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Alien life form ‘is here on Earth’
NASA scientists will announce a major discovery this Thursday that could boost the chance of life on other worlds. Experts believe they will say they have found a new form of life on Earth that is completely alien to anything known before.
Mono Lake viewed by Landsat satellite
NASA, who have called a full scale press conference for tomorrow, have tried to keep their findings under wraps, though an accompanying scientific paper has been released to some journalists under embargo.
Skymania has not seen the paper and so has been free to do some detective work to discover what will be announced. Despite wild speculation on the internet, there is unlikely to be an announcement that extra-terrestrials have been discovered, for the reasons very well put forward by Stuart Atkinson’s Cumbrian Sky.
But our own investigations suggest that it follows a breakthrough in the discovery of microbes in a lake that get their energy from the usually poisonous arsenic. Experts say this shows they had a completely different origin to any other creature known on our planet. It means that life began not just once but at least twice on Earth. Update: The conference has since revealed that, though the microbes appear to have adapted to use arsenic, they do not appear to be an independent life-form, i.e. a shadow biosphere. Read Ed Yong’s excellent take for more.
A key scientist on NASA’s panel will be Dr Felisa Wolfe-Simon who has spent two years investigating Mono Lake, close to California’s Yosemite National Park. The lake has no outlet and has, over many millenia, built up one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic on Earth.
Geobiologist Dr Wolfe-Simon has been looking to see whether microbes with a totally different make-up to that of conventional carbon-based life could have developed. There was an interesting article about her search for alien life on Earth in NASA’s online Astrobiology Magazine.
The importance that NASA attaches to her discovery and its implications for finding extra-terrestrial life is demonstrated by the fact that they will have on tomorrow’s panel experts on two other sites in the solar system where life might have developed.
They are Pamela Conrad who is looking for life on Mars and Steven Benner who is studying Saturn’s largest moon Titan which has a dense atmosphere like Earth but lakes of liquid methane rather than water. Also on the panel will be ecologist James Elser who is involved with a NASA-funded search for ET.
All life previously discovered is of one basic type because it relies on phosphorus as an essential building block. The newly found microbes seem to use arsenic instead.
Astrobiologist Dr Lewis Dartnell, of the Centre for Planetary Sciences in London, told Skymania today: “Mono Lake has a very high concentration of arsenic dissolved in it which is usually poisonous and consequently there’s not much life.
“I’m 90 per cent certain that Felisa has found something in Mono Lake and they have been able to demonstrate in some way that it uses arsenic in its metabolism rather than be poisoned by it.”
He added: “Phosphorus is key and absolutely essential for life. It forms the backbone of DNA. Every form of life of Earth we have known so far depends on phosphorus as well as another molecule called ATP, an energy storage molecule, or biological battery.
“It is exciting to find life in an arsenic-rich environment. If these organisms are using arsenic in their metabolism, it demonstrates that there are other life forms to that as we know it.”
Dr Dartnell went on: “There is no reason to expect that life arose just once on Earth. It could have arisen any number of times. The only reason that all life we have found so far has all descended from the same progenitor – the same mother of life – is because we’ve been looking for life in the same way.
“But if you start looking in extreme environments like Mono Lake, where our kind of life doesn’t survive very well, that’s where you find fundamentally different life forms with a separate origin. They’re aliens, but aliens that share the same home as us.” (Update: Just for the record, Lewis was not suggesting that a shadow biosphere would be announced by the NASA conference, simply that it was something biologists look for.)
Dr Wolfe-Simon has previously said of her research: “It may prove that there are other possibilities that are beyond our imagination. It opens the door for us to think about biology in ways we have never thought.
“We are going to look for life on other planets and we only know to look for that which we know. This may help us to develop tools to look for something we have never seen.”
Last year NASA revealed the detection of plumes of methane on Mars that offered compelling evidence that there might be life on the red planet.
British space scientist Professor Colin Pillinger, who has devoted his life to finding life on Mars, told Skymania: “If they have found anything which they can attribute to arsenic-based life then it is very interesting and obviously has connotations for other places in the universe where life forms other than the ones on Earth may very well have developed.”
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22 Comments
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Isaac Forman, Bas de Raad. Bas de Raad said: Alien life on earth: http://bit.ly/gWfL8O [...]
Ahem. Mono Lake is NOT “in California’s Yosemite National Park.” It’s more than 12 miles outside the park’s easternmost boundary.
And by the way, Mono Lake isn’t “deadly poisonous.” The lake water isn’t drinkable, but it is full of algae, and algae-eating brine shrimp (as many as 6 trillion of them, by some estimates), and as a result is one of the richest habitats for migrating birds in North America.
The lake supports an annual population of nearly 2 MILLION waterbirds, including 35 species of shorebirds. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_Lake)
[...] and some speculation that it would relate to Saturn’s moon Titan. However, one plausible explanation comes from Sky Mania: Our own investigations suggest that it follows a breakthrough in the discovery of microbes in a [...]
