NASA makes incredible discovery about extraterrestrials

[Nate]

...but not as incredible as some might think.

See, NASA said earlier this week they had some amazing evidence they'd release on Thursday that had huge implications for extraterrestrial life. Everyone was thinking/hoping they'd discovered hard evidence of life outside of Earth. Well, turns out, that isn't exactly true. But the discovery is no less significant.

See, what NASA has found is a special type of bacteria in California. Most life forms use phosphorus in their DNA/RNA for structural purposes. In fact, it's one of the "six building blocks" of life: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. Since before it was believed all life on Earth requires those six things, that we wouldn't find extraterrestrial life unless a planet had all six of those things.

Well...the rules have changed. See, the bacteria in California have an interesting quirk. They live in a lake with a lot of arsenic in it. Arsenic is of course poisonous. But here's the catch: since there isn't really much phosphorus for the bacteria there to use in their cells/DNA, they are able to use arsenic instead. And it isn't even an alternative like "If they were in an environment with phosphorus instead, they'd die because there'd be no arsenic." No, the thing is, they can use either.

This means the pool for what qualifies as "hospitable to life" has increased tremendously. If these bacteria don't need phosphorus but can use arsenic instead, that means that maybe we're wrong about other "necessary" elements for life too. Maybe there exists life that doesn't need nitrogen or oxygen, either.

Put simply, if there's something on Earth that lives off a poisonous chemical, maybe there's something on other planets that does too. So while not quite as amazing as evidence of life, it's a powerful, significant discovery that really has changed our knowledge of life, and makes it even more possible that life could exist on other planets, other environments where we think life can't possibly exist.

[armeck]

that's really cool! i'm going to have to tell people about that

[klomp123]

They also found a bunch of red dwarf stars recently. So that bumps the chances for extraterrestrial life, or if not life, then at least a place to live.
I'm so excited for the future! Someone better invent cryogenic freezing so I can witness it. And consumer grade jet packs darn it!

[ich1990]

Well, I was personally hoping for genuine living space aliens, bacteria or otherwise, but this is a cool consolation prize. Reminds me of a sci-fi story I read called "A Martian Odyssey". It was written in 1934 and explored the idea of the existence of Silicon, rather than Carbon based life forms. Arsenic based life is even more radical than that.

Sci-fi becoming reality? I love it. Too bad it took 76 years to happen, though. That means we won't get our hoverboards until the year 2100.

[Atria35]

They also found a bunch of red dwarf stars recently. So that bumps the chances for extraterrestrial life, or if not life, then at least a place to live.
I'm so excited for the future! Someone better invent cryogenic freezing so I can witness it. And consumer grade jet packs darn it!

Considerably cool, but general census is that life similar to what we know is most likely found among small yellow stars. And I believe they aso invented cryogenics- but have yet to wake anyone up from them.

But still a very cool step in the direction of ET!

[Davidizer13]

Well, I was personally hoping for genuine living space aliens, bacteria or otherwise, but this is a cool consolation prize. Reminds me of a sci-fi story I read called "A Martian Odyssey". It was written in 1934 and explored the idea of the existence of Silicon, rather than Carbon based life forms. Arsenic based life is even more radical than that.

Normally I'd repeat the boilerplate that silicon-based life is impossible because despite being in the same family of elements, silicon and carbon are too dissimilar in their chemistry to replace each other, but since this discovery is about something doing just that, maybe it's not quite as impossible. (Also, it's not about arsenic-based life, only about arsenic replacing phosphorus in some organic molecules - minerals do it with elements all the time, but life is a bit different.)

But yeah, we're still finding life on Earth that's weirder than anything sci-fi writers can come up with, especially in microbiology and the oceans. There's bacteria that live in radioactive waste dumps, acidic hot springs, and then there's deep-sea vent life. Those vent thingies are nuts - they're these animals that live around underwater volcanic vents called black smokers that are spewing out super-hot, metal-rich water. The bacteria that are the producers (i.e., the "plants"; what everything else depends on eventually for food) of the ecosystem get their energy from consuming hydrogen sulfide rather than from light because it's too deep for any light to get to them, there's those tube worm thingies, and there are these snails that build their shells out of pyrite instead of calcium carbonate. The world is just awesome; the guy who put it together knew what he was doing.

[Shao Feng-Li]

Cool. Not that learning something we didn't know (gasp) means aliens, heh.

