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Space

Alien Life Found On Earth? 128

Posted by timothy from the only-trying-to-snag-a-place-on-oprah dept.
Eris writes: "An interesting tidbit from a UPI story running on Environmental News Network: A Welsh/Indian team of scientists thinks that their high flying research balloon may have picked up actual alien bacteria dropped into the atmosphere by cometary debris. It remains to be seen whether this is any better than our old friend ALH 84001, the Martian Meteorite, and the researcher involved does have a history of pushing the life-from-outer-space theory. But this is just neat enough to merit at least a quick glance." So far, no Andromeda Strain reactions -- a good sign.
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Alien Life Found On Earth? More

Alien Life Found On Earth?

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  • That is such a rip off of the movie Contact it's not even funny.

    Allow me to quote from Good Will Hunting: "When you are 55 you will start to do some thinking on your own and you will come to two conclusions. One, don't do that (plagerize). Two, you wasted two-hundred and fifty grand in tuition getting an education you could have got for two-fifty in late charges at the library."

  • Blasphamy...
    You must code.. you must hack perl...
    How dare you prefer calculus to perl...

    Nooo we must torment you....

    Ok my minions.. discover the subject he is weakest on and force him to answer questions in that area...
    Torment him when he is wrong.. and and force him to watch evil purple dinos...
    Deprive him of his fav Si Fis...
    and force him to watch the stupid mockerys of si fi by hacks (writing hacks BTW.. not computer hacks.. in publishing it's an insult)...
  • ...has been around for a while (cf. Fred Hoyle).

    ...who has co-written many books on exobiology and extra-terrestial life origin theories with, er, Chandra Wickramasinghe. So none of this is anything new.

    I found "Diseases in Space" on a second-hand book stall a few months ago, and just finished reading it. It's utter bollocks. And it's certainly not good science.

    ISTR Life Cloud was pretty shoddy too, read that about 15 years ago. This is the same old crap that these two have been producing for years.

    Z.

  • It's "so different from _anything_ we've seen before", yet he calls it a "bacterium" not a "virus", or a "protozoa" or a "single celled self-reproducing thing" or a "non-cellular self replicating protein" or a ...

    It's a fucking bacterium. We have seen them before here on this planet. Unfortunately this _non_-scientist comes from a different planet entirely...

    FatPhil

    I post as non-AC because I'm not ashamed of my opinions.

  • why don't we actively search other high altitude objects. Sats that need service would have been assembled in clean room environments, so if you recover a micrometeor punctured component, maybe you can get a swab back.

    Is anybody planning to clean-recover previously sealed components from mir or ISS in the event of the penetration of a hermetically sealed device? Doesn't matter what the box is. It could be a hard drive for all we care.

    Heh. "ALIEN BUG FOUND ON HARD DRIVE"

    IF it happens, the daily mirror will be pleased.

  • I'm being silly here so don't take me too sereously..
    Now the bacterea isn't very smart is it?
    Wait if the whole colective of bactera is accually a single life force.. Then it could have intelegence. It's not really dependent on any given cluster of cells..

    It's not in control of the mutations so occasionally it becomes harmful but the whole idea is to just live peacefully.. So it's not resentful when we kill off thousands of it's cells.

    Now.. picture that we are basicly unaware it exists.. becouse it's diffrent etc.
    Now picture.. it's just ammused by us and while it would like to say hello it's waiting for us to make first contact. (No crop circles etc)

    Now picture it has a sense of hummor and all thies humans are looking for alien life...
    Now picture. it's a prankster... a major prankster...

    "Look at me.. I'm an alien..." hahahaha...

    To be more realistic.. just seems maybe we have a lot of bacterea around the planet.. in the atmosphear etc...
  • It should be reasonably easy to tell an alien lifeform apart - the bochemistry would be expected to differ. Two examples - all earth life uses the same 20 amino acids to create proteins - these 20 were 'chosen' a long long time ago, but there's no reason why the exact same 20 have to be used (or even if it has to be 20). Similarly the genetic code that specifies amino acids in the dna is exactly the same for all earth life (with the minor exception of mitochondria inside cells). Again there's no reason why the code has to be exactly the same.

    There's lots of other more subtle examples.

  • On earth there are a larg number of deity of such the Christian god is only one.

    Of deity many clame to be "The one and only" many deity are still folowed today.

    The Christian god was not allways in populare folowing. So we can not count on this as proof of validity...

    Given a pure statistical analisis what are the odds that the christian god is valid?

    Now... is this any way to handle religion? Not really...

    But for those who enjoy running around saying "Repent" (such as the poster) well.. ok fine thats funny...
    Those who are truely sereous about it... Who stand out infront of mass transit trains (such as BART in California or the Subway in New York..) I have a reply...

    Repent now and be saved or Oden shall smite you...

    (Please note I'm not an Odenist so it's likely the preveous statment is not consistent with that religion.. I wouldn't know)
  • Where does it "imply" it's a DNA based microbe? It only said that's what previous "panspermia" theorists had postulated as the possibility of primitive organisms, possibly DNA, from other worlds (which would then have germinated life here on Earth).
    In this case, however, no one hinted at evidence of DNA structure -- given the ramifications you correctly point out, I don't think the researchers would have lightly dropped such a hint if they had evidence of it!

