The one source of info I have is from the above CNN article.
I guess my question is, are there any other info sources about this besides the above CNN article? My web searches have come up with zilch.
I think they are making a huge jump that these are from outer space. Sure, they were found high up, but they were found in the atmosphere of a planet with a known biosphere. Probability-wise, isn’t it FAR more likely they came from the planet known to have life?
Regarding the nature of the microbe:
First the article says:
Sounds like a very unique microbe, yes?
But then it says:
It would have to be a VERY, VERY different microbe to convince me that the microbes are not from the biosphere they were plucked out of.
My first impression on reading that article is that the Weekly World News has succeeded in a hostile takeover of CNN. My second impression is that maybe CNN is capable of incompetent reporting all on their own.
If it’s a member of a common terrestrial genus, it’s terrestrial. It’s trivial for it to get up that high: Even if there’s no natural process that could get it there, there’s at least one artificial process, namely the probe itself. There are no known spectral signatures of bacteria that could be detected from an ablating meteor. No academic journal is mentioned as publishing the results, and only two sources are named, one of whom (Hoyle) has been considered a crackpot by the scientific community for decades. There is absolutely no reason at all to believe this report accurate, and every reason to believe it a hoax (and an incompetent one, at that) or worse.
Even if these microbes are extraterrestrial, it is not necessary to assume that they evolved independent of terrestrial life. If life can be carried between planets on comet fragements or meteors (panspermia theory), then it’s possible there could be many places in the solar system with life, all of them of a common origin. Remember the fossilized bacteria supposedly found in a meteorite of Martian origin in Antarctica. (The facts on that case still are not entirely clear).
That said, I think they really should explore all terrestrial possibilities before speculating about extraterrestrial origins. When you hear hoofbeats outside your window, don’t assume it’s a zebra.
I’d be curious to see an analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of this supposedly alien bacteria. IIRC, most terrestrial bacteria share rather similar mitochondrial DNA. A vastly different genetic signature might serve as a hallmark of alien origin.
I think the whole concept of panspermia to be fascinating in the extreme. For one thing, it gets local Darwinism over the first, really BIG hurdle, which is bubbling up a molecule as complex as DNA out of some scraps of ammonia, methane, etc. The implications of DNA based life being “standard”…well, for one thing, when we meet beings from another world, we could probably eat them!
And vice-versa, of course.
Any geriatric dopers remember Twilight Zone,“To Serve Man”?
Panspermia may get local biology over the hurdle, but it still doesn’t really solve the problem of the origin of life, it just puts if off to someplace else. You’ve still got to account for where that first living cell came from, in whatever part of the Galaxy the original pot of organic soup was located.
True enough, far as it goes. But it opens things to other than local conditions, more specificly, the relatively short (in my estimation) amount of time available in the Earth scenario, as compared to some hypothetical other.
If panspermia is rougly correct, then intergalactic contamination may have occured any number of times. But after a certain point in our evolution, they wouldn’t find an unoccupied giant petri dish, but a fully diversified biosphere that wouldn’t be as likely a candidate for colonization.
If Earthling DNA arrived from elsewhere, we most likely will never know, lacking some kind of clue that this DNA is from Arcturus and this DNA is from Earth. They might very well be identical. Mitochondrial DNA might not provide the answer, as we cannot be sure that Astro-DNA based life would have evolved mitochondria.
One of my favorites things: an utterly fascinating hypothesis with no ugly facts lurking about with murder in mind!
Um, zenster, bacteria don’t have mitochrondria. Mitochrondria are seemingly prokaryotes themselves in a long-established symbiotic relationship with all eukaryotic cells.
Interesting that Sir Fred and Dr. Wickramasinghe are two “scientists” mentioned. I haven’t heard from them since they were using “advanced photographic techniques” to prove that the London Archeopteryx specimen was a fake.
My first reaction is that the report will not pan(spermia) out. This dynamic duo have backed too manny lame horses already.
I still wonder why there are some who feel that space bacteria seeding this planet initially has any bearing on the validity of current theories which explain how that life has differentiated over time.
IANA biochemist, but I believe it’s correct to say that all life on Earth–even the Archaebacteria–use the same fundamental genetic code. In other words, a particular group of three nucleotides codes for a particular amino acid (or for some command like “start” or “stop”) whether the organism in question is a human or a bacterium. Life from some other planet might very well use proteins to catalyze reactions, nucleic acids to store information, and water as a solvent for it all, but all of those things could have been independently evolved. However, if life from some other planet uses the same genetic “alphabet”, I think we’d have to conclude that life on that planet has a common origin with the life on this planet.
Two quotes from that article that get my crap radar beeping:
IOW, they’re not going to let other scientists at them.
The two people who have made one of the most important discoveries in history just happen to be the originators of the idea their discovery supports? What luck!!
Extraordinary claims demands extraordinary proof.
Also remember Occam’s Razor (i.e., it’s more likely that it’s Earth bacteria transported up rather than E.T. bacteria transported down).
So far, it looks like home-grown bacteria. I think they would need to repeat the experiment under controlled conditions.
Once again, this seems like the media reporting on the findings of one experiment before the whole peer review & reverification process of the scientific method.
Panspermia actually doesn’t even give you that much more opportunity for the origin of life. In order to have life, at least life as we know it, you need to have carbon, oxygen, and a few other elements available somewhere or another, preferably the surface of a planet. Unfortunately, these heavy (relative to hydrogen) elements weren’t available in the early Universe, and have to be manufactured in stars. This means that you have to wait long enough for stars to form in the Universe, then let those stars die to distribute the carbon etcetera, then have the dead material re-coalesce into stars and planets again, then let all that soup sit for however long it takes to turn into life, then for that life to develop into some form durable enough to survive space travel, then wait for some sort of event like a big meteor collision to get it into space, and finally to give it enough time to travel between stars to some other incubator planet. There might just barely have been enough time since the beginning of the Universe for all this to have happened, but it’s cutting it mighty close, and it turns out that the hypothetical Eden planet didn’t realy have any more opportunity to develop life than did Earth. Much simpler to just cut out the middleman, and deal with a planet which we know is capable of supporting life.
Well, if you buy the panspermia hypothesis, then life elsewhere wouldn’t necessarily have “significantly different” DNA–Terran life might have the same “genetic code” as life on other planets, just like on Star Trek. The problem is that 10 miles up just isn’t “far out” enough to conclude that the little critters are really extraterrestrial. After all, you could dig up some hitherto unknown bacterium in the Amazon, and say “Hey, for all anyone knows this drifted in from deep space last Thursday!” Who could prove you wrong?
If we found life using the same genetic alphabet we do on other planets, or indisputably spaceborne–say, a properly sterilized probe returns samples of interplanetary dust–we might have to take another look at the panspermia hypothesis. Of course, if we found bacteria with a radically different genetic code drifting in deep space, this would bolster the idea that our kind of life might have drifted here from somewhere else, though presumably not from that particular strain of space-going life.