[Rusty Claymore]

Wow, looks like the hybrid car idea wasn't something new. XP

There's nothing new(but many cool stuffs) under the sun. Or over it, for you UFO types. XD

[ich1990]

Normally I'd repeat the boilerplate that silicon-based life is impossible because despite being in the same family of elements, silicon and carbon are too dissimilar in their chemistry to replace each other, but since this discovery is about something doing just that, maybe it's not quite as impossible. (Also, it's not about arsenic-based life, only about arsenic replacing phosphorus in some organic molecules - minerals do it with elements all the time, but life is a bit different.)

Sorry, perhaps I should have said that it was life that used arsenic as its basis rather than calling it arsenic based life. I meant the former of course, although it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to extrapolate the possibility of the latter now that the former has been proven possible. Very cool.

[Nate]

Yeah, that's the real groundbreaking part of this discovery, is you can't say now "Well there could never be silicon-based life" because if you went to a biologist before this bacteria was discovered and said "Maybe there's a life form that can use arsenic instead of phosphorus to build its DNA" they would have said it was impossible as well.

In other words, we can't say "All life requires these six elements to survive." Now it's an open field. Anything could potentially host life.

[Rusty Claymore]

Now we just gotta figure out this "life" stuff... XD

[Nate]

We HAD it figured out pretty well until this groundbreaking discovery. As I said before, until this bacteria was found, scientists said all life required six elements to survive. Those would be carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus.

So, as scientists said, if those six elements were not present in an environment, life could not exist. This obviously has changed.

Further, life (as we currently know it) possesses a few attributes that separate it from non-life. These would be homeostasis, organization, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction. Interestingly enough, this is why viruses used to be debated as to whether they were living things or not, as viruses fulfill almost all the qualities for life. However, they don't metabolize and can't reproduce by themselves, so they fall a bit short.

It's pretty unlikely that the qualifications for life will change anytime soon. I don't think we'll find any life forms incapable of reproduction, for example (I mean as a whole, not individual specimens within the species, since otherwise sterile humans would be considered "not living" since they can't reproduce), or life forms that don't respond to stimuli.

[Rusty Claymore]

Err, you misunderstand.
As you stated above, we can qualify if something is "living" or has "life", but we don't have any clue on what this "life" is. We just know what it does when it's around. n.n
Otherwise we would be able to animate bodies created from scratch. As far as I know we can't even truly animate cells.
That's all I meant. XD

[Nate]

but we don't have any clue on what this "life" is.

It's a process by which objects (organisms) can act and react to stimuli. "Life" is being able to do these things. Dead organisms cannot act or react to stimuli. Nor can inanimate objects such as rocks and metal.

So I don't see how you can say we don't have a clue of what "life" is. We know pretty well.

Otherwise we would be able to animate bodies created from scratch.

That's incorrect. The reason we can't animate bodies from scratch isn't because we don't know what "life" is, but because as a general rule you cannot "inject" life into non-living elements. You cannot create a living thing from say, a robot body. The metal would not have the biological cells necessary for life. You can program the robot to have intelligence, maybe even consciousness (I'm talking purely theoretical) but it still would not be a living organism as it would be unable to reproduce on its own, metabolize, or grow.

As far as I know we can't even truly animate cells.

This isn't because we don't understand life, but rather, because the materials are "worn down." If you buy an old broken car from a junkyard, you will never be able to get that car to run again unless you purchase new materials to rebuild it. You cannot make the rusted metal new again. Biological cells are the same way. They are not immortal, and will wear down just as anything else.

Also, there's been a lot of research into synthetic life. It's called synthetic to differentiate it from artificial life, which is usually in regards to robots and machinery.

http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/overview/

That's part of the progress that's been made. Obviously it's a huge step from that to full human bodies, not because we don't "understand" life but because multicellular organisms are leagues more complicated than single-cell ones.

[armeck]

i don't think we will ever be able to create living creatures

[Syreth]

i don't think we will ever be able to create living creatures

We are closer than one might think. Look at the work of Craig J. Venter, who recently created a synthetic genome, able to be inserted into a cell which is then capable of logarithmic growth.

The recent discovery by NASA is highly interesting, but not entirely surprising, considering the mercurial nature of bacteria. If any organism could utilize arsenic, it would be bacteria. Not that this makes the discovery any less significant.