Dr Wolfe-Simon also said in an interview back in March that she had “exciting findings” that would be published by the end of the year.
So it’s my bet she’s found her “arsenolife”.
[...] Read it. NASA scientists will announce a major discovery this Thursday that could boost the chance of life on other worlds. Experts believe they will say they have found a new form of life on Earth that is completely alien to anything known before. But our own investigations suggest that it follows a breakthrough in the discovery of microbes in a deadly poisonous lake that get their energy from arsenic. Experts say this shows they had a completely different origin to any other creature known on our planet. It means that life began not just once but at least twice on Earth. All life previously discovered is of one basic type because it relies on phosphorous as an essential building block. The newly found microbes seem to use arsenic instead. He added: “Phosphorous is key and absolutely essential for life. It forms the backbone of DNA. Every form of life of Earth we have known so far depends on phosphorous as well as another molecule called ATP, an energy storage molecule, or biological battery. [...]
@Hank Thank you Hank. I’ve made those corrections.
[...] Aunque algunos medios que no están suscritos al servicio de EurekAlert ha buscado vías alternativas para reportear la noticia, como en este caso: http://skymania.com/wp/2010/11/alien-life-form-is-here-on-earth.html/ [...]
You didn’t even spell the name of the lake correctly. Its Mono Lake. Not mona lake. You spelled it correctly only once, in the caption for the photo. If your going to write an article on something so vitally important as alien life and feature it on your website you might want to at least spell the name of it correctly.
@Sympa. Thank you. Knuckles duly rapped and name corrected!
[...] of the announcement must be felt out by way of clues surrounding the press conference itself. As Paul Sutherland notes: A key scientist on NASA’s panel will be Dr Felisa Wolfe-Simon who has spent two years [...]
@Sympa
“If your [sic] going to write an article on something”
If YOU’RE going to rant on and on about poor spelling, you might want to pay attention to the difference between “your” and “you’re.”
“so vitally important as alien life”
Thank you for the laugh; I needed it.
[...] rumored that NASA will announced tomorrow (Dec. 2nd, 2010) that researchers have found a second instance of [...]
You are spending billions of dollars trying to contact with intelligent life on other planets, yet, Cetacean’s are intelligent life here with us on Planet Earth, we don’t even try to communicate with them. Yet they are as intelligent as us, kind of ridiculous, don’t you think?
[...] Govert Schilling twittert een clou. (Nee, hij vindt dat geen embargobreuk) Astronomiesite Skymania speculeert wat. Tabloid The Sun denkt het helemaal te weten. Hun aankondiging is zo mogelijk nog [...]
[...] pumped and intrigued by NASA’s press conference scheduled for tomorrow. You should read this article to get some info on it (TL;DR: “It means that life began not just once but at least twice on [...]
If cetaceans were as intelligent as us, [Moby-Dick] would be way shorter, and Japan more vegetarian. (Obviously, the whales and dolphins would be smart enough to leave one survivor to explain to the rest of us, “Leave the Great Sea Men alone.” On porpoise.)
Arsenic is deadly poisonous to -you-, folks.
“Millennia” has two Ns. We -did- this, remember? Ten, twelve years ago… oh, wait, how old are you. Right…
Let’s wait and see what it is. But this is my guess when I was told about it: Santa Claus observed on trajectory intersecting with Earth’s orbit late December, ‘too early to predict’ collision but you had better not pout, cry, etc., between now and. Santa Claus is coming /straight/ down.
Because they do things like that. When he gets closer, he’ll be tracked by NORAD. And I read that he’s been on Twitter since at least Dec. 2007 (so about two years nine months longer than everyone else), but I don’t know which one is actually him.
It is dogmatic and I think unreasonable to insist that life began more than once because a hypothetical microbe uses arsenic in place of phosphorus. Life quite likely did began more than once but probably only one source became dominant while the rest died out. However, this particular microbe, if it exists, may quite simply have adapted to an arsenic rich, phosphorus poor environment. It is hyperbolic to suggest it came from some primordial life form different from the rest of life on earth.
[...] Conrad: Astrobiologist, article here mentions her and the guy right beneath her James Benner in both being proponents in the search for [...]
[...] interview with brilliant young UK astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell, a fuller version of which is on my website, did not get it completely right – it seems this is a form of life that has adapted to using [...]
[...] Google search of the names and research projects of the members of the panel, something journalist Paul Sutherland did on his “Skymania” site, enabling to essentially figure the whole thing out) but [...]
[...] ur primary distraction? #amazing!! “@hackernewsbot: Alien life form ‘is here on Earth’… http://skymania.com/wp/2010/11/alien-life-form-is-here-on-earth.html/” #@cwoodruff u shd try driving in Bangalore once. 90mins for a 25mins distance means we had only [...]