in petri dishes and don't cause diseases, and would no doubt be unknown to this day if they didn't contain DNA.
I think there's a fairly low chance that Earth has life that doesn't use DNA/RNA but if there is and it minds its own business, it could be decades or more before we discover them.
Consider things that grow much, much more slowly. They're already finding chemolithoautotrophs living in rock 4 km beneath the surface of the earth, that reproduce over the course of years, rather than in twenty minutes like the bacteria we're used to working with. If there were organisms that didn't have DNA, but did have some sort of body that could maintain chemical gradients, allowing it some sort of metabolism, and reproduced on the scale of centuries, we'd have trouble ever noticing it was there because we haven't made the tools to find it, for lack of knowing what we're looking for.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
The best phrase I've heard for this is "don't eat the menu". Indeed.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.