  • So they find a new species of bacteria, and they assume its alien? The only reasonable basis for such an assumption is if the bacterium displayed obviously alien charachteristics (e.g. silicon-based instead of carbon-based chemistry). This screams bad science, and I'll be surprised if we see this published in a peer-reviewed journal.

  • oh yeah... wildfire alert!
  • Curses! Spiffy bugs-from-space agrument foiled once again by Occam's Razor...
  • ...not known it? This may sound a bit strange, but it always struck me as odd that we always assumed that alien life would have DNA and would be cellular in nature, simply because everything organic we see here on earth is cellular. However, what if something is alive, intellegent and rational and is not cellular? That reproduces, is damanged and repaired on a compleatly different way then our DNA based cells. Anything could be intellegent alien life, we just didn't bother to or know how to hear it/talk to it. It could just be that the comet itself is intellegent, and has manufactured biological tools to handle certian aspects of space travel, and all we are finding is the comet's spare parts.

  • Re:Alien life.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Take it to the tv. *sigh* I'm American, too. :(
  • Any extrasolar comet passing through the solar system would move in a hyperbolic orbit. To the best of my knowledge, no one has seen even a single one.

    An almost infinitely more likely possibility is that it some form of earthborn life blown into the atmosphere, or perhaps some weird type of bacteria that lives its entire life in the high atmosphere. Wierder things have happened.
  • At the moment we would consider life alien if from another planet than earth inside the solar system, to throw something new in, the asteroids might come from the breakup of a big planet.
  • [scratchy old broad's voice] "RAAAAAGWEEEEED POLLEN!"

    (The first thing I think of whenever I think of the film version of Andromeda Strain).

    "Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
  • > The question is: if there are so many intelligences in the universe, where are they?

    Easy answer: Not here...

    How are we going to find life on other planets while we are trapped on this one?

    Only human arrogence would assume alien life would think like we do...

    The desire to make contact with alien life is a human desire.. It may be unique to us...

    That again.. assuming it's even POSABLE.. and the chances are pritty good it's not...

  • In Other News... (Score:3)

    by Cheshire Cat ( 105171 ) on Wednesday November 22, 2000 @08:51PM (#605656) Homepage
    An old man and a crying baby were the only survivors of a town, where everyone else mysteriously died off.... :)
  • the first time we have had direct evidence for the hypothesis that comets seed life on other planets

    Direct evidence for a hypothesis huh? What good is that? :) It's still a hypothesis, no? Perhaps they've found supporting data, but not evidence.

    Basically it's hypothetical evidence... an oxymoron if you will, they cannot exist in the same reference...

    That's all for my annoying corrections :)
  • Remember not to get them wet, or they'll multiply!
  • ...has been around for a while (cf. Fred Hoyle). Given the researcher it's going to be a nearly religious argument within the scientific community.,

  • ...and there is evidence that such a cloud-borne ecosystem does exist, and might even have considerable importance in driving the earth's climate. Here is a quote from a the abstract of a presentation made by Dr Roland Psenner of the University of Innsbruck.

    "...we show that bacterial metabolism can play a measurable role in the production and transformation of organic carbon in cloud droplets collected at high altitudes, even at temperatures at or well below 0 C. Although bacterial abundance and biomass in cloud water is low compared to other aquatic environments, growth and carbon production rates per cell are approximately as high as in warm and eutrophic lakes. We consider the atmosphere not only as a conveyor of organisms but as a site where significant microbial processes take place already during transport. Since ca. 60% of the earth surface is covered by clouds, with a still increasing trend, we hypothesize that microorganisms suspended in cloud droplets could play a crucial role in the transformation of airborne organic matter and the chemical composition of snow and rain."

    The entire abstract is here [aslo.org].

  • Well... (Score:3)

    by Auckerman ( 223266 ) on Wednesday November 22, 2000 @08:55PM (#605661)
    I once tought I discovered proof of alien life on Earth, until my mother assured me that she was indeed my sister.
  • The question is: if there are so many intelligences in the universe, where are they?

    Sometimes I think that the surest sign that intelligent life exists somewhere else in the universe is that none of them has tried to contact us - Calvin.

  • Able to survive in space =/= Coming from space (Score:3)

    by Christ-0-Geek ( 246330 ) on Wednesday November 22, 2000 @08:55PM (#605663)
    Every time you hear about these arguments, it seems the people claiming the bacteria are from space base their claim solely upon the observation that the bacteria could survive in outer space. This is a logical fallacy on more than one ground(induction, as opposed to the logically sound deduction for starters). Just because my computer could hurl through space and still be functional, does not mean it necessarily comes from space.

    Interesting nonetheless, though :)


    -CoG

    "And with HIS stripes we are healed"
  • Any kind of life, or any kind of life we are aware of? Making blanket statements based on what we know and what we can see is a huge mistake.

    ---

  • A few decades ago, one might have postulated that bacteria whose metabolism is based on sulfur as fuel and had no connection to creatures that utilized the power of sunlight would be genetically unrelated to anything on earth. Scientists, whose only experience was with creatures that lived within a very narrow range on the surface of the earth, might believe that a creature like this might be extraterrestrial. That is until the Alvin finds colonies of these things clinging to black smokers at the bottom of the Galapagos Rift.

    If further study of such a creature revealed a genome that was totally unrelated to anything on the surface of the earth, would this point to an extraterrestrial origin or highlight an example of parallel evolution in a closed system that has remained separated from the surface ecology.

