Per Gizmodo, NASA is preparing to announce the discovery of an entirely new form of life:

Hours before their special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything.

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

But not this one. This one is completely different. We knew that there were bacteria that processed arsenic, but this bacteria–discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California–is actually made of arsenic. The phosphorus is absent from its DNA. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.

Interesting conversation developing in the comments on the Gizmodo story — people trying to figure out how significant this is, some expressing disappointment that what’s being announced is not the discovery of alien life.

Two points I’d like to make on that.

1. This is huge. How can anyone not see tthat this is huge?

2. Of course it’s alien life. Whether it developed on this planet independently  or it was deposited here by some meteor — this is alien life.

To borrow a phrase from our most recent podcast, this is at the very least a “proof of concept” for alien life.

If it’s from this planet, is there some path by which it could have evolved from common ancestors of the rest of the biosphere? If so, how could that have happened? Every other living thing on earth shares the same chemistry — but not these bacteria.

And if it’s NOT from this planet…

Let’s just say that raises some questios, too.

Image via Wikipedia

Phil and Stephen discuss the implications of the discovery of the first potentially habitable planet
outside the solar system. What does the existence of Gliese 581g imply
about the existence of more such worlds? What does it tell us about the
potential for life elsewhere in the galaxy.

If we’re ever to travel to a planet such as 581g, how will we get there? And what will motivate us to go?

 

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Image via Wikipedia

Brian Wang has some additional thoughts on potential technologies for starship propulsion. There’s no shortage of possible approaches, that’s for sure. It turns out that the star drive used in Avatar is a plausible choice — who knew?

While some are dismissing interstellar travel as hopelessly unrealistic and/or pointless, Brian begs to differ. We need to be at a different level of technological and economic development in order to seriously consider mounting such an effort, but Brian says there’s a way to get there. It begins with, of all things, weather control:

If we have moderate levels of molecular nanotech or really push non-molecular nanotech so that we can make 20 million tons of the balloons for the Hall Weather control machine

The balloon needs to be somewhere between a millimeter and a centimeter
in size. It has a very thin shell of diamond, maybe just a nanometer
thick. It’s round, and it has inside it an equatorial plane that is a
mirror. If you squished it flat, you would only have a few nanometers
thick of material. Although you could build a balloon out of materials
that we build balloons out of now, it would not be economical for what
I’m going to use it for.

Then that also gives us Kardashev level 1. Current world energy
usage and generation is at about 20 terawatts. Getting all solar power
means about 2000-5000 times current power levels. We would be 1000
times richer and able to spend 1000 times more on space without
increasing the fraction of the overall economy to space. The overall
fraction is about 2 million to 20 million times less than overall
energy and resources.

Currently about 12% of the respondents to our survey on motivations for star travel say that we’ll never go. Presumably, several of these folks are transhumanists who predict that the singularity will give us new projects to work on and that implementing the mega-engineering required to achieve the Kardashev levels will be thought a poor use of resources.

And they could be on to something. If we’re all uploaded cyber beings, there are easier ways of getting around in deep space than building massive starships. But then we may not all go that direction. A remnant of mostly original substrate humanity might decide to develop such technology — if their robot / transhuman overlords allow them to, that is.

Image via Wikipedia

The discovery of the first potentially habitable earth-like planet raises questions about humanity’s future in interstellar space. Will we, in fact, “explore strange new worlds” and “seek out new life and new civilizations?” In my previous post I suggested that discovery of habitable, earth-like planets may give us the impetus to begin serious manned exploration of interstellar space.

That’s assuming we have the technology. But then, wanting to go badly enough will play a large role in how and whether we ever develop the technology. If we do ever travel to the stars, which of the reasons listed below do you think is most likely to be our primary motivation to do so? We’d like to know what you think. Please chime in via the survey and comments below.

Apparently not everyone was seeing the links to the results way down at the bottom, so I’m putting them up here, too.   View Totals          View breakdowns