So, About That Whole Biogenesis Thing - Looks Like it Happened Twice

Zillah

Hell yes, go science. This story won't be definite until a Nasa conference tomorrow, but it is looking like they are about to announce that an entirely separate form of life has been discovered in an arsenic saturated lake. Instead of a phosphorus based energy system it uses arsenic. It seems that its biology is so fundamentally different to that of other life that it cannot have occured through evolution. Meaning that it is of a completely separate lineage.

Take that Creationists! Not that it will matter of course, they're impervious to facts but it's one more tool in our box.

Article here: http://skymania.com/wp/2010/11/alien-life-form-is-here-on-earth.html

I stress though that this is still tentative until the confirmation from Nasa. They'll probably be broadcasting the conference live.

How fuckin cool is this? Will it have DNA as we know it? Quite exciting.

keppler

Zillah wrote: »

Hell yes, go science. This story won't be definite until a Nasa conference tomorrow, but it is looking like they are about to announce that an entirely separate form of life has been discovered in an arsenic saturated lake. Instead of a phosphorus based energy system it uses arsenic. It seems that its biology is so fundamentally different to that of other life that it cannot have occured through evolution. Meaning that it is of a completely separate lineage.

Take that Creationists! Not that it will matter of course, they're impervious to facts but it's one more tool in our box.

Article here: http://skymania.com/wp/2010/11/alien-life-form-is-here-on-earth.html

I stress though that this is still tentative until the confirmation from Nasa. They'll probably be broadcasting the conference live.

How fuckin cool is this? Will it have DNA as we know it? Quite exciting.

Judging by the scientists that will be involved in the conference it looks like its definitely gona be something along these lines.
I honestly thought I'd never be alive to see something like this (if thats what it really is):) please please please please please please let it be true!

Daftendirekt

Wow, so there is life on other pla- oh wait...

Pretty amazing stuff!

virmilitaris

Zillah wrote: »

Hell yes, go science. This story won't be definite until a Nasa conference tomorrow, but it is looking like they are about to announce that an entirely separate form of life has been discovered in an arsenic saturated lake. Instead of a phosphorus based energy system it uses arsenic. It seems that its biology is so fundamentally different to that of other life that it cannot have occured through evolution. Meaning that it is of a completely separate lineage.

Another nail in the false doctrine of Darwin.:pac:

Isn't <insert your preferred deity here> amazing ?

deise go deo

Creationism is counter to evolution right?

We now have life that did not involve Evolution(Apparently)

This is proof against Creationism?
(Not a creationist, Its a lode of crap, just sayn.)



One question though, Why is NASA involved in this?

keppler

deise go deo wrote: »

Creationism is counter to evolution right?

We now have life that did not involve Evolution(Apparently)

This is proof against Creationism?
(Not a creationist, Its a lode of crap, just sayn.)



One question though, Why is NASA involved in this?

NASA invests alot of research into extremophiles and their environments why?
Do you know of any other planets/moons in our solar system that are slap bang in the middle of the goldilocks zone?

keppler

deise go deo wrote: »

Creationism is counter to evolution right?

We now have life that did not involve Evolution(Apparently)

This is proof against Creationism?

creationists believe that abiogenesis (the way scientists think of it) without the intervention of a deity is absolutely impossible/extremely unlikely (just ask JC).......;)
If it can be shown that abiogenesis happened more than once then this would strongly imply that abiogenesis is alot more likely to occur than anyone thought before

Ickle Magoo

Or they'll just do the usual and move the gap a bit and suggest god put that life-form on the planet too...

Goduznt Xzst

keppler wrote: »

If it can be shown that abiogenesis happened more than once then this would strongly imply that abiogenesis is alot more likely to occur than anyone thought before

Eh... no it won't.