    If we find something that is totally non-DNA based, we might have something to talk about, but could we know for sure? Maybe there are non-DNA based creatures thriving in some nook or cranny deep within the crust of the earth. Maybe there are non-DNA based metabolisms thriving unnoticed and undetected right under our noses, perhaps even within us and around us. Would we even know what to look for?

    We are currently limited in what we can know with our incomplete knowledge of even the single planet we reside on. After we get some planet hopping under our collective belts, we should have some limited basis for proving that some form of life might be extraterrestrial in origin whether it's based on DNA or not.
  • "Extraordinary claims," she said, "need extraordinary evidence."
  • It will be no problem for us as long as we do not see the bactreria in "X-Files Movie" around us.
  • You're obviously trolling (amino acids have come into existence in simulated primieval conditions in a lab), but actually if you multiply the tiniest probabilities of intelligent life by the number of planets in the known universe, you still get a hell of a lot of intelligence. Meaning that the universe isn't a total waste which it would be if we were all there was.

  • whoah! quite hardcore stuff this is. well, there's so many unknown species on earth that i don't think so

  • Aww, no chicks? What's the point.

    ---

  • this post was gay.
  • if a probe was built in absolutely sterile conditions(and I mean *absolutely* sterile conditions), and it came back with mold growth, then I'd start to wonder ... ;)

    built and launched in sterile conditions. no to mention making sure it doesn't pick anything up on its way through the atmosphere.

    if you sent your house up into space, and when it got back your computer was in there (or on the roof?), then what are the chances that it came from space?

    what i wanna know is how are they gonna explain the dead rodents orbiting mars?
  • Radicaly different doesn't automaticly mean "from outer space" and if it where ailen, it would have to be adapted for space travel, be fit enought to survie entry into this planet, and also able to live and reproduce in the upper atmosphere. but it if where "earth-home" it would just have had to get up there and could slowy adpat and don't forgot that our planet has many many different types of sepicies, I belive the true test will be to look at its DNA and for the love of god don't nuke it!!!
  • "Slashdot, News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." After reading your post, I am convinced that you are an illiterate asshole.
  • Yes, doubtlessly there is other life in the universe, and so doubtlessly there is also other intelligent life out there. The problem however is time scale.

    It is only the last two centuries that humans have made any scientific advances towards space travel. For millions upon millions of years before that, humanity was just sitting there doing nothing, and for billions up on billions of years before that, there was no humanity at all.

    With regards to other intelligent life, quite likely:
    a) It still has to evolve, and will do so in a few billion years
    b) It has gone beyond being human-like a few billion years ago and evolved into Goddess knows what
    c) It has managed to destroy itself a few billion years ago with its own pollution and/or weapons of mass destruction

    And even if there's a planet out there that chances to have intelligent life in a human-like stage of evolution, it's most likely that:
    a) it will reach the space age in a few million years
    b) it hass already gone beyond the space age a few million years ago

    And even if there's one species out there that is human-like in evolutional development and just beyond our current space age, presuming they have faster than light travel to reach us, they will still likely be so different that we'd never have any hopes of communicating with them (I mean, come on, we can't even understand dolphins yet, let alone creatures from another planet). And that's the least of the problems. Maybe they'd die instantly in our atmosphere - and even if that's all compatible, then our common cold may be their ebola. Any alien race with enough intelligence to actually be able to reach us will also be intelligent enough to avoid us like the disease we'll probably be.

    )O(
    Never underestimate the power of stupidity
  • This sudden change could have had something to do with a severe lack of sleep lately, though...

    No... Remember those nuclear tests the French did? They shipped some samples over to Metz to see how call centre agents would react to it.

    )O(
    Never underestimate the power of stupidity

  • Re:Able to survive in space =/= Coming from space (Score:5)

    by dbarclay10 ( 70443 ) on Wednesday November 22, 2000 @10:06PM (#605678)
    Every time you hear about these arguments, it seems the people claiming the bacteria are from space base their claim solely upon the observation that the bacteria could survive in outer space. This is a logical fallacy on more than one ground(induction, as opposed to the logically sound deduction for starters). Just because my computer could hurl through space and still be functional, does not mean it necessarily comes from space.


    Yeah, but calculate the odds of your computer leaving the surface of the Earth, going around for a while, and landing on some other planet. Pretty bloody unlikely. Now, calculate the odds that all that would happen *naturally*, with no man-made forces at work. Yeah, damn near impossible now.

    Okay, now visualize for a second microbes/organic material that can survive for millions, even billions of years encased in rock(if the organism is simple enough, and it's kept cold enough, it could last indefinetly). All of a sudden, it's very possible that at some time in the distant past, a primitive(or maybe not so primitive) planet/moon was struck by a large meteorite, throwing up huge clouds of dust, full of organic materials(and maybe even primitive life, that survived the blast). A comet passes through the cloud, and carries said organic material all through the solar system.

    Calculate the odds on THAT. When you're dealing in time scales of billions of years, it's not so far fetched.

    I don't think that the people who believe this is possible base their belief on the fact that bacteria can survive in space. I think it's much more than that. Personally, I don't know. I'll need hard evidence before I'm convinced. For instance, if a probe was built in absolutely sterile conditions(and I mean *absolutely* sterile conditions), and it came back with mold growth, then I'd start to wonder ... ;)

    Speaking of probes, what about the Galileo probes? I'm sure they must have some form of Earth-life on them. If it ever falls to another planet, not only is it possible that life has travelled between planets, but it's fact.

