No ... it's not just an excuse to put a Bowie song on here ... even though I'm going to. It's actually about my obsession with "things that never get said." Well, not in the "popular" media anyway. Right now, on the moon and on Mars, ingenious machines are sampling the surface of each of those bodies. And one of the things scientists are keen to find is ...life. Or at least, signs of life. Evidence that life was once there, if nothing better can be found. So ...lets say they find an actual living thing.... or a recently living thing.... and they bring it back.Well, there are various scenarios. Maybe it will be close to the sort of life we have on Earth .... some single-celled organism like Euglena or Paramecium. That would be amazing stuff .... but not that amazing. We know they live here .... and there are perfectly feasible ways in which they could have got to another body. But it's a start. But what if they found some organism we apparently haven't got here on Earth ...as far as we know.Well, that's quite a breakthrough. But ..they might well find that the "DNA coding" uses the same 4 bases in groups of three,producing the same strings of amino-acids to make proteins in the same way that life on Earth does. That would not be too surprising ... it would be pretty standard. As far as we know so far, all life on Earth uses in its DNA the same 4 bases, A, C, T, and G, in groups of 3 which code for the same 20 amino-acids in the same way, stringing them together in the same way ... no exceptions. It's been like that since the first living things appeared on Earth. As far as we know. [ Note .. RNA uses a slightly different set of bases, but works in a similar way] Here's a dinky video that shows you what goes on ! But supposing these new organisms were not quite like that. They might, for example, use those same 4 bases, but the coding was different. So the sequence ATG might code for a different amino-acid to ours ! That would be a hell of a thing ! That would be an amazing discovery .... to find an organism that used a different coding system. That's one of the Holy Grails of scientific research. But does it ever get a mention in the newspaper reports. No. Does it ever get mentioned in the newspapers. No. And yet .... all those people working on these projects must know that a discovery like that would be absolutely shattering. We would know that, almost certainly, life has been created, and evolved, elsewhere and independently from our Earthly life-forms ..... that, maybe, just maybe,the creation of new, differently -coded life-forms is not as rare as we might think. But they don't mention it .... I think they think it's too big ! Too big a thing for us to deal with. Coo ! Blimey !! That's my theory anyway. It's just too big a thing for us humans to cope with. I'd be OK with it though. I'm an inclusive old Hector.
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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