Alien Life Discovered

Well, this will rewrite a few books. Gizmodo is reporting that NASA is about to release findings of a new bacteria that was discovered at Mono Lake in California. They write:

NASA has discovered a new life form—called GFAJ-1—that doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. It's capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything. Updated.

NASA is saying that this is "life as we do not know it". The reason is that all life on Earth is made of six components: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

In a surprising discovery, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon and her team have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the newly discovered microorganism—called GFAJ-1 and found in Mono Lake, California—uses the poisonous arsenic for its building blocks.

This is huge. It is alien life that either developed in isolation from the rest of life on this planet for the last 3.8 BILLION years (unlikely) or it is literally alien in origin. Here is the NASA story by Dwayne Browne and Cathy Weselby. They write:

"The idea of alternative biochemistries for life is common in science fiction," said Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "Until now a life form using arsenic as a building block was only theoretical, but now we know such life exists in Mono Lake."

We will see how this gets picked up by different organizations in the next few weeks. It has amazing implications for exobiology.

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Off Topic: Close But No Cigar?

A new exoplanet has been discovered that is the most earth-like planet yet found. It is GJ 1214b. Wired has the story:

“If you want to describe in one sentence what this planet is, it’s a big, hot ocean,” said Harvard University astronomer David Charbonneau. “We can even study its atmosphere. This planet will occupy us for years. That’s part of what’s so exciting about it.”

Described by Charbonneau and 17 other astronomers in a paper published Wednesday in Nature, GJ 1214b is the latest of roughly 400 planets detected by earthly telescopes. Of these, 28 are considered “super-Earths” — planets with a mass roughly comparable to our own.

The super-Earths themselves are too distant to be seen. Instead, astronomers infer their presence from subtle distortions in starlight, caused when photons travel through the super-Earths’ gravitational fields. Depending on the degree of distortion, astronomers can even calculate a planet’s mass.

Once upon a time I asked my friend Rob Kroeger, who is a physicist at the University of Mississippi, how big the universe was across. He said it was approximately 150 billion light years across. When I asked him if that number was generated by the limit of the available technology, he replied "no, it is just that beyond that point, what you see is a 'fuzz' that seems to be the barrier." That we are able to discern with any degree of certainty the characteristics of objects at that distance speaks volumes of the current level of technology and understanding of astrophysics. What an awesome universe!

Now the other shoe. Does this planet have life? The story continues:

That list of ingredients raises at least the possibility of life. With an estimated temperature of 370 degrees Fahrenheit, GJ 1214b is an unlikely incubator (Earth’s toughest extremophile, a microbe that lives in deep-sea volcanic vents, maxes out at 284 degrees) but it’s not impossible.

“I don’t want to imply that there’s any indication of life as we know it. It might have life, but it would have to be a strange kind of life,” said Charbonneau.

The telescopes sure to be trained on GJ 1214b in the near future will try to answer that question. But even if it proves barren, other planets await. The telescopes that spotted GJ 1214b were custom designed to find Earth-like planets around nearby stars, and had only operated for a few months before striking water.

“We only look at a handful of stars before finding this planet, said Charbonneau. “Either we got lucky, or the planets are very common.”

But what if we did find a planet that did have life? Gordon Glover, in his excellent blog, Beyond the Firmament, addressed the issues that Christians had when it was discovered that there were people that lived on the other side of the world. He writes:

If all men are physically descended from Adam, and thus Adam’s sin is credited to their account, then any people living on the opposite ends of the earth must have traveled there from the Ancient World after Noah’s time. And since there was no record of any such journey, and the equatorial region was thought to be impassable by ship, it was absurd to think that descendants of Adam could inhabit such places.

This led to the people on the other side of the world being dehumanized. Consequently, when the explorers visited these people, they treated them as if they were not human. It didn't occur to them that their theology needed revising. If there is life on one or some of these exoplanets, does that make God less of a God? Or these creatures less of his creations?


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Another Exoplanet

Too bad its too hot. USA Heute is reporting on a planet that circles its parent star every 20 hours—that's kind of fast, I think—but is so hot it can't sustain life. The difference is that it is a rocky planet:

This is a major discovery in the field of trying to find life elsewhere in the universe, said outside expert Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution. It was the buzz of a conference on finding an Earth-like planet outside our solar system, held in Barcelona, Spain, where the discovery was presented Wednesday morning. The find is also being published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The planet is called Corot-7b. It was first discovered earlier this year. European scientists then watched it dozens of times to measure its density to prove that it is rocky like Earth. It's in our general neighborhood, circling a star in the winter sky about 500 light-years away. Each light-year is about 6 trillion miles.

Four planets in our solar system are rocky: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

Oh well. Next time.


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