    Dave

    'Round the firewall,
    Out the modem,
    Through the router,
    Down the wire,
  • Even if it is of terrestrial origin, the fact that it has been living and evolving in low earth orbit means it no longer has terrestrial citizenship. If we suddenly found your (for the sake of argument) IBM computer floating miles in the sky having transformed into an Amiga, then we could safely hypothesize that whatever its origin, it is now an alien species.

  • Re:"Two possible explanations. ....+1 (Score:3)

    by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Wednesday November 22, 2000 @10:08PM (#605680)
    ""only two possible explanations. [...] organisms have been lifted from the earth to great heights in the skies and have somehow multiplied there and changed over time." The second, he said, is "that this is an example of primitive alien life."

    I fail to see what the first explanation is not the more reasonable!"

    And I fail to see why a scientist (who's ideas i am supposed to find credible) refuses to admit that the most probable explanation for his findings is CONTAMINATION! No matter how incredibly stringent your reqirements for having sterile sampling equipment are, it must be noted that the expirament was carried out ON EARTH. you know....that place where there are on average Billions of living organisms per square meter.



  • Probably nothing to this... (Score:3)

    by angkor ( 173812 ) on Wednesday November 22, 2000 @10:21PM (#605681)
    "direct evidence" he says? Wickramasinghe works with a guy named Sir Fred Hoyle--their odd theories have made them favorites of the creationist crowd. They are definitely fringe thinkers.

    Among their ideas->insects are smarter than humans-flu epidemics come from space-Archaeopteryx was a fake.

    See http://www.talkorigins.org/scripts/search/query.id q?Cmd=Chandra+Wickramasinghe&How=sim ple for more info. The enthuastic tone Wickramasinghe takes in the article is not indicative of a scientist--especially when dealing with such a potentially important discovery.

  • > If the DNA is really ET DNA - that is it is
    > truely genetically unrelated to anything on
    > earth, it would mean that the universe must be
    > full of DNA for it to just land on Earth.

    Why does the fact that it's ET DNA mean that it's genetically unrelated? Different by four gigayears of divergent evolution, maybe, but it's entirely possible (and the idea of panspermia is) that we come from the same gene pool, at some point.
  • Couldn't it just be some kind of newly discovered bacteria that lived in a cave someware on a remote mountain in the Himalaya and escaped on a little breeze and eventualy landed on a rock from outher space, liked it and made it their home.

    Until you people found some bacteria that came in little spacecrafts I am not confinsed...

    Mark [zwienenberg.com]
    "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
  • Remember not to get them wet, or they'll multiply!


    You forgot...don't feed them after midnight or they'll multiply
  • Cool, a universe so hugely massive that we could never hope to explore even 0.0001 percent of it. All for us! Seems like overkill to me.

  • There's a reason that the people that discovered the DNA molecule got the Nobel prize. (name escapes me at the moment, and I'm too lazy to look). But before you all speak completely out of your asses, do you know how special DNA is? Do you know why DNA is shaped the WAY it is? It is an entirely valid and reasonable hypothesis that ALL life capable of self-reproduction makes use of DNA because of some very interesting properties that come about because of it's structure - and that those properties are the result of the component elements, and one could assume that there's nothing special about those elements.

    PLEASE could you look at the science before saying stupid things like "microbe - I think it would be very unlikely that a true ET would just happen to be DNA - though it's possible". You sound like a moron to anyone with half a clue.

    While I am not a genetist (can I even spell it?), my dad IS a Ph.D genetist, and we've had this discussion before, and it's EXTREMELY likely that DNA is the only mechanism in organic chemistry - the chemistry of life - that could sustain any advanced lifeforms, ET bacteria included. Viruses are a special case, becuase you could argue they're not really "alive", per se. Chemistry doesn't change anywhere in the universe, as it's all based on the same physical principles that apply to non-nuclear reactions.

    Sorry, haven't had my coffee yet, and this stuff is important.

  • I recall a geothermometer paper published earlier this year about some recent Canadian meteorite. The internal temperature stayed well below 100C (from the chemicals still existing).
  • While its certainly a fallacy to suppose that something came from space just because it was found in space, thats not induction its a reverse implication (assuming a=>b is the same as b=>a).
    For something to come from space its necessary for it to be able to survive in space, but not sufficient.

    Incidentally, induction may be logically unsound, but it or something equally unsound is the only way to make correspondences between the world as we percieve it and our formal models of it.

  • Include disclaimer.h: I am **NOT** a molecular biologist. . . .

    As I recall, DNA, although a complex molecule, is a fairly normal development of protein evolution. However, TERRESTRIAL DNA is based on 4 amino acids: Adenine (A), which pairs with Thymine (T), and Guanine (G), that pairs with Cytosine (C).

    Other amino acid pairings are theoretically possible, although not found on Terrestrial life-forms. The discovery of a non-GATC based DNA would be strong evidence of non-terrestrial origin, although probably not sufficient of and by itself. . . .

    Of course, a TOTALLY different method of genetic encoding would be pretty much conclusive. . .