[Rusty Claymore]

Hmm, Nate, I think this is a stalemate. You view life as a condition, whereas I view it as a substance.
As far as the article goes, it is extremely vague. They essentially say they create synthetic life by taking one organism's chemical make up and re arranging it to the pattern from another. Essentially, they took windows DOS out of a computer, determined the programming make up, re-typed the program by hand making ver. 2.0. and inserted it into another computer that was already set up to accept DOS ver. 2.0 as an operating system.
It's basically (well, more like, 'complexically') a cell prosthetic limb. Which is amzing, no doubt about it.
Maybe it's best to say it: We know what life is the way we know what gravity is. It's effects and laws are undeniable, but we have no idea why it works.
As I sit here thinking about it, who originally said life can only be based on those six elements? That's rather naive I think.

Anything could potentially host life.

That should always be the assumption until we have tried absolute everything. Which is impossible, and why science cannot prove anything, it just records what we observed under circumstance.

[Nate]

You view life as a condition, whereas I view it as a substance.

I don't see how life is a substance unless you want to go the original Star Wars (not the prequels obviously) with "the Force" being in all living creatures or whatnot, or Metroid where it's like "Metroids suck the life energy out of a creature but there's no bodily fluids or tissue lost, they just seem to absorb life itself." And if you're basing your thoughts on life on Star Wars or Metroid I don't even know how to respond to that.

Life is just anything that meets the conditions of life. If it doesn't, it's not alive. It's either dead, or inanimate. There isn't anything "magical" or "substantial" about responding to stimuli. One-celled organisms do it. Of course life is a "condition." "Alive" and "dead" are conditions, just like "hungry," "thirsty," or "sleepy." I mean you don't sit there and go "Man I'm hungry I must be filled with hunger energy!" or something, right? No, of course not.

People die when their bodies break down, or sustain great harm and loss of vital things such as blood or organs. The reason we die when we lose blood is that blood is the body's method of transporting oxygen to its components. If you want to talk about what "life" is as a substance, then life is oxygen. We can't survive without oxygen. You can survive without food and water (for a while anyway) but remove oxygen and you're dead in minutes.

Maybe it's best to say it: We know what life is the way we know what gravity is. It's effects and laws are undeniable, but we have no idea why it works.

Not exactly. We know why things are alive, unlike gravity which we really just kind of shrug off by saying "Things with mass naturally attract each other." "Why?" "Because that's what we observe."

As I sit here thinking about it, who originally said life can only be based on those six elements? That's rather naive I think.

It wasn't one person, but rather a consensus of many people. It's not like it was a really incredible leap of logic. Every living thing we had seen on the planet requires those six elements. It's not farfetched to say "Okay, so all life requires these things." You can say "But that's wrong!" but you're speaking in hindsight now that these bacteria have been discovered.

It's like saying "Ha ha those ancient people sure were STUPID to think that the earth was the center of the solar system!" Well you know, you're speaking purely on the privilege of having the scientific knowledge that they didn't have access to. Maybe one day someone will look back at you and say "Those people in 2010 sure were STUPID to not know how telepathy works!" or whatever other scientific discoveries are made between now and then.

Which is impossible, and why science cannot prove anything, it just records what we observed under circumstance.

That's not entirely true. There are things science has definitively proven. The Laws of Thermodynamics, for example. Other than that, your definition of "prove" is exceptionally narrow-minded. Otherwise you might as well believe the Matrix, because hey man, you can't PROVE that we're not all hooked up to computers right now in a crazy robot-controlled future being used as batteries for them. You can't PROVE that I'm not just having a dream and imagining your responses to this thread, or even that I posted it. Quite simply, you can't even prove you yourself exist. And if you can't prove you yourself exist, how can you know anything? All knowledge is a lie. You can't even trust your own senses, or even your own memory. After all, you can't PROVE your memory hasn't been falsely implanted or tampered with or even completely fabricated.

There is nothing wrong with something being proven to the best of our knowledge. And nothing can be "proven" as I pointed out above. It's an interesting argument for philosophy...Ryan would be glad to talk to you all day about how everything is subjective and nothing is objective and Plato's cave and all that. Not to insult him, but he loves that stuff. :p I'm just saying once you go down the road of saying "You can't prove anything" you open yourself up to a lot heavier implications than you think.