I, For one, welcome our new extra-terrestrial overlords!

[self biased]

Astrobiologists confirm extraterrestrial life.

link to the actual paper.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Not quite. This could be ALH84001 redux until there is further examination.

[self biased]

peer review /shpeer review.

[MrFun]

Astrobiologists confirm extraterrestrial life.

link to the actual paper.

If we want extraterrestrial life, why not create them ourselves? Transport water bears to Mars.

[giblets]

What we want is sentient extraterrestrial life. Let's send MrFun to Mars.

[self biased]

i think we'd be better off sending the water bears.

[Guynemer]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/11/meteorite_life_claims_of_fossils_in_a_meteorite_are_still_wrong.html

[MrFun]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astro...ill_wrong.html

damn it

[MrFun]

What would happen though to the water bears that would be transported to Mars? Considering they can live in just about any extreme environment and can survive all kinds of exposure, I would think they would feel at home.

[Elok]

Having a hard time wrapping my head around the logistics of this. As I understand it:

-Our kind of life isn't believed to be possible outside an earthlike environment. So these things didn't grow in deep space.
-There's no earthlike environment in the solar system but Earth. Maybe Venus or somewhere used to be Earthlike, but then what happened?
-It takes one hell of a long time for anything to get here from other star systems.

Putting it all together, life developed on a suitable planet who-knows-where, but got blasted into deep space by some cosmic catastrophe. It then spent hundreds of thousands or millions of years drifting through space before coincidentally crashing into another suitable planet, namely ours. And, if one buys into this panspermia business, the stuff was still viable after all that time zipping through cosmic rays at about five kelvin (also this staggering happenstance has occurred at least