If two people in a town win the lottery on separate occasions, it doesn't imply that by moving to that town my chances of winning the lottery would increase.

keppler

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

Or they'll just do the usual and move the gap a bit and suggest god put that life-form on the planet too...

oh definitely.....100% for sure the more simple minded of creationists will do this but, for the more 'mildly organised' ones say ones who are fighting for the intelligent design fallacy to be taught in science classes... it would leave alot of them lost for words

Ickle Magoo

If NASA come out with anything convincing then you just know within hours there will be some concocted story trying to convince us that it was god , they knew it was god and nothing about religion or deism has been in anyway dis-proven, I wouldn't be surprised if it was claimed that the bible has been trying to tell us all along why it is a sin to eat shell-fish...

keppler

Goduznt Xzst wrote: »

Eh... no it won't.

If two people in a town win the lottery on separate occasions, it doesn't imply that by moving to that town my chances of winning the lottery would increase.

Ahhh but...it would if the town you moved from had no way of selling you a ticket lol

GLaDOS

Wow, this is genuinely spectacular (assuming it turns out as speculated) be interesting to see evolution from said biogenesis

Zillah

deise go deo wrote: »

Creationism is counter to evolution right?

We now have life that did not involve Evolution(Apparently)

This is proof against Creationism?
(Not a creationist, Its a lode of crap, just sayn.)

Their argument is that God created life in one go as it is now. The fact that we all have genetic similarities is evidence for a common designer, they claim. One 'argument' that Creationists always launch against science is that we have yet to explain or prove abiogenesis (the creation of life), saying that it is impossible for it to occur naturally.

It seems a bit ridiculous that God would create 99.9999999999% of life on this planet to look as though they were all genetically related, and then for some bizarre reason create one species of micro-organism that is fundamentally different on a cellular and genetic level to everything else in one arsenic filled lake.

Now, I'm sure they'll managed to twist it into some ugly and tortured argument in favour of Creationism, but really they've just lost yet another of their shaky foundations.

One question though, Why is NASA involved in this?

NASA funds research into life that can survive in extreme locations on Earth so that they can understand what life in extreme locations in the rest of the universe might be like. Wanna know what organisms under the ice on Titan's moons could look like? Look under the ice on Earth. Want to know what an organism living in an arsenic lake on Venus might be like? Look in an arsenic lake on Earth. Etc.

Zillah

Goduznt Xzst wrote: »

Eh... no it won't.

If two people in a town win the lottery on separate occasions, it doesn't imply that by moving to that town my chances of winning the lottery would increase.

This is not an appropriate metaphor. A better one would be:

We live in a town. We never hear about lottery results from other towns. One person wins the lottery in our town. We do not know how likely that was, maybe there are thousands of towns and we're the only one to win. Then another person in our town wins. Assuming there is nothing more than random chance behind the lottery, it is pretty safe to assume that this is a very generous lottery, and there are likely to be lots of towns where there are victors.

Not a perfect metaphor, as some towns would have proverbial super high gravity, or be composed of nothing but gasses, or be ten thousand degrees, all of which make winning the abiogenesis lottery less likely.

MagicMarker

The conference is at 7pm on the NASA website.

magicbastarder

i've seen this one before. it's arsenic and old lakes.

Ickle Magoo

magicbastarder wrote: »

i've seen this one before. it's arsenic and old lakes.

bah-boom-tsh! Nice. :pac:

magicbastarder

must be great working in PR for NASA on stuff like this.

'the Department of Seriously ****ing Cool **** would like your attention for a few moments please, ladies and gentlemen.'

Zombrex

Zillah wrote: »

Hell yes, go science. This story won't be definite until a Nasa conference tomorrow, but it is looking like they are about to announce that an entirely separate form of life has been discovered in an arsenic saturated lake. Instead of a phosphorus based energy system it uses arsenic. It seems that its biology is so fundamentally different to that of other life that it cannot have occured through evolution. Meaning that it is of a completely separate lineage.

Take that Creationists! Not that it will matter of course, they're impervious to facts but it's one more tool in our box.

Article here: http://skymania.com/wp/2010/11/alien-life-form-is-here-on-earth.html

I stress though that this is still tentative until the confirmation from Nasa. They'll probably be broadcasting the conference live.

How fuckin cool is this? Will it have DNA as we know it? Quite exciting.