  • Humans send tons of stuff into space which is not necessarily sterile. How do we know that a rocket, or satellite picked up some bacteria with it?

    I want to believe...
  • An excellent book on how it might have happened on earth is Seven Clues To The Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story [amazon.com] by Alexander Grahm Cairns-Smith.

  • No, as far as I know there are traces of bacteria found in places like Greenland with no less than 3,4 billion years old. And there seems to exist indirect evidence that bacteria lived already 3,8 billion years old. Nuclear cells seem to have existed at no less than 2,5-3 billion years ago, and it seems these are traces of algaes. Meanwhile at 1 million years ago there seems to already exist a very large community of animals, plants in morphologies that today are equaled to SF nightmares. These groups were all gone by the end of Archaic, when probably 99% of species were slandered by a possible cosmic impact or something else.

    The morphologies of Archaic beings are so weird that it would be possible to say that they are quite alien to us. Or maybe WE are the aliens?
  • I believe that bacteria can *survive in space, but can they actually survive being hurled millions of miles with no organic detritus to subsist on? I mean even bacteria need organic food of some sort, right?
    So unless the comet is made out of some sort of nitrogen-carbon-oxygen mixture that could support life, which it isn't, I don't understand how any life could realistically survive that. Not to mention the fact that a comet is, to say the least, incredibly hot, and 90% of bacteria are killed by excessive heat.
    Their major claim is that just because the bacteria is "so different from anything [they've] seen before" it must be extraterrestrial or strangely mutated. Please.. we're still discovering species of birds, let alone all the weird and creepy little bacterium on Earth.

  • This link [sciam.com] gives a pretty good rebuttal to the notion that with so many planets in the universe there just has to be a lot of intelligences out there.

    The question is: if there are so many intelligences in the universe, where are they?

  • "actual alien bacteria dropped into the atmosphere by cometary debris. It remains to be seen whether this is any better than our old friend ALH 84001"...

    I'm confused, isn't alien bacteria growing in outter space on the MIR space station?

    Is this so hard to believe???

  • This is OBVIOUSLY not a true finding. EVERYBODY knows aliens are big, green, and ugly. Sigh.....scientists always seem to botch things up. This time, they really screwed up.
  • Actually, cold isn't a problem at extremely high altitudes. The troposphere, the lowest part of the atmosphere is charactarized by decreasing temperatures as altitude increases. It extends from 20,000-60,000 feet, depending on season and latitude. The stratosphere's temperature remains rather constant with altitude. Beyond that, the temperature actually increases with altitude, to about 10C at 150,000 feet. It drops again to about -100C at 250,000 feet, then increses to as high as 3,000C (yes, 3 thousand!) at around 400 miles altitude. Not that anything at that altitude experiences that temperature due to contact with the atmosphere, the numbers are actually based on the kinetic theory of gases. Anyway...

    I could see it being possible that simple terrerestrial life forms could exist at high altitudes. I think the main problem would be lack of water vapor, and high levels of solar and cosmic radiation.
    --

  • Now in a cinema near you! X-Files 2, the revelation.

    Watch our heroic bacteria once again take it up against the well known super-villains Mulder and Scully! Will Scully succeed in inventing a antibiotic before our heroes accomplish their heroic task of annihilating the human race? Will Mulder remember to brush his teeth?
    Starring in alphabetical order: E. Coli,D. Duchovny and N. Portman


    Wanna bet? the N. Portman will cause the -1 Troll...

  • I would be much more interested if it's genetics were non-DNA (A COMPLETELY alien replicator).

    Not all life on Earth is DNA-based - some viruses are RNA-based. Replication doesn't need DNA or RNA, and replication doesn't necessarily mean "life".
  • Yeah, well, I'd rather be rich than stupid.

    Really? You'd rather be rich than stupid? Why, fancy that! Imagine giving up marvellous, wonderful stupidity for something as boring as wealth. I assure you, you'll regret it. Never again will you be able to watch Baywatch or the A-Team without puking, but you _will_ feel compelled to spend gross sums of money on personal computing hardware and pleasure cruises, where big-breasted bimbos will felate you constantly. Oh, the sacrifice!

    Are you _sure_ that you would rather have millions of dollars instead of a few dozen brain cells?

    Oh, wait, you already _are_ stupid, which is why you were willing to make the trade. Wait, no, if you already are stupid, willing to trade your stupidity for wealth, that would make you clever, which causes a terrible paradox!

    I feel the universe imploding! Ah-hh!
  • I couldn't get it to look like L'Hospital's rule. I even tried squinting at it. One thing's for sure, it's not a symbol from the Propositional Calculus, which would have been the right calculus for the job at hand.
  • In its 4.5 billion year history, Terra has produced only one species capable of contemplating the question, ?Are we alone in the Universe??.

    Our species has only been able to communicate by means of radio for less than 100 years. So our existence has been visible to at least one other star for a mere 2.2 X 10^-6 % of our planets history. Currently, any ET spaceship within 70 light years would have absolutely no problem determining our existence and location.

    Each year the amount of Radio energy we send out at least doubles. So given the Law of Mediocrity and the fact that any other space-age civilization is more likely to be several million years older, we would expect to be awash in ET radio signals. When we look up into the sky with a radio telescope, we should be blinded by incoming reruns of alien sitcoms and documentaries.

