Did extraterrestrial's spark life on earth?

Originally posted by undo
bridas,

Well, you missed Revelation 20-21, the arrival of new city jerusalem.

And Revelation 9, the opening of the bottomless pit and arrival of those flying terrors.

I think the ones tinkering with our species though, are the rebel angels, the fallen. They're disobeying the prime directive, if you will, and it's been the source of most human suffering since this whole thing began.

Originally posted by Sun Matrix
Aren't we 25,000 light years from the nearest galaxy? That pretty far...and isn't that traveling 186,000 plus miles per second?
That's pretty fast..........and for 25,000 years.........I don't have that kind of blind faith

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the shuttle travels at about 292 miles per second and looses heat tiles. To upgrade a craft to go 186,000 miles a second is quite an upgrade...............And that's still 25,000 light years to the next Galaxy.

How old do you "reckon" these aliens are? And how long do they live?

'Directed Panspermia' suggests that life may be distributed by an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. Crick and Orgel argued that DNA encapsulated within small grains could be fired in all directions by such a civilization in order to spread life within the universe. Their abstract in the 1973 Icarus paper reads:

"It now seems unlikely that extraterrestrial living organisms could have reached the earth either as spores driven by the radiation pressure from another star or as living organisms embedded in a meteorite. As an alternative to these nineteenth-century mechanisms, we have considered Directed Panspermia, the theory that organisms were deliberately transmitted to the earth by intelligent beings on another planet. We conclude that it is possible that life reached the earth in this way, but that the scientific evidence is inadequate at the present time to say anything about the probability. We draw attention to the kinds of evidence that might throw additional light on the topic."

Crick and Orgel further expanded on this idea in their 1981 book, 'Life Itself.'. They believed there was little chance that microorganisms could be transported between planets and across interstellar distances by random accident. But a technological civilization could direct panspermia by stocking a spacecraft with a genetic starter kit. They suggested that a large sample of different microorganisms with minimal nutritional needs could survive the long journey between worlds.

Source.

The earth has existed for approximately 4.5 billion years. In the beginning it was merely a radioactive aggregate with a surface temperature reaching for the melting point of metal. not really a hospitable place for life. Yet there are fossils of single-celled beings that are approximately 3.5 billion years old. The existence of a single cell necessarily implies the presence of DNA, with its 4-letter "alphabet" (A, G, C, T), and of proteins, with their 20-letter "alphabet" (the 20 amino acids), as well as a "translation mechanism" between the two - given that the instructions for the construction of proteins are coded in the language of DNA. Crick writes: "It is quite remarkable that such a mechanism exists at all and even more remarkable that every living cell, whether animal, plant, or microbial, contains a version of it"

P.76 The Cosmic Serpent - Jeremy Narby
ISBN 0-87477-964-2

Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA is a nucleic acid molecule that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all living organisms

Source.

The code is read by copying stretches of DNA into the related nucleic acid RNA, in a process called transcription. Most of these RNA molecules are used to synthesize proteins, but others are used directly in structures such as ribosomes and spliceosomes.


Source.

www.springerlink.com...

hloroplast division without DNA synthesis during the life cycle of the unicellular algaCyanidium caldarium M-8 as revealed by quantitative fluorescence microscopy
Journal Protoplasma
Publisher Springer Wien
ISSN 0033-183X (Print) 1615-6102 (Online)
Issue Volume 149, Numbers 2-3 / June, 1989

Chloroplast division without DNA synthesis during the life cycle of the unicellular algaCyanidium caldarium M-8 as revealed by quantitative fluorescence microscopy

T. Kuroiwa1 Contact Information, H. Nagashima2 and I. Fukuda3
(1) Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, University of Tokyo, Tokyo
(2) Faculty of Industrial Science and Technology, Department of Biology, Tokyo
(3) Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Science University of Tokyo, Tokyo

Received: 3 September 1988 Accepted: 24 January 1989
Summary The behavior and DNA content of the cell and chloroplast nuclei (synonymous with nucleoids; ct-nuclei) during the life cycle have been studied in a synchronized population of cells of the unicellular algaCyanidium caldarium M-8. Cells were examined by epifluorescence microscopy after staining with 4prime,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole (DAPI), and by fluorimetry using a video-intensified microscope photon-counting system (VIMPICS). The young cell contains a single petal-like chloroplast, a spherical cell nucleus and several mitochondria, and the cell nucleus and the chloroplast divide in that order just prior to cytokinesis. The chloroplast contains a ring-shaped ct-nucleus which is located at the periphery of the chloroplast during the life cycle. During the first 40 h after the initiation of sychronous cultures, the young cell and its chloroplast increase markedly in size, and the DNA contents per cell nucleus and per ct-nucleus increase approximately two times and 16 times the value in 16-endospore cells, respectively. Four endospore divisions then occur, at intervals of approximately 12 h between 40 h and 90 h, after the initiation of synchronous cultures. The volume of each cell, the volume of each chloroplast, the amount of chloroplast DNA (ct-DNA), and the level of pigmented material in the chloroplast are reduced stepwise after each endospore division until finally, at the 16-endospore stage, they reach approximately 1/16 of the original values for the mother cell. The size of the mitotic spindle also is reduced stepwise as the cell divisions proceed. By contrast, the cell nuclei duplicate their DNA during each endospore division cycle. These results and analysis of other components indicate that the chloroplasts divide into two daughter chloroplasts without any DNA synthesis during four successive cycles of endospore division and also that the DNA content of the chloroplast is intimately related to the volume of the chloroplast and the cell and to the level of pigmented material in the cloroplast, but is not related to the DNA content of the cell nuclei.

Keywords Chloroplast division - Unicellular red alga - Cyanidium caldarium - DNA content
Abbreviations CN cell nucleus - M mitochondrion - CP chloroplast - CPN chloroplast nucleus (ct-nucleus) - PN plastid nucleus (pt-nucleus) - ct-DNA chloroplast DNA - ISC initiation of synchronous culture


www.newstatesman.com...

Life Without Genes
Adrian Woolfson HarperCollins, 420pp, £17.99
ISBN 0002556189

Adrian Woolfson has attempted to discuss and define life, with or without genes, in his new book, Life Without Genes. DNA-based replicators are almost certainly the descendants of earlier self-replicating units of ribonucleic acid (RNA). These, in turn, were more than likely the descendants of self-replicating units derived from materials other than nucleic acids.

It is fascinating to consider the early prehistory of DNA-based life on Earth. The view that an "RNA world" preceded our "DNA world" is now widely held among molecular biologists. Most agree that other organic or inorganic replicators must have preceded the RNA world. Computers and laboratory-based experiments have demonstrated the reality of chemical self-replication. Manipulation of self-replicating machines will provide the foundations of a revolution in "nanotechnology", which may underlie the next giant step in the economic progress of man.

In Life Without Genes, Woolfson has made a bold effort to bring some of these concepts to the general readership. But the problem is that few scientists can present their work with the elegant simplicity of, say, Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould. Many scientists, wedded as they are to precision, cringe when they are asked to disseminate their research to a lay audience. In taking novel concepts and abstract ideas into a more public domain, however, borrowing from poetic technique is indispensable.