If it doesn't have DNA that will be a huge discovery. But like so many of these things I wait until the announcement has been made, they rarely match the hype.

Genghiz Cohen

Imagine it, twice in one solar system...
Now imagine all the solar systems in the galaxy.
Now imagine all the galaxys in the universe...

Incredible.

MagicMarker

Genghiz Cohen wrote: »

Imagine it, twice in one solar system...
Now imagine all the solar systems in the galaxy.
Now imagine all the galaxys in the universe...

Incredible.

Twice on one planet.
Now imagine all the planets in a solar system.
Now imagine all the solar systems in our galaxy.
Now imagine all the galaxies in the universe.
Now imagine all the universes in the multiverse.

Genghiz Cohen

MagicMarker wrote: »

Twice on one planet.
Now imagine all the planets in a solar system.
Now imagine all the solar systems in our galaxy.
Now imagine all the galaxies in the universe.
Now imagine all the universes in the multiverse.

MULTIVERSE!?!?
THATS JUST A THEORY!!

magicbastarder

the mail have a more sober interpretation.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1334628/Astrobiology-findings-Alien-bacteria-lives-arsenic-Californian-lake-opens-search-life-planets.html

magicbastarder

it's not often that i get to say that about the daily mail. times truly have changed.

Zombrex

Zillah wrote: »

This is not an appropriate metaphor. A better one would be:

We live in a town. We never hear about lottery results from other towns. One person wins the lottery in our town. We do not know how likely that was, maybe there are thousands of towns and we're the only one to win. Then another person in our town wins. Assuming there is nothing more than random chance behind the lottery, it is pretty safe to assume that this is a very generous lottery, and there are likely to be lots of towns where there are victors.

Not a perfect metaphor, as some towns would have proverbial super high gravity, or be composed of nothing but gasses, or be ten thousand degrees, all of which make winning the abiogenesis lottery less likely.

A better metaphor is this

We live in a town where one person has won the lottery, who is now dead. Some suppose that the won the lottery by buying a lottery ticket in the town, but some stupid religions types believe for stupid religious reasons that this is impossible because they believe that there has never been a lottery ticket seller in the town.

Most reasonable people say that the person bought the ticket from a lottery ticket seller, and can point to where it looks like this seller worked, can show you evidence of his financial transactions, there is an old sign up saying "Lottery Tickets Here", etc

Despite all this the stupid religious people refuse to accept this saying it is impossible that a lottery seller ever worked in this town. They explain the existence of the lottery winning person through a stupid religious presumption (a fairy brought the lottery ticket to the winner from another town because the fairy was the persons fairy godmother). They say "Can you prove its wrong?" when ever someone says this is stupid.

We then discover another person, completely unrelated to the first, had also won the lottery years ago.

The stupid religious people say this doesn't necessarily mean they are wrong because who is to say that the magic fairy godmother didn't also buy a lottery ticket for this person as well.

At which point the towns folk say "You guys are really stupid" and stop interacting with them The stupid religious people move out to a farm on the outskirts of town, start hording weapons and eventually burn their compound down :eek::D

magicbastarder

anyway, the big question - new lifeform; what sort of god do they worship?

magicbastarder

some more cautionary water for the fire:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/11/30/snowballing-speculation-over-a-nasa-press-conference/

Zombrex

magicbastarder wrote: »

anyway, the big question - new lifeform; what sort of god do they worship?

The god that looks like them, obviously :pac:

nozzferrahhtoo

Even if the announcement is that life has been found elsewhere, it would be too soon to say that this means Biogenesis happened twice. It could have happened once at one location and was somehow seeded to both locations.

What we need is to examine any other life found and find if it is similar to ours or identical, or entirely different and then we can start making such guesses.

If an entirely new form of life were to be found, not working on DNA, or not Carbon based then the title of this thread would be accurate. If however it is essentially identical in every way it would lend credence to the seeding argument that the first generation of life happened in one place and was seeded to others. Either a common ancestor location, or on Earth/Titan and somehow transferred to the other.

