UPDATE! NASA Discovers a NEW FORM OF LIFE!

How else could Captain Kirk have sex with them?

 

At no point in time did I make any assumption about life elsewhere.

I pointed out that your statement was incorrect that "Not all organisms on earth do"

 

You underestimate Jim...

 

The back story in Star Trek is that early humans were captured and dispersed to other planets by a higher intelligence and evolved independently from those who remained on Earth. But not separated so long that we became a separate genus, maybe simply different only at the sub-species level. Thus humans could still mate with many of their extra-terrestrial cousins when travel between the stars became possible. Vulcans, Klingons, Romulans, Humans, etc. Not sure about Ferengi.

 

And I pointed out that your statement about my statement was incorrect.

 

If memory serves, there was an episode of the original Star Trek television show that introduced these higher beings. They could take physical form at will, but existed primarily as pure energy.

They did not reproduce. They wanted to help the younger species (us and other humanoids) to advance peacefully to a higher state of being.

There are unseen worlds, even reasonable to conjecture unseen universes.

Heard a lecture recently about two-dimensional beings called "Flatlandians" who could not imagine us 3-dimensional creatures.
We actually also occupy a fourth half-dimension called Time.

What lies beyond that? Take a wild guess...
I am trying to!!

 

How was it incorrect?

Which living organism on earth has no DNA?

 

Mitochondria are a relic of such an organism. No longer independent, but likely once was.

 

Likely once was....

I put as much faith in a statement such as that, as I do in one about god.

Is it a living organism on earth? No, it is not. May it have been? Yes, and there may be organisms off earth that don't have DNA, and there may even be ones here on earth that we don't know of yet...

And I may win the lottery...

Many things fall into the 'may' category... making assumptions and claiming them as fact is not science.

 

I think the only thing that separates higher intelligence from lower is time and chance.

The reason I say this is that there has never been a species wide mutation (that I know of) in which there were none of the precursors of it still around.

Monkeys and humans for example... I don't see there being any reason that in a different set of circumstances that something totally unlike us reaches the level of higher intelligence.

What that intelligence looks like, and what the products of it are, are totally dependent on the the species itself. Compare a beehive and a wasps nest as examples... both very similar creatures but their 'architecture isn't similar.

 

At one level all thus stuff just comes down to the attraction between atoms and how they form molecules

Phosphorus in a DNA chain more stable than arsenic, longer more complex chains result

This reminds me of the carbon based vs silicon based life argument decades ago, the main trouble being that when you oxidise carbon you get a gas, when you oxidise silicone you get a solid, making any type of energy oxy/redux system impossible at least in our type of environment.

There is speculation you could have silicon based life at very high temperatures

Would aliens from other earth like planets be very different to us, probably not, a T-Rex looks very different to a labrador, but still does the same basic functions - hunts, eats, shits, dies.

Still bound by the same set of rules, any aliens from a similar environment might look different, but still going to be a result of the factors their environment allows, be within a certain size range, eat, shit, die, reproduce in a way that gives way to a certain level of complexity.

Any aliens really different are going to come from very different environments: gravity well of a black hole, surface of a sun

 

You ever read Dragon's Egg or Starquake?

 

here's a link to an article that explains it quite nicely

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/nasa-finds-arsenic-life-form/

the researchers fed microbes arsenate, rather than phosphate. so it didn't happen in nature. maybe i'll look up the actual article in Science...

 

Bolded - Exactly

So by the sounds of it the microbe isnt phosphorous free.

Some 'astounding' discovery before they've even worked out the details

I'm even more suspicious now, I've seen NASA do this kind of thing before


And on the news th other night it was presented as "Alien Life found on Earth", totally inaccurate, but for the layman in a couple years it becomes "Didnt they find alien life on earth a couple years back?"

Three words for you NASA - Health Care Funding

 

Some here may remember the heated debate in 1996 and later about the Mars specimen ALH84001.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001

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The Martian meteorite findings are still open to debate.

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if they are physical beings they will abide by the rules governing physical entities

 

^^^unless they are in a different "multi-verse" with different laws of physics.
(i'm recalling an episode of Nova)
i suppose it'd be pretty hard for them to make contact with us though

 

What the critics say:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelo...les-in-nasas-arsenic-eating-microbe-discovery

http://www.slate.com/id/2276919/pagenum/all/#p2


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