    And yet, all we see with our most powerful radio arrays is noise, all we hear is static. If a space age civilization is just 1000 years more advanced than we are, their star should shine more brightly in radio than in all other parts of the spectrum combined.

    If just one of those ET civilizations managed to last a few million years, then they would have been able to colonize every solar system in the galaxy several hundred thousand years ago (all assuming an average expansion of 0.05 c/yr).

    Furthermore our own existence on this planet is due to a list of exceptionally improbable events: Jupiter?s mass sucks up or slingshots out of the solar system, most space junk that would otherwise go into the inner solar system (also forms the asteroid belt); a Mars sized planetesimal smashes into the Earth during the Hadean (ca 4.3GA) which forms the moon, which in turn protects us from most incoming asteroids/comets that Jupiter misses = this allows for a more complex cycle of bacterial evolution that eventually leads to the explosive Cambrian Adaptive Radiation (ca 570 MA) ; a series of cooling events caused by Antarctica making splitsville with Australia in the Late Cretaceous (ca 70MA) and the formation of the Isthmus of Panama during the Pleistocene (ca 3MA), led to an expansion of savannas at the expense of woodlands = our ancestors finally had to get out of the trees. And since we didn?t have any talons, claws, fast legs or any type of natural protective gear to work with, we had to develop our brains in order to survive. Oh, I forgot to mention the Extinction of the Dinosaurs at ca 65MA.

    Don?t get me wrong, I am a Strong Life proponent (Life at the bacterial and simple multicellular level probably exists on many millions of worlds for at least part of that worlds history); it just seems highly unlikely that there are many other lifeforms out there that could actually contemplate whether they are alone.

  • A: DNA is one of the very few molecules that can be used as a code carrier. The other is RNA but it is less reliable.

    B: Some proteins may be considered also as code carriers but there are some serious doubts on how reliable they can be.

    C: There are several hypotesis considering other combinations but they demand other termodynamic conditions, far from those on Earth. One of these hypotesis concerns a more Titan-like environment with a hint on a silicon based life. However, if a living being from such world would fall into ours, he would be momentarly desintegrated.

    D: Your question is good and bad. Good because it asks if we may not find something else. Bad because it's too Earth bound. DNA is not a "Earth property" it is an Universal property. Specially if we consider that there are clouds and clouds of the DNA's basic construction blocks floating in Cosmos. However we should not search only for DNA like beings. With a good level of craftsmanship it is possible to create "the other silicon beings" (apart of Tiatan-like ones) much similar to what we see on computers. This is no SF. But it is a hint on artificiality...
  • This does sound as bad journalism because not one single evidence was shown in the article. "They are so different" is mass-media boom, nothing else. However I should note you that it will be VERY HARD to see a natural silicon-based lifeform on Earth. As this poor thing will need a refrigerator to survive. Well, at some levels of atmosphere we have such chance but that's a fraction of all upper atmosphere. And a silicon being, a natural one, would need, theoretically less than -100 centigrades to survive.

    One point of a bacteria being alien. Its DNA turns opposite to ours... Or its DNA sequence is completely different for manything on Earth. Or it is based in a protein not known on Earth. Or it is silicon-based and as two nano-diods on it... :)
  • All of a sudden, it's very possible that at some time in the distant past, a primitive(or maybe not so primitive) planet/moon was struck by a large meteorite, throwing up huge clouds of dust, full of organic materials(and maybe even primitive life, that survived the blast). A comet passes through the cloud, and carries said organic material all through the solar system.

    OK, fine, but isn't most likely by far that this collision happened at the nearest life-bearing planet -- Earth? Especially when we *know* that we've been hit by pretty large things. Why the need for all the travelling through space, which while infintesimally possible, is still a very very small chance even after billions of years?


    --

  • DNA is stable. RNA is relatively easily formed during certain conditions, and evolution would tend to push an organism towards using DNA, rather than RNA, as the primary storage format for its genetic material. DNA is RNA with a missing hydroxyl, which makes it far less reactive, and less prone to various chemical attacks. I don't have a hard time believing that an alien lifeform might use DNA. Besides, this doesn't disprove the "life from space" theory.

    However, if the organism's "universal code" (i.e., how the DNA is translated ultimately into proteins) is exactly or mostly similar to the predominately form found on Earth, then it would tend to imply one of two things:

    1) There exists a common ancestor for both Terran life and the life from wherever this came from. See the "life from space" theory.

    2) It came from Earth.

  • Ok. Let me just have a conversation with myself for a minute. The bio def (he he... bio def...) for life is something that reacts with its enviornment... well, lots of stuff appear to react with the enviornment, but can I be for sure? Not really. So, to make the next big assumption: Life in space... Ok. Why not? Mir is now a fungi farm, and they are not sure if it came from earth or from space... and it's obviously in space now... so there you have it... life, in, space... And where do you draw the line from earth and space?... and isn't earth in space,... wait Russian space station... OH SHIT, there ALIENS!!! Damn, I always thought they were rather dull, Russians. Anyway, we're looking for smart life, so we'll move on... Is fugi smart? If it stays away from me it is. Damn well better stay in space or I'll go to that ass! It probably smells what the rock is cooking. And if a rock cooks, it's obviously intelligent, so there we are. come again.
  • Well, I'm not quite sure if these really *qualify* as life, but I believe that prions (little things even smaller than viruses) have no nucleic acid in them at all, but are merely protien chains. Not impressive, sure, but they exist, and some cause such nasty diseases as scrapie (in sheep), mad cow disease (in cows), and Creutzfeld-Jakob Syndrome (in people).
    Also, prions can survive temperatures up to 1700 degrees Fahrenheit, so cooking your meat extra rare isn't going to help. :-/ Almost makes me want to give the stuff up... nah.