Either way it could be exciting stuff and although it might not answer many questions it will certainly inform us as to which of our many questions have been worth asking. As usual with NASA however I do not expect the actual announcement to match the hype put into it, but I hope to be wrong.

Dades

wikileaks has just released ahead of time a magnified image of NASA'a newly discovered entity...

Magnified x 100,000:



All hail !

ChocolateSauce

Wicknight wrote: »

If it doesn't have DNA that will be a huge discovery. But like so many of these things I wait until the announcement has been made, they rarely match the hype.

It would be an even bigger discovery if it did have DNA, but if that DNA had evolved independently. It would be evidence that not only is life as we know it not unlikely, but that it is highly probable given the right conditions.

liamw

magicbastarder wrote: »

must be great working in PR for NASA on stuff like this.

'the Department of Seriously ****ing Cool **** would like your attention for a few moments please, ladies and gentlemen.'

I guarantee if this makes the news, more will be talking about the x-factor result than this. So it's only really cool to some of us.

Zombrex

ChocolateSauce wrote: »

It would be an even bigger discovery if it did have DNA, but if that DNA had evolved independently. It would be evidence that not only is life as we know it not unlikely, but that it is highly probable given the right conditions.

True, though I imagine it would difficult to tell if it evolved independently.

housetypeb

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3899/numbers-stars-universe-tripled

There are three times as many stars in the universe as they had previously supposed - and "possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars" - say astronomers.




That should raise the odds of finding life elsewhere.

Galvasean

3 pages and nobody has said it...

"It's life Jim, but not as we know it."

antiskeptic

keppler wrote: »

If it can be shown that abiogenesis happened more than once then this would strongly imply that abiogenesis is alot more likely to occur than anyone thought before

If they could show abiogenesis occurred at all then that would be a fine thing..

liah

antiskeptic wrote: »

If they could show abiogenesis occurred at all then that would be a fine thing..

And so it begins...

Stercus Accidit

antiskeptic wrote: »

If they could show abiogenesis occurred at all then that would be a fine thing..

Surely our faith in abiogenesis makes it true alone?

liamw

antiskeptic wrote: »

If they could show abiogenesis occurred at all then that would be a fine thing..

You already know and have a personal relationship with the creator of all life, so no need to worry yourself about new scientific discoveries like this. Problem is some of us humans just don't know, so we'll have to keep seeking. This sort of news must be very uninteresting for you.

nozzferrahhtoo

antiskeptic wrote: »

If they could show abiogenesis occurred at all then that would be a fine thing..

Interestingly if life is to be found on Titan etc then we would be a giant step forward to doing just that.

If the life is the same as ours in enough ways it would lend credence to the seeding notion. Much of our efforts are aimed at finding out how certain necessary steps could have occurred here on earth. If we find it occurred elsewhere then it may cause us to redirect our questions in a way that will greatly help the endeavour.

If however the life discovered is massively different then, like triangulation, the points of difference and commonality between them will greatly serve the process of reverse engineering we are engaged in while discovering life’s origins. Our mistake all too often is to look at our own lifeform and assume that this is how all life has to be. We have been shown the error of ours ways a few times recently when life on this planet was discovered in areas without oxygen and without sunlight, two things we thought at one time were indispensable. We then discovered chemosynthesis instead of photosynthesis and more and we have learned that life can come in many forms. Adding another form, previously unknown, would also greatly serve such ends.

Either way it would be massively interesting, exciting and helpful in ways that make insignificant and one-liner trolling attempts, on a relatively tiny internet forum, from a theist desperate for attention.

Genghiz Cohen

Galvasean wrote: »

3 pages and nobody has said it...

"It's life Jim, but not as we know it."

darjeeling

Wicknight wrote: »

True, though I imagine it would difficult to tell if it evolved independently.

If we turned up something that used DNA for information storage but didn't use the same or a very similar triplet genetic code to the rest of life, and didn't share the genes (such as ribosomal RNA genes) that are conserved across all of life as we know it, then we'd have good evidence that it had arisen independently from everything else.

antiskeptic

liah wrote: »

And so it begins...

