Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[counting]

Biochemistry has been going a long way ahead into the territory of biology right now than in the 50s, 60s. We can now even synthesize simple cell using man-made DNA. But we haven't fully understand how many kinds of them we can make. And what's the simplest form or early form. (or alien form, and how many are there possible, possibly infinite). At least we know that the "Earth form" isn't the only option. 

[Bauglir]

To be fair, whether or not there are other nucleobases matters about as much for the form life could take as does whether you use 1s and 0s for binary or Qs and Rs. It's a data storage mechanism, although other bases could improve its efficiency. Novel amino acids, though, could have really significant impacts. And more evidence that Earth is not particularly unique in the chemical reactions that can occur is always nice.

[alway]

I agree with MSH. At this point, it's a pretty well established fact that the universe is flooded with pre-biotic materials. Amino acids have been found all over the place in space, their ease of creation under the conditions on the early Earth means they were here in abundance, ect and so forth. At this point, there being other life in the universe hasn't seemed more probable since the time they thought they saw cannals on Mars.

[counting]

Let's put things into perspective. What this discovery means is that rocks/celestial objects no matter how big (from meteors to planet size), are capable of carrying and producing biochemistry building materials through organic non-biochemistry process. (non-earth-biochemistry anyway), as long as they are in the right place (distance from a sun/star/heat source, so it won't froze, or too hot) with right raw materials. (covered in - organic, simple molecular). And the next step into real biochemistry, is that for some reason (probably due to frozen events) only some of these organic materials evolved in some way (not clear how) into biochemical process and building lives on Earth.

And if this is true in our solar system, then the process of organic non-biochemistry process is also likely happens in other solar system in space on small celestial objects (probably still happening right now in our own solar system), rather than limited on a right place, right composition planet-size celestial objects in some distant past. So it increases the chance of the the next step biochemical process to happen. We used to think these process has to happened on a planetary sized planet like what happened on Earth and within Earth. Now we know the entire solar system is a giant factory for manufacturing components. So YES, it did increase hope for more extraterrestrial lives other than our own. (And even life happens in space, at least in asteroid-size one.)

A planet may be too hot when it was just formed, and gradually cooling or moving into suitable living condition, and with constant asteroids seeding components on a planet, these carriers from space will greatly shorten the "waiting time" for life to appear and increase the chance of life to evolve (before a planet becomes too cold, which Earth probably will be without life). But this still falls into the second step which we don't truly know much. So how long it may take from organic-biochemical components evolve into biological lives is still unknown. We know it took Earth less than 1 billion year (considerably less if you only count from when condition is suitable for life on Earth), whether we are lucky(or unlucky) in this process is yet to know.

[Vector]

This is... exciting.

Extremely exciting.

[Jackrabbit]

More cool shit...IN SPACE!

Thin belt of antimatter found in Earth orbit

Not all that significant AFAIK, but still damned cool.

Does that mean if we shoot a hunk of metal into space, it'll punch through the antimatter, react with it and cause the best fireworks display ever?

[MaximumZero]

Jack, I think you've hit upon the best idea ever.

[Heron TSG]

Does that mean if we shoot a hunk of metal into space, it'll punch through the antimatter, react with it and cause the best most cancerous fireworks display ever?

Fixed that for you.

[Jackrabbit]

Does that mean if we shoot a hunk of metal into space, it'll punch through the antimatter, react with it and cause the best most cancerous fireworks display ever?

Fixed that for you.

I am willing to risk this for the sake of large explosions.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

You can't make an omelet without giving everyone in the Northern Hemisphere antimatter-induced skin cancer.

[MaximumZero]

Wait. Shouldn't antimatter destroy cancer, which is matter?

[Vector]

Brain... pain...

[counting]

More cool shit...IN SPACE!

Thin belt of antimatter found in Earth orbit

Not all that significant AFAIK, but still damned cool.

Does that mean if we shoot a hunk of metal into space, it'll punch through the antimatter, react with it and cause the best fireworks display ever?

Nope you won't. Unless you shoot protons. And it will be microscopic spark. (Probably even out of human eye sight spectrum). A proton may even not hit an anti-proton at all since it spreads so thin to near vacuum.

And if you use a macro scale object, it will just gain some hundreds MeV (1.6×10^-13 J) of kinetic energy per cm^2 per second from random directions. (it's how they measure it actually). Feels like microscopic turbulence.

You can see their early draft paper.

[KaelGotDwarves]

*cue Futurama newsman*
ANTI-MATTER DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.

Also, for those saying it's not a big deal, they've figured this out before, well, no. It was theoreticised before. This is the first time they were able to pull off a conclusive peer-reviewed study and came out willing to bet their professorial publishing necks based on the theory.

We do indeed live in exciting times.

[Jacob/Lee]

I hope to live to the day we can absolutely %100 confirm intelligent alien life, which means we must see them first.