    -----------------
  • >I am **NOT** a molecular biologist.

    Not even a chemist I'd guess...
    (Sorry, couldn't resist :-))
    ATGC are not aminoacids, they are (a bit misleadingly) called "bases". Life as we know it is actually build with about 20 aminoacids. They are components of proteins, not nucleic acids.
    Regards,
    kovi
  • Can anyone enlighten me as to the real author of the above (Black Lawyers, Slavery, And Inutterable Weariness Maybe Some Things Aren't Somebody Else's Fault), and when and where it was published?

  • No, if you feed them after midnight they'll become bigger and more aggressive. How you define "bigger" for a bacteria I'll leave up to you...
  • The slight difference between bacteria and your computer is that bacteria are considered a form of life. I assume(hope) your computer does not live up to the definition of "life".

    BTW, imagine the amount of overclocking you can do in space:-)
  • If I were an alien, and i saw the way we(they) Humans treat our(their) planet, I'd put a big four-dimensional sign on the north Pole saying "Thank you for dumping your trash here".
  • If the comet is big enough, and I mean like really big. It's quite possible the very core of it would be hardly affected by the impact. OTOH, if it was that big, those bacteria might get really lonely on earth...
  • Now you're just speaking unintelligable madness. God created the EARTH and put life upon it. Nothing was ever said of the other moons in the heavens that rotate above us in the crystal spheres that surround this planet. To even suggest that there is life outside our planet is blasphemy. Everyone knows the Earth is the center of all creation. So yes, perhaps these magical "microbe" animals DID just launch themselves naturally into space.. or perhaps more likely it was God's will that they be launched there from the Earth.

  • Food (Score:2)

    by daviod ( 142932 )
    Maybe they have been eating the ozone layer

  • High altitude life forms (Score:3)

    by intmainvoid ( 109559 ) on Wednesday November 22, 2000 @08:57PM (#605723)
    Of course it's always possible that there is a "high altitude ecosystem" and that we're been too ground level focussed to notice. It seems pretty feasible for bacteria to have evolved to survive at altitude. It's not that hard - there would be plenty of energy available from the sun - the main problem would be the cold, and a little less oxygen than at ground level.

    Such bacteria probably wouldn't fare too well if it drifted down to ground level, which could explain why we haven't bacteria like this before.

  • Yeah, but calculate the odds of your computer leaving the surface of the Earth, going around for a while, and landing on some other planet. Pretty bloody unlikely. Now, calculate the odds that all that would happen *naturally*, with no man-made forces at work. Yeah, damn near impossible now.

    Pity the rest of your replies missed it, but this statement is flatly incorrect. In conjunction with the news about the Mars meteorite found in the Antartic that alledgedly has some evidence of life left on it, most stories contained numbers for the number of chunks of one planet that end up on another per year. IIRC (and I probably don't completely), it's something like 11 chunks of Mars end up on Eart per century, with fewer making the trip up the well to Mars from Earth (but it's actually not that hard, it just takes time). Large impacts (which happen rarely) can blast chunks right into orbit, at which point gravitational permutations can, with time, take those chunks anywhere. The vast majority fall back, some beat the odds.

    Bearing in mind that the odds are such that on the cosmic scale, a piece of one planet being sent to another is a routine occurrance, your argument is shot to hell.

    (In fact, if we discover life in the solar system, the first thing we will need to do is prove that it didn't come from Earth, because every significant body in the system has been hit by chunks of Earth before. If it came from Earth, it proves nothing about how frequently life may arise.)

  • Your mother was your sister? How many fingers do you have?

  • "the first time we have had direct evidence for the hypothesis that comets seed life on other planets."

    Wouldn't any fragment from a comet burn up in the atmosphere? And if it was too big to burn up, wouldn't that make it create hostile conditions which would destroy small forms of life? (i'm thinking ice age)

    I'm probably and idiot, but I'd like to know..

  • "Two possible explanations." (Score:3)

    by raymondlowe ( 257081 ) on Wednesday November 22, 2000 @09:02PM (#605732)
    The Professor [cf.ac.uk] is quoted as saying "only two possible explanations. [...] organisms have been lifted from the earth to great heights in the skies and have somehow multiplied there and changed over time." The second, he said, is "that this is an example of primitive alien life."

    I fail to see what the first explanation is not the more reasonable!

    This is an old argment - they a whole web site: http://www.panspermia.org/ [panspermia.org]

    R.

  • It has settled in Florida (Score:3)

    by Scarry Jerry ( 97089 ) on Friday November 24, 2000 @03:33AM (#605733)
    These bacteria, being advanced as they are, have evolved into lawyers and descended upon the state of Florida. News reports have greatly overestimated their abilities though. They seem to have problems with propagating their species, since the only thing they seem concerned about is pregnant 'chads' and how they should be counted. They do have a sense of humor, and most of the world, except the members of the two major parties in the US, are laughing at the daily media circus they keep feeding.
  • Well, the article says:

    "Researchers said that in the filter of a high-flying balloon operated by the Indian Space Research Organization, they found a strain of bacteria unlike anything on Earth."