Nah, it began with a faith-based statement supposing abiogenesis to have occurred once. Thereafter comes but evolution

antiskeptic

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

Interestingly if life is to be found on Titan etc then we would be a giant step forward to doing just that.

How so?

If the life is the same as ours in enough ways it would lend credence to the seeding notion. Much of our efforts are aimed at finding out how certain necessary steps could have occurred here on earth. If we find it occurred elsewhere then it may cause us to redirect our questions in a way that will greatly help the endeavour.

What's the seeding notion?

If however the life discovered is massively different then, like triangulation, the points of difference and commonality between them will greatly serve the process of reverse engineering we are engaged in while discovering life’s origins. Our mistake all too often is to look at our own lifeform and assume that this is how all life has to be.

That has always struck me as wierd - the hulabaloo about "water possibly existing on planet x". As if life required water.

Either way it would be massively interesting, exciting and helpful in ways that make insignificant and one-liner trolling attempts, on a relatively tiny internet forum, from a theist desperate for attention.

The troll was merely pointing out a faith-based statement from a worldview which would state itself as somewhat ambivilent to them. I don't deny that life elsewhere would be massively interesting. I just don't see how it necessarily helps establish that abiogensis occurs.

Genghiz Cohen

antiskeptic wrote: »

Nah, it began with a faith-based statement supposing abiogenesis to have occurred once. Thereafter comes but evolution

I can see how your stance is much more reasonable.

nozzferrahhtoo

antiskeptic wrote: »

How so?

Because in reverse engineering (which is essentially what we are engaged in when working out how life started) having diverse samples to work with is monumentally helpful, more than any other thing can be helpful in the field.

To use an analogy imagine you were trying to reconstruct Latin from English. It would be impossible. The more languages derived from Latin you had however the greater your chances.

In my post above I also mentioned Triangulation. That was no idle word dropped in for effect. Locating a point is much easier the more references you have to work with.

antiskeptic wrote: »

What's the seeding notion?

There is a possibility that life on earth did not first rise on earth. It is only a possibility and I do not care to go into the probabilities, but if evidence were found that such a thing happened then it would mean many of the questions we have been asking are the wrong questions. Asking "how did life start on earth?" clearly would be a stupid question if it was found it did not, wouldn't it?

antiskeptic wrote: »

That has always struck me as wierd - the hulabaloo about "water possibly existing on planet x". As if life required water.

Now you are getting the idea. Discovering ways life is possible that differ from the life we know best (our own) is monumentally helpful, like discovering a whole new language would be helpful in constructing the first route language all others were derived from (the holy grail of many linguists).

We have too long assumed that many of the indispensable characteristics for life as we know it are the characteristics like MUST have. However recent discoveries of life on earth operating in oxygen devoid areas, and in areas where energy is derived independent of sunlight by chemosynthesis has had some massively eye opening effects on our sciences. So new are these things that my spell checker in Chrome is trying to correct the word chemosynthesis to photosynthesis as I type.

antiskeptic wrote: »

I just don't see how it necessarily helps establish that abiogensis occurs.

Quite obviously discovering HOW something could occur is one massive step in the line of things that are required to establish THAT something occurred. Trying to show something happened without knowing how it could possibly happen is doable of course, but it does make the task a lot harder.

Zombrex

antiskeptic wrote: »

Nah, it began with a faith-based statement supposing abiogenesis to have occurred once. Thereafter comes but evolution

You are here. Abiogenesis happened at least once

Wicknight

Wicknight wrote: »

You are here. Abiogenesis happened at least once

Ahh but that's just a faith based belief isn't it?
Cause a detailed theory of how stuff can start self replicating using simple and known chemistry is the exact same as "it was magic".

Enkidu

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

To use an analogy imagine you were trying to reconstruct Latin from English.

<Pedantic>English developed from dialects of German, not Latin.</Pedantic>

robindch

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

Interestingly if life is to be found on Titan etc then we would be a giant step forward to doing just that.

I'm holding out for life on Europa.