NASA's discovery of alien life

DNA is very complex but made from only 4 or 5 molecules. Is more than one of these substructures of DNA involved in this substitution?

It might be a hoax after all. An article from 2008 says this bacteria uses arsenic in place of water in photosysthesis rather than as a substitute for P. That makes sense but is not news worthy outside of its science interest and never grew as a story back in 2008.

Hi Jim, hoax is too strong a term, and in this case I very much doubt that we haven't got a genuine chimera. NASA is much more experienced in the ways of the press these days. They have been burnt too many times for them not to have "minders" for their researchers.

On the subject of palindromic sequences in dna code, I asked Aubrey de Grey for his thoughts on it. he seemed rather dismissive, saying that the smart money was on repeated sequences. It's there that the self correcting mechanisms can drop thee ball as it were, and delete the repeated section of code. I think he's right, for the work he's doing but I do think that palindromes are very important in the development of life at the start.

Life on Earth hit the ground running. We have an ocean and a reducing atmosphere, the ocean a thin consomme crammed full of the building blocks for a self replicating system. Mars had the same set up but it could be ahead of the game. It can eject bacterium weight bodies, and even smaller stuff can hitch a ride on dust particles.

It's a two way street, and the Earth can send stuff back to Mars but the weights are going to be in the range of viruses. However at this stage of the game they wouldn't be viruses. This possible panspermia muddies the water (couldn't resist that) One question is, did Mars ever develop an atmosphere like the Earth's present atmosphere? Sagan thought so but the debate goes on about it. The problem of limonite springs to mind here. If it did then there would be a hiatus, when life forms ejected would arrive on Earth sans spacesuits.

Back to palindromes, bacterial dna forms itself into a loop. A mobius, and there are rules for the number of twists. A phosphate has to join onto a sugar. So let's make a palindrome from the word "mississippi," for no other reason other than it's a fun word. Double it up and reverse half the letters. We get a palindrome with two letter "i"'s in the middle but we could dump one of them and still have a palindrome. That will alter the number of twists though.

The fun starts when you get a pair of scissors and cut round the mobius. I did ask a guy on utube, who had made thousands of these strips about his findings but he never got bak to me. The man was slightly compulsive. Anyway, there are rules for how many crossovers there are and how many trefoil knots, six and one as I recall for most of them.

I'll leave it there, what I think you have with palindromic code is a sort of pseudo ordering. That word "mississippi" might "develop" meaning, from an arbitrary happenstance. Yeah, it needs work I know.

I did find this article, well someone put it up on facebook, that I thinks shows just how acrimonious this thing is becoming. Pretty close to accusing nasa of outright fraud.
rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/arsenic-...-bacteria-nasas.html

NASA is way too political and could use a good house cleaning-they do too many political topics and attempt to pass them off as science. The media is a contributing factor to all the bad science we have effecting political topics. This looks like another half-baked idea that never should have been put on the market like it was by NASA. But, it is an important new discovery how ever it turns out.

Hi Jim, i think we have large "P" Politics (explicit) and small "p" politics (implicit) at work here. large p politics would involve questions such as, the very setting up of nasa. In a democracy it makes sense to separate off pure space research form any military applications, or at least appear to do so. It would be naive to think that there wasn't any horse trading done. another example would be the famous "o" rings disaster. Contracts were given out as sweeteners to politicians who sat on various committees. Jobs for their constituents. I honestly don't see how this can be avoided, other than having a very good watch committee to ensure checks and balances.

The small p politics is much more tribal and psychological in tone. Scientist involved in cutting edge science are a pretty small grouping within the departments of corporate/state mega science. They do seem to spend an inordinate amount of their time, looking over their shoulders, to see what's on the plates of their peers. That link I gave is a case in point, there's a little too much petulance in it for my liking. The author, a working biochemist, actually drops the ball on growth rates. She happily concedes that exponentials are not her thing. i would argue that the central plank of her argument is that this arsenic dna backbone is unstable. if she happens to be wrong about this, then it's not inconceivable that her la might be invaded by young people who talk a lot about pseudo Monte-Carlo experiments. Something of a threat to her status.

I think that's fair enough but then do we have all the answers, as to why any organic molecules are stable? If we have to "smear" electrons to have a stable benzine ring for instance, then it works, should anybody be that happy about it though? Yeah, if it means pay lip service to the idea but keep the qed people out of your lab. If this "chimera" tuns out to be true, then without a shadow of a doubt, the quantum mechanic tribe will claim a feather, an after the fact feather. With feathers comes funding and heaps of kudos.