this living universe
2010-Sep-01, Wednesday 09:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mellowtiggerBlood raining from the sky may be a common occurrence. No kidding.
Life may be ubiquitous. Evidence slowly accumulates that panspermia is the way the universe operates. If true, then Earth is special only because it is prolific, not because it represents a unique achievement.
Many years ago, I read stories about the "red rain" that fell in India. Yeah, blood from the sky. The truly weird part of the story is that even microscopically, the strange rain still looked very similar to blood. There were "cells" in the water, and they replicated without dna. Now, finally, there is more to report on the very interesting news.
We have shown that the red cells found in the Red Rain (which fell on Kerala, India, in 2001) survive and grow after incubation for periods of up to two hours at 121 oC . Under these conditions daughter cells appear within the original mother cells and the number of cells in the samples increases with length of exposure to 121 oC. No such increase in cells occurs at room temperature, suggesting that the increase in daughter cells is brought about by exposure of the Red Rain cells to high temperatures. This is an independent confirmation of results reported earlier by two of the present authors, claiming that the cells can replicate under high pressure at temperatures up to 300 oC. The flourescence behaviour of the red cells is shown to be in remarkable correspondence with the extended red emission observed in the Red Rectangle planetary nebula and other galactic and extragalactic dust clouds, suggesting, though not proving, an extraterrestrial origin.
- http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.4960
So life might exist scattered throughout the vast expanse of "empty" space. Such life would rain down upon our tiny ball of dirt (that we affectionately call Earth) as we fly through interstellar fields of dust particles hosting microscopic "spores" of primitive life.
Ain't that a kick in the rubber parts?
Life may be ubiquitous. Evidence slowly accumulates that panspermia is the way the universe operates. If true, then Earth is special only because it is prolific, not because it represents a unique achievement.
Many years ago, I read stories about the "red rain" that fell in India. Yeah, blood from the sky. The truly weird part of the story is that even microscopically, the strange rain still looked very similar to blood. There were "cells" in the water, and they replicated without dna. Now, finally, there is more to report on the very interesting news.We have shown that the red cells found in the Red Rain (which fell on Kerala, India, in 2001) survive and grow after incubation for periods of up to two hours at 121 oC . Under these conditions daughter cells appear within the original mother cells and the number of cells in the samples increases with length of exposure to 121 oC. No such increase in cells occurs at room temperature, suggesting that the increase in daughter cells is brought about by exposure of the Red Rain cells to high temperatures. This is an independent confirmation of results reported earlier by two of the present authors, claiming that the cells can replicate under high pressure at temperatures up to 300 oC. The flourescence behaviour of the red cells is shown to be in remarkable correspondence with the extended red emission observed in the Red Rectangle planetary nebula and other galactic and extragalactic dust clouds, suggesting, though not proving, an extraterrestrial origin.
- http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.4960
So life might exist scattered throughout the vast expanse of "empty" space. Such life would rain down upon our tiny ball of dirt (that we affectionately call Earth) as we fly through interstellar fields of dust particles hosting microscopic "spores" of primitive life.
Ain't that a kick in the rubber parts?
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Date: 2010-Sep-01, Wednesday 08:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-Sep-01, Wednesday 09:28 pm (UTC)