    I rest my case.

    Your case is only taking a nap, jitenpai; just because they said this doesn't mean it is actually unlike anything on Earth. We haven't seen even a significant fraction of all the bacteria that likely exist on this planet, and they haven't had enough time to determine if it even matches one we have seen, much less one we haven't.

    -
  • And I fail to see why a scientist (who's ideas i am supposed to find credible) refuses to admit that the most probable explanation for his findings is CONTAMINATION! No matter how incredibly stringent your reqirements for having sterile sampling equipment are, it must be noted that the expirament was carried out ON EARTH.

    Sure, and I'd think so too if he was claiming to have found penicillin from outer space... but the scientist claims to have found an entirely new species of bacteria, unlike any previously known. The odds of getting your sample contaminated with a previously unknown species are pretty low -- but still probably higher than finding alien bacteria.

    It's still a bit too early to say anything for sure, but assuming that an independent team verifies that these critters are indeed unique in some way, then I'd wager on there being bacteria in the upper layers of the atmosphere. If it turns out the bacteria have evolved to be able to live high up in the atmosphere permanently, it would also mean that odds are they didn't just come off a comet...

    Cheers,
    -j.

  • I think it would be very unlikely that a true ET would just happen to be DNA

    I'm no biologist, but I've got a couple of possibilities to throw up:

    • As other people mentioned, say this organism has ET origins, but shares a common ancestor with earthly life. That explains why DNA.
    • Maybe there is no other naturally-occuring molecule that can serve as the basis for life. I know there are RNA-based viruses, but I'm not of anything that counts as "life" based on anything else. I do know that any ET life, would more than likely be carbon-based - IIRC no other element supports the constructions of sufficiently complex molecules to be "life".

    Could somebody with more knowledge than I have comment?

  • if there are so many intelligences in the universe, where are they?

    A larva has no idea that butterfly phase even exists. It does not have senses to perceive the larger world yet. This is one of many possible explanations.

    Our attempts to discover civilizations using optical and radio astronomy could be naive at best, given the FTL issue. Our own civilization may be unrecognizable in just 100 years (everyone is a cyborg, datasphere etc.) - and we are talking about civilizations distributed in time frame of millions of years!

  • I could be wrong, but I heard that this has now been shown to be impossible - complex "silicon chains" are far too unstable to be the basis of any kind of life.
  • The slight difference between bacteria and your computer is that bacteria are considered a form of life. I assume(hope) your computer does not live up to the definition of "life".

    My computer sure does...and man, I'd hate to see what happens if you piss it off.

  • Mir: Alien Life? (Score:3)

    by ipinkus ( 238283 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @01:26AM (#605751) Journal
    If people are concerned that a comet could contain traces of alien life, why are they dropping Mir into the ocean? Seems like it just might have come into contain with alien bacteria if it is out there... Then we go and drop the thing in the middle of earths womb? Great idea guys... *shrug* Anyone else been thinking along these lines?
  • Mmmmm. I'd say calling Hoyle and his gang "thinkers" is being too kind on them. They're about on the same level of "thought" as creation scientists and space bacteria.

  • because I like calculus more than I like programming.

    *dons asbestos armor*


    -CoG

    "And with HIS stripes we are healed"
  • <Lame joke>
    What are you American's going to do when it asks you to take it to your leader? ;)
    </Lame joke>

    "The good thing about Alzheimer's is that you can hide your own Easter eggs."

  • But it's DNA (Score:4)

    by mindpixel ( 154865 ) on Wednesday November 22, 2000 @09:13PM (#605756) Homepage Journal

    The article implies that it is DNA based microbe - I think it would be very unlikely that a true ET would just happen to be DNA - though it's possible - I would be much more interested if it's genetics were non-DNA (A COMPLETELY alien replicator).

    If the DNA is really ET DNA - that is it is truely genetically unrelated to anything on earth, it would mean that the universe must be full of DNA for it to just land on Earth.

    Can you say Andromeda Strain?

  • "Directed panspermia" is a widely accepted theory that life on earth originated from similar DNA based microbes that fell off the tail of a comet as it passed by our planet.

    It makes a lot more sense than thinking that our complex ecosystem could arise from nothing more than the hydrogen + nuclear fusion that formed the rest of our solar system.

    Its also interesting because it would imply that if there is substansial life elsewhere in the universe, it is likely to be remarkable similar to life on earth.

  • Re:This is probably how we got here (Score:3)

    by radja ( 58949 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @03:05AM (#605762) Homepage
    >It makes a lot more sense than thinking that our complex ecosystem could arise from nothing more than the hydrogen + nuclear fusion that formed the rest of our solar system.

    it may explain how life came to earth.. but it only moves the problem to a different planet where life didn't get by panspermia. the problem isn't adressed at all.

    //rdj
  • Whilst life on earth is something like 4 billion years old isn't cellular life much younger at something like one billion years old? To my mind this makes the likelihood of these bacteria not being from space much lower.

  • "...their claim solely upon the observation that the bacteria could survive in outer space."

    Well, the article says:

    "Researchers said that in the filter of a high-flying balloon operated by the Indian Space Research Organization, they found a strain of bacteria
    unlike anything on Earth."

    I rest my case.

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