NASA reveals microbe that can live on arsenic.
Interesting stuff 
I thought
this was cute.
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amos33 (0 friends, send message) wrote:5h 22m ago There is physical life on earth only. Read the Bible starting at Genesis 1:1:âIn the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.â Genesis 1:1
Do not let discoveries in California fool you!
Godâs Word is the only truth in the Universe!
I used to work with very big lead acid batteries which use sulphuric acid as the electrolyte, the same type in your car but very much bigger. We discovered something in the acid and called in the CSIR because this grey mold like substance kept growing. They informed us that it was an species of extremophile. These are creatures that can live where no other can. Sulphuric acid dissolves anything organic, from cotton clothing to human bodies, yet these creatures were growing in it.
Later we noticed that our diesel filters kept blocking. Again the experts were called and another extremophile was found multiplying in the diesel fuel tanks.
There are many examples of extremophiles. They live where most organic creatures would perish, such as in the âblack smokerâ abyssal undersea vents that emit water at 400 deg C at crushing pressures. This proves that DNA based life doesnât have to have a rigid set of circumstances to flourish and life is possible on planets very different to ours.
Apparently God created the entire universe with all the stars for us to keep time by, so life on other planets is clearly pointless.
Thatâs why he has 0 friends.
Given the ubiquity of life on this planet, I would suggest finding life on other planets inevitable.
Given the ubiquity of life on this planet, I would suggest finding life on other planets inevitable.I agree, but intelligent life? I don't think that initially it gives you a big advantage, evolutionarily speaking. Maybe not even in the long run. Our intelligence made it possible for us to break out of our niche, to use other resources but are we clever enough to not over exploit those resources? To find other ways to carry on when those run out? It brings us back to the Drake equation. Life in the universe can be just the earth or millions, depending on whose calculation it is.
Quite, but it doesnât really matter if itâs intelligent. If it is, we can talk to it, and if it isnât we can eat it and rape its planet.
Thanks Tweefo and StOnes.
The life I was referring to was simple, like the extremophiles I encountered.
However, this brings to mind simple life forms. I work in the abyssal depths of the ocean and see many weird life forms. A colleague once remarked when I observed a string of lights performing a swimming manoeuvre; - âHate those things, it gives me the creeps.â Surely jelly strings with lights must have some intelligence to realise where they are going and where the next meal is coming from and what is this thing with lights approaching me and maybe I should swim away before it eats me.
Every thing I have observed has tried to protect its DNA, so there must be intelligence in every creature including the extremophiles?
However, I do not expect most life to challenge its environment and use the resources available to change the environment to suit itself. The classic definition of intelligence.
Two issues here: life on arsenic - actually, using arsenate to replace phosphate, a very radical notion - and intelligence.
As I happen (he coughs, modestly) to be a microbiologist by training and profession, it saddens me to say that the arsenate-using bug is probably not such after all. Rigorous dissection of the evidence presented results in the impression that the authors of the paper in question did not really do as much as they should have to prove what they were trying to - and that the bugs they experimented on could have been surviving on phosphate scavenged from their own phospholipids, rather than incorporating arsenate (arsenic is in the same chemical series as phosphorus so has much the same properties) instead of phosphate into the backbone of their nucleic acids.
Which would have been SERIOUSLY funky. A good dissection of the hype is given here, for those interested: http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/57851/
As for intelligence: some radical microbiology types are suggesting that bacteria can manifest intelligence, especially when acting as a community: in biofilms and other complex bacterial communities, certain subsections of the community can exhibit altruism in terms of passing nutrients on to other members via transport mechanisms; they can also sacrifice themselves. We are getting closer and closer to all of our behaviour being explainable in terms of complex chemical interactions, folksâŚB-)
when i heard the hype bout NASA and their âalienâ announcement, i gave it a raised eyebrow, and not much more. when i heard the actual announcement, i was like, duh!
my opinion, (without being a microbiologist or anything more eloborate than opinionated),is that we are horribly infantile in our knowledge of the universe and everything in it. and as much we would like to think we know stuff, we know squat. as much as 500 years ago we thought we knew stuff, and how wrong we were.
so i would not be comfortable to say a definite yes or no on intelligent alien life. i would like to think yes, simply because the universe is so expansive, and the likelihood of life is not as tiny as i think we would comofortably like to think of.
allso, i think, when we think of life, we get stuck in star trek like bipeds, and assume that aliens will have arms and legs, or tentacles at least. we cannot fathom what kind of environments these creatures could have evolved from, and what they might look like, or whether they even posess a physical form. like my other half said, there could be gas whales living in jupiter, and the red gaint storm is their amusement park.
i think, even the most ambitious imgination might not even come close to what might really be out there.
I wouldnât say squat. There are some truly astounding human achievements based on a very sound understanding of the physical world. Granted, there are always some things that we are unlikely to know - but this is mostly due to the inherent limitations of our senses and our technological extention of these senses. Currently, we simply cannot know whats cooking biologically even as little as 45 light minutes away. But watch this space.
Mintaka
We do know that slime mold is not so thick
Iâm guessing the probability is high of such stuff existing some place other than earth.
Awesome stuff! ;D
To use what was âknownâ about the world three, four, five or more centuries ago as an indicator for the extent and/or reliability of what we know today about it is, I think, in an important sense deeply specious. What people âknewâ a few centuries ago was rule-of-thumb patterns, intuitions, authorities and traditions that largely held within their limited scope. It may be the case that in another few centuries, people will hold a similar view of what we think we know today, though I doubt it. The knowledge we have today is much, much more secure and reliable because it is rigorously tested against reality â so much so that one might be forgiven for thinking that scientists and technologists take special lessons in stress testing theories. Itâs no doubt true that there is much still to learn, but it would be deeply foolish to model the future of knowledge on its past. The scientific method is a fairly recent innovation, one that has evolved to the point where it is not easy to smuggle nonsense into humanityâs corpus of knowledge.
'Luthon64
I think that modern science has become hypothesis-driven to a large extent because it allows simplification of the investigation of complex phenomena - which means it sometimes loses sight of the complexity, in its inexorably reductionist drive to âprove / disprove the hypothesisâ.
Itâs not the only way to do science: increasingly, folk are finding that in âsystems biologyâ particularly, for example, one has to be aware holistically of what is happening, rather than along any one avenue. And that discovery can trump a hypothesis, and discoveries are easy to come by when youâre doing things like metagenomic sequencing.
So predicting where we will go, from where weâve been, is simplistic and probably wrong-headed: for example, the simple linear sequence of a protein tells us very little about how it does or can fold in 3 dimensions, or more importantly in some instances, what it can associate with, as these are emergent properties. Predicting a human from the entire human genome sequence is also impossible: 1.5% error, and you have a chimp; get the developmental sequence wrong, and you have a pile of slime.
SoâŚmassively parallel quantum computing MAY give SOME kind of an idea of how to predict things we KNOW - but will it be any good at predicting what we donât, like possible aliens?
I doubt it - or at least, it wonât happen until or unless there is enough computing power and time given to the task, that the simulation will have as much reality asâŚwell, reality.
Like the simulation weâre living in nowâŚB-)