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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 11/25/2008 : 05:26:24
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Ok, weirdness is not a good description for these organisms. They have evolved in an environment as alien to us as the icecaps of Mars. For example, a great many species pass their whole lives without ever coming in contact with any solid object. Thus, not requiring strength nor toughness, they are little more than water themselves and this encourages form & function that seem ridiculous but make perfect sense at 1,000+ fathoms. This little squid is an excellent example.
Pretty cool, eh? It even has elbows! And it points out that we know more about the surface of the Moon than we do of the largest and most important ecosystem on Earth.
Sad, really.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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DtheB
New Member
USA
22 Posts |
Posted - 11/25/2008 : 05:39:03 [Permalink]
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| By god... we need to destroy them! They've already developed elbows, it's only a matter of time before the get legs and then DESTROY US ALL!!! |
The misuse of a tool does not negate its existence. |
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Siberia
SFN Addict
Brazil
2322 Posts |
Posted - 11/25/2008 : 05:56:02 [Permalink]
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It does look a bit like the tripods from War of the Worlds, doesn't it?
Cool critter, though. |
"Why are you afraid of something you're not even sure exists?"
- The Kovenant, Via Negativa
"People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs."
-- unknown
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perrodetokio
Skeptic Friend
275 Posts |
Posted - 11/25/2008 : 06:02:33 [Permalink]
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| Awsome!!! |
"Yes I have a belief in a creator/God but do not know that he exists." Bill Scott
"They are still mosquitoes! They did not turn into whales or lizards or anything else. They are still mosquitoes!..." Bill Scott
"We should have millions of missing links or transition fossils showing a fish turning into a philosopher..." Bill Scott |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 11/25/2008 : 08:38:52 [Permalink]
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Looks like the things in Cloverfield.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
Posted - 11/25/2008 : 08:49:30 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by HalfMooner
Looks like the things in Cloverfield.
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#1. I agree.
#2. Cloverfield rocked.
#3. The icy moons could be teeming with stuff like this. |
-Chaloobi
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 11/25/2008 : 09:19:16 [Permalink]
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It kinda reminded me of a bacteriophage at first glance.
But the squid sure is way cool looking, it would make for a great looking alien, for sure. |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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Grim Ungainly
New Member
USA
8 Posts |
Posted - 11/25/2008 : 13:23:05 [Permalink]
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Phage was my first thought too.
Although as alien as it seems, it's surprisingly similar to us. They have cells that look much the same as ours, they use ATP just like we do, they use all the same amino acids as we do, etc... Any life found on another planet would be much, much stranger.
Seeing creatures like this blows my mind. It is truly incredible that evolution can create such diversity while maintaining so much unity between all living things. Shame some people blind themselves to it just because of their religion. |
"Much I marveled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly."
Edgar Allen Poe |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
Posted - 11/25/2008 : 14:57:37 [Permalink]
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Yeah, but what's it do?
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Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 11/25/2008 : 15:18:58 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Kil
Yeah, but what's it do?
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On the one hand, it poses for really neat pictures, of course. On the other hand, it piques our insatiable and accursed curiosity, and that makes our ulcers bleed when we cannot find out more.
But on the gripping hand, the next time some smart-ass says something is as useless as elbows on a squid, we'll have a snappy comeback.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9688 Posts |
Posted - 11/25/2008 : 17:06:00 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Grim Ungainly
Although as alien as it seems, it's surprisingly similar to us. They have cells that look much the same as ours, they use ATP just like we do, they use all the same amino acids as we do, etc... Any life found on another planet would be much, much stranger.
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Why?
ATP is used by us for a good reason: it does it's job well.
Even macro molecules evolve along the path of least resistance. With that, I mean that natural selection will weed out more complex structures unless it's at least correspondingly more efficient (or serves a practical purpose).
The relative abundances of elements across the universe, and the unique properties of water, makes in my opinion carbon based life-forms by far the most likely. Amino acids as building blocks for life, and there will only be so many combinations to choose from when you start building macro molecules.
When you have random assembly of amino acids on a huge scale will produce self-replicating macro-molecules with abundances according to the probability of them forming. The most efficient one will out-compete the others, and will thus become the template upon which life will get built.
On Planet Earth, RNA became the basis for life.
Given the enormous number of chemical reactions that happens, and the many steps (or generations if you will) involved, natural selection will eventually select the simplest solution that works. If RNA was the solution here on earth, I figure it's only logical to conclude that RNA will be solution elsewhere too. Because it's 'simple' and it works.
Richard Lenski proved with his E. Coli research that faced with identical environments, evolution will eventually select the same solution even you rewind and play the scenario more than once. Randomness is not the overriding factor, just a facilitator.
Pretty much the same way many different civilisations invented the wheel independent of each other. It's simple and it gets the work done. This is why I believe that alien life will not be fundamentally different from ours. We may look different, but the chemistry will be very similar. |
Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
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"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 11/25/2008 : 21:46:45 [Permalink]
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I think the jury's still out on what basic chemistry is needed for life, though it seems self-evident that the RNA-DNA path that life has taken on earth is at least one of the successful chemistries.
All life on earth is intimately related to the first cell or virus-like organism that was able to metabolize and reproduce. We thus tend to think of earthly life's chemistry as the only way to go, but perhaps that's simply because it's the only way we know. But that does not prove that another chemistry might not have been as successful, had the first organism used another biochemistry for genetics and metabolism.
It's just possible another biochemistry could have worked just as well, even on earth. Perhaps RNA-DNA preempted the game, by eating up the accumulated biochemicals in the primordial soup.
On another world, with temperatures and pressures much different from earth's, RNA-DNA might have been either too sluggish, or too volatile to work.
