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NASA Has Found Extraterrestrial Life (pg. 2)
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| d_Verge |
It seems this conference is most likely about a second instance of abiogenesis here on Earth. NASA scientists were studying microbes in a lake near Yosemite that has one of the highest concentrations of arsenic in the world, and discovered a life form of completely different origin than that of conventional carbon-based life.
It's significant because it demonstrates that life can thrive in conditions otherwise thought to be poisonous to "life as we know it."
To me, though, it just seems like common sense that life wouldn't be exclusive to carbon; ing carbon chauvinism. :whip:
| quote: | NASA, who have called a full scale press conference for tomorrow, have tried to keep their findings under wraps, though an accompanying scientific paper has been released to some journalists under embargo.
Skymania has not seen the paper and so has been free to do some detective work to discover what will be announced. Despite wild speculation on the internet, there is unlikely to be an announcement that extra-terrestrials have been discovered, for the reasons very well put forward by Stuart Atkinson’s Cumbrian Sky.
But our own investigations suggest that it follows a breakthrough in the discovery of microbes in a lake that get their energy from the usually poisonous arsenic. Experts say this shows they had a completely different origin to any other creature known on our planet. It means that life began not just once but at least twice on Earth.
A key scientist on NASA’s panel will be Dr Felisa Wolfe-Simon who has spent two years investigating Mono Lake, close to California’s Yosemite National Park. The lake has no outlet and has, over many millenia, built up one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic on Earth.
Geobiologist Dr Wolfe-Simon has been looking to see whether microbes with a totally different make-up to that of conventional carbon-based life could have developed. There was an interesting article about her search for alien life on Earth in NASA’s online Astrobiology Magazine.
The importance that NASA attaches to her discovery and its implications for finding extra-terrestrial life is demonstrated by the fact that they will have on tomorrow’s panel experts on two other sites in the solar system where life might have developed.
They are Pamela Conrad who is looking for life on Mars and Steven Benner who is studying Saturn’s largest moon Titan which has a dense atmosphere like Earth but lakes of liquid methane rather than water. Also on the panel will be ecologist James Elser who is involved with a NASA-funded search for ET.
All life previously discovered is of one basic type because it relies on phosphorous as an essential building block. The newly found microbes seem to use arsenic instead.
Astrobiologist Dr Lewis Dartnell, of the Centre for Planetary Sciences in London, told Skymania today: “Mono Lake has a very high concentration of arsenic dissolved in it which is usually poisonous and consequently there’s not much life.
“I’m 90 per cent certain that Felisa has found something in Mono Lake and they have been able to demonstrate in some way that it uses arsenic in its metabolism rather than be poisoned by it.”
He added: “Phosphorous is key and absolutely essential for life. It forms the backbone of DNA. Every form of life of Earth we have known so far depends on phosphorous as well as another molecule called ATP, an energy storage molecule, or biological battery.
“It is exciting to find life in an arsenic-rich environment. If these organisms are using arsenic in their metabolism, it demonstrates that there are other life forms to that as we know it.”
Dr Dartnell went on: “There is no reason to expect that life arose just once on Earth. It could have arisen any number of times. The only reason that all life we have found so far has all descended from the same progenitor – the same mother of life – is because we’ve been looking for life in the same way.
“But if you start looking in extreme environments like Mono Lake, where our kind of life doesn’t survive very well, that’s where you find fundamentally different life forms with a separate origin. They’re aliens, but aliens that share the same home as us.”
Dr Wolfe-Simon has previously said of her research: “It may prove that there are other possibilities that are beyond our imagination. It opens the door for us to think about biology in ways we have never thought.
“We are going to look for life on other planets and we only know to look for that which we know. This may help us to develop tools to look for something we have never seen.”
Last year NASA revealed the detection of plumes of methane on Mars that offered compelling evidence that there might be life on the red planet.
British space scientist Professor Colin Pillinger, who has devoted his life to finding life on Mars, told Skymania: “If they have found anything which they can attribute to arsenic-based life then it is very interesting and obviously has connotations for other places in the universe where life forms other than the ones on Earth may very well have developed.” |
http://skymania.com/wp/2010/11/alie...-on-earth.html/ |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by tubularbills
titan has been one of the best examples in our solar system of possible extra-terrestrial life. oddly enough, its just a moon of saturn. i've heard about possible stuff on there for a long time. of course, it's just speculation; but they've been thinking about it for years. |
Don't underestimate moons - what matters is that they're rocky. The day they find life in Jupiter or in Saturn, I'm officially ditching linguistics and going for astrobiology in order to find out who he hell divided by zero! |
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| EddieZilker |
| They've found cave shrimp who live in Hydrochloric Acid, too. |
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| aNYthing |
I'll just leave this... right.... here...
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by EddieZilker
They've found cave shrimp who live in Hydrochloric Acid, too. |
That's not news. I know hippies who live on lysergic acid diethylamide! |
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| tubularbills |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
Don't underestimate moons - what matters is that they're rocky. The day they find life in Jupiter or in Saturn, I'm officially ditching linguistics and going for astrobiology in order to find out who he hell divided by zero! |
there's also the faint possibility of Triton on Neptune as well. it's pretty far out from the sun; but hey...it's still got an atmosphere!
funny, how these places like Enceladus, IO, Tritan, Europa, and Triton all have more of an atmopshere than the planet Mars, which....despite having ice caps has no sustainable atmosphere.
all has to be perfect balance (i.e. Earth)...even if we were say some 100 miles closer or farther from the sun, life here would be very, VERY different! (if not non-existant) |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by d_Verge
It seems this conference is most likely about a second instance of abiogenesis here on Earth. NASA scientists were studying microbes in a lake near Yosemite that has one of the highest concentrations of arsenic in the world, and discovered a life form of completely different origin than that of conventional carbon-based life.
It's significant because it demonstrates that life can thrive in conditions otherwise thought to be poisonous to "life as we know it."
To me, though, it just seems like common sense that life wouldn't be exclusive to carbon; ing carbon chauvinism. :whip:
http://skymania.com/wp/2010/11/alie...-on-earth.html/ |
thanks for posting that. |
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| nefardec |
i always thought the whole concept of 'life' was something rather frivolous (yet interesting of course to us as those who define it)
what we see as 'life', that is complex molecular structures that metabolize and reproduce are to me to be nothing more than a special subset of all matter in general, and i don't see why these characteristics of matter are so privileged in the study of it all, except for the fact that we as human beings basically have a wish to see ourselves in the face of the external universe.
as someone said, it's pure chauvinism. |
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| d_Verge |
| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
i always thought the whole concept of 'life' was something rather frivolous (yet interesting of course to us as those who define it)
what we see as 'life', that is complex molecular structures that metabolize and reproduce are to me to be nothing more than a special subset of all matter in general, and i don't see why these characteristics of matter are so privileged in the study of it all, except for the fact that we as human beings basically have a wish to see ourselves in the face of the external universe.
as someone said, it's pure chauvinism. |
Couldn't agree more. I did hear a pretty cool quote once that went something like, "The Universe created life in order to know itself." Carl Sagan maybe? Can't remember; too lazy to google. |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
what we see as 'life', that is complex molecular structures that metabolize and reproduce are to me to be nothing more than a special subset of all matter in general, |
Given that this “special subset” exists in exactly one location anywhere in the freakin universe as far as we know, maybe it’s a little more special and a little less subset? |
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| The17sss |
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| d_Verge |
| I met an alien in a K-hole once. |
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