ET rang home

Perhaps our planet is a refuge for strange life forms, which are not at all related to life as we know it from everyday life

At a scientific conference held in Chicago in February 2009, the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the well-known professor Paul Davis suggested that extraterrestrials may be living among us right now on our planet. Perhaps our planet is a refuge for strange life forms, which are not at all related to life as we know it from everyday life (eg people, dogs, cats, lions, tigers, cockroaches and grasshoppers). This is how Paul Davis explained to us, Physicist from Arizona State University and the head of the Beyond Center - Beyond - for basic concepts in science.

Davis believes that strange life forms may be hidden in toxic arsenic lakes or boiling hydrothermal vents in the deep sea. And what is Lake Arseni? A lake containing the chemical element "arsenic", also known as arsenic, an extremely toxic element from the semi-metal family.

Davis suggested that scientists send an expedition to Earth - probably similar to the expeditions described in Jules Verne's books - to try to look for signs of biological activity in hostile environments. After all, strange life can even dwell among us in forms that we do not yet notice. We don't need to travel to other planets to find strange life, Davis says. They can be found right under our nose, or even, oddly enough, inside our nose.

It certainly makes sense that we might find an unfamiliar biosphere here on Earth. Professor Davis hypothesizes that there may have been two healths on Earth. This means that life evolved on Earth twice. how strange Perhaps the descendants of that second creation have survived to this very day in a kind of additional biosphere, where the life of that biosphere has a different biochemistry than ours. Our microscopes are used to life as we know it - so it should not be surprising that we have never discovered microbes with different biochemistry. We don't really know what a strange life looks like, and the free hand of imagination can be exercised.

Asked asked: How do we know what to look for? After all, it's like hunting for Lewis Carroll's snark. If indeed there are strange forms of life here on Earth, as Davis postulates, they could be based on DNA and RNA - but with a slightly different genetic code, or maybe slightly different amino acids?

What do you really do when you go looking for something you don't know what it is? And what do we do when we go looking for something while we don't know what we are going to look for? We may find creatures with drastic variation or with slight variation. Perhaps one of the elements of life (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium or phosphorus) was replaced by another element in those creatures? For example, Davis says, most of the same operations that phosphorous can be performed in its place are arsenic, which can be toxic to humans, but has chemical properties that may be ideal in microbial mechanization.

Davis therefore offers two options:

1.) Strange life is usually ecologically isolated in niches, which are beyond human reach. In this case, we have to start traveling to the most hostile environments on Earth: deserts, salt lakes and areas with high and extreme pressure - temperature - or UV radiation.

If you are looking for arsenic life, you should look for microbial species for example in environments rich in arsenic and low in phosphorus, such as in the mouths of the ocean depths.

On the other hand, it's possible that strange life is all around us, merging with carbon-based life. In this case it will be difficult to discover them - and we have to find a way to filter everything but them. Scientists have used this process to search for unknown organisms in seawater - laboriously filtering out everything but them.

However, if by chance we find something, then we will start arguing whether these lives are really different, or is there some common ancestor that leads us to the common tree of life in the evolutionary process?

Another question would be: how do we know that this is a separate life that originated on Earth, and not some bacterium or bacteria that came from Mars? It is known that rocks are exchanged between the two planets and thus life could, as they say, "catch a ride" on these meteors.

In this case, Davis asks the basic question? Was there more than one lung? I mean, did life happen once or twice? If they happened twice maybe it could indicate that they came to us from somewhere else in the universe the second time?

2.) Another way to determine what alternative life could look like is to go to the lab and try to invent it ourselves. A year ago Scientific American published an article under the title: "Artificial Life: Did Steven Spielberg get onto something in ET?"

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=artificial-life-was-steven-spielber-2009-02-15

And so they began to ask if Steven Spielberg discovered something when he created ET, maybe there is such a creature on Earth among us and we haven't discovered it yet?

If we can create new molecules that can behave according to some definition of life, we may then go out and look for these molecules in all kinds of environments on Earth, says University of Florida professor Stephen Benner.

http://www.ffame.org/people/sbenner.html

At that time Steven Benner's group created the closest alternative life form to something man-made. Benner reported at the same meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago in February 2009 that they have an artificial chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. And didn't say anything beyond that. Ask him: Is your system alive? Well, she doesn't support herself. A university graduate should stand next to her and feed her from time to time. But she is developing.

Then suddenly Bener pulled out another system from his lab: a molecule that is basically an elaborate version of the double helix of our DNA - but with six letters in its genetic alphabet, instead of four.

These nucleotides line up in pairs, and they can replicate, although only with the help of polymerase enzymes and heat. Sometimes mistakes are made in pairing and these mistakes are preserved in the next generation - when the system develops. The next step is to apply natural selection to the system, to see if it can evolve under selection pressure.

The accepted definition of life is a molecule capable of Darwinian evolution, so the team is trying to combine molecules that will be able to perform this task. This is how Benner tried to grow ET in his lab! Because ET is an organism with a six-letter alphabet.

But what if this definition of life by natural selection is too focused according to the definition of life on Earth? Just because we are a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution does not mean that this is the universal definition of life.

In 2003 a study was published that took DNA samples from people, animals, plants, microbes and viruses. Researchers from New Zealand and Sweden claimed that what we, viruses, bacteria and plants have in common is that our DNA forms a double helix structure held together by four chemicals different called bases. That is, in living beings the "alphabet" consists of four letters (adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G)).

The scientists created a computer program that showed that it was unlikely that organisms would have evolved at all on Earth if their "life code" had been written by more or fewer bases.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2985345.stm

The study examined what kind of DNA could have been found in living creatures elsewhere in the universe, outside of Earth, if they were based on an evolutionary process similar to ours. Let's say the same process occurred on a planet similar to ours, but located at the other end of the universe. The results of the research carried out On computer simulations, it is likely that the same principles of life as those on Earth will be everywhere else in the universe. But if life forms based on super RNA have evolved other planets, and if they developed the error-correcting techniques needed to repair the destruction to the genetic code caused by mutations and degeneration, it's quite possible that they evolved into something that has six-base DNA. So was Spielberg right?… We'll wait for the call from ET.

For a 2009 article by Paul Davies and Stephen Benner et al