My own wild guess is that RNA-DNA is going to prove common, but perhaps not the only game, in fairly earth-like environments. Even on those worlds, however, there may have been other unknown biochemistries that evolved in time to preempt RNA-DNA. In more exotic conditions, wholly other chemistries may dominate. Will life in the universe be variegated, from the molecules up, or will some general rule of biochemical convergent evolution apply? It's not too early to guess, but I think it is too early to know.
We will probably just have to wait and see what ET life is like.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 11/26/2008 03:41:36 |
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Grim Ungainly
New Member
USA
8 Posts |
Posted - 11/26/2008 : 00:54:26 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dr. Mabuse
Originally posted by Grim Ungainly
Although as alien as it seems, it's surprisingly similar to us. They have cells that look much the same as ours, they use ATP just like we do, they use all the same amino acids as we do, etc... Any life found on another planet would be much, much stranger.
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Why?
ATP is used by us for a good reason: it does it's job well. |
ATP certainly does do its job well, but plenty of other nucleotides would do just as well. The only bit that really matters is the phosphate chain, another planet could use a guanine instead of a adenine, or any other base. And there are plenty of different sugars that would work just as well as the ones we use.
| Even macro molecules evolve along the path of least resistance. With that, I mean that natural selection will weed out more complex structures unless it's at least correspondingly more efficient (or serves a practical purpose). |
What I'm saying is that there will probably be multiple paths of least resistance. The one we took was probably decided by chance. A different planet might go down a different path. (guanine instead of adenine. or cytosine, thymine, uracil, etc.)
The relative abundances of elements across the universe, and the unique properties of water, makes in my opinion carbon based life-forms by far the most likely. Amino acids as building blocks for life, and there will only be so many combinations to choose from when you start building macro molecules.
When you have random assembly of amino acids on a huge scale will produce self-replicating macro-molecules with abundances according to the probability of them forming. The most efficient one will out-compete the others, and will thus become the template upon which life will get built.
On Planet Earth, RNA became the basis for life.
Given the enormous number of chemical reactions that happens, and the many steps (or generations if you will) involved, natural selection will eventually select the simplest solution that works. If RNA was the solution here on earth, I figure it's only logical to conclude that RNA will be solution elsewhere too. Because it's 'simple' and it works.
Richard Lenski proved with his E. Coli research that faced with identical environments, evolution will eventually select the same solution even you rewind and play the scenario more than once. Randomness is not the overriding factor, just a facilitator. |
What? If you are referring to the same experiment I am (evolution of citrate usage) that it proved no such thing. The cit+ mutants were working off of probably non adaptive change, the exact kind of blind luck I am talking about. From the wiki;
"historical contingency can have a profound and lasting impact on the course of evolution."
Pretty much the same way many different civilisations invented the wheel independent of each other. It's simple and it gets the work done. This is why I believe that alien life will not be fundamentally different from ours. We may look different, but the chemistry will be very similar.
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I totally disagree.
whenever I look at the complex chemical processes inside a cell, it all looks pretty arbitrary. I feel like there are probably different paths that would be just as good for nearly everything. Is there a different way for the Calvin cycle to work? Probably. The only reason we only do it one way is because that's how life on earth has always done it. |
"Much I marveled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly."
Edgar Allen Poe |
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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
Posted - 11/26/2008 : 06:09:54 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Kil
Yeah, but what's it do?
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What does anything do? |
-Chaloobi
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Hawks
SFN Regular
Canada
1383 Posts |
Posted - 11/26/2008 : 08:31:51 [Permalink]
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| That is seriously cool. Wouldn't want one of them stuck on my face, though. |
METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
It's a small, off-duty czechoslovakian traffic warden! |
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9688 Posts |
Posted - 11/26/2008 : 08:37:16 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Grim Ungainly
Originally posted by Dr. Mabuse
Richard Lenski proved with his E. Coli research that faced with identical environments, evolution will eventually select the same solution even you rewind and play the scenario more than once. Randomness is not the overriding factor, just a facilitator. |
What? If you are referring to the same experiment I am (evolution of citrate usage) that it proved no such thing. The cit+ mutants were working off of probably non adaptive change, the exact kind of blind luck I am talking about. From the wiki;
"historical contingency can have a profound and lasting impact on the course of evolution."
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That was the impression I got from the little I read about Lenski's work, but then, I'm an electronics engineer not a microbiologist. I readily admit that my conclusions may be wrong, if someone more knowledgeable than me say so.
I'd be happy if you can elaborate on the quote above. While I take pride in my English skills, I have trouble making sense of it. English is my second language.
I'm not saying that the mutation has to happen at the same place in the genome every single time, but as long as the ability is coded for, does it matter?
If a number of random events have to happen in a certain sequence, that just affects the probability of it happening. But if the reward is great enough, selection will make it happen. Eventually.
Pretty much the same way many different civilisations invented the wheel independent of each other. It's simple and it gets the work done. This is why I believe that alien life will not be fundamentally different from ours. We may look different, but the chemistry will be very similar.
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I totally disagree.
whenever I look at the complex chemical processes inside a cell, it all looks pretty arbitrary. I feel like there are probably different paths that would be just as good for nearly everything. Is there a different way for the Calvin cycle to work? Probably. The only reason we only do it one way is because that's how life on earth has always done it.
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I maintain that taking random paths in enough number of events, and the randomness becomes statistical average and not random: From a large statistical outcome all paths will be represented. But the path which is strongest in the combination of efficiency and abundance, will win.
So I guess we will have to disagree on this for now.
But I'd love to pick your brain a little more on this subject. I still have a lot to learn about microbiology and biochemistry.
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Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
Send them unarmed civilians for target practice..
Collateralmurder. |
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Bathypelagic weirdness
