[extropy-chat] ET is a Bacterium

The Avantguardian avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com
Wed Jul 20 09:38:04 UTC 2005



--- Damien Sullivan <phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:

> No it wasn't, or you're confusing things. 
> "Spontaneous generation" back then
> referred to life being frequently and ubiquitously
> formed in dead matter under
> human-normal conditions; Pasteur showed that no,
> life did not spontaneously
> arise in a flask of sterilized broth, nor did
> maggots come from screened meat.

That he did and despite the fact that the broth had
all the basic building blocks of life, nothing
happened. So what you are suggesting is that had he
electrocuted the broth while shining UV light on it at
52 atm of pressure in a methane atmosphere for a
million years, some primordial cell would have oozed
out of it?  


> 
> This has no relevance to spontaneous generation in a
> planet-wide ocean subject
> to UV, lightning, and tides, over 100 million years.

Is the ocean somehow more nutritious than the broth?

> But they aren't certain that life 3.8 billion years
> ago came from pre-existent
> life.  In fact, they study how it could have formed.

Obviously. But they don't have any good verifiable
theories yet. It is one thing to zap some gases with
electricity and get amino acids. But amino acids do
not live. We have a good grasp of the chemistry, but
where, how, and when did the biology happen? You say
it happened on Earth. I say maybe not. It might not be
possible to spontaneously generate life any more. It
might require the physical constants of the universe
to be different than they are now.

> But panspermian life had to be spontaneously
> generated somewhere else.

Yes, perhaps when the universe was young and far less
entropic than it is now. Who knows. Maybe the whole
universe started out alive and then over time, most of
it died until now only small bits of it are alive.

> An adaptation can have unexpected effects.  An
> endospore evolved to survive
> years of dehydration and temperature change -- say
> in a desert -- may also
> find itself radiation resistant.  Once you've
> stabilized your structures for
> decades, they're stabilized.

Actually the dehydration resistance is rather separate
from the radiation resistance. It is DNA repair
enzymes that still function while in spore form that
allow it to withstand such radiation. One of the few
"vital signs" a endospore has is DNA repair. But my
point is that they can survive in space and such has
been experimentally verified. Regardless of how that
adaptation came about, it renders them capable of
space-travel. Whether they did so to get here is
anybody's guess, but it is certainly not impossible
and seems to be more likely than spontaneous
generation from a statistical viewpoint.

The Avantguardian 
is 
Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that they haven't attempted to contact us." 
-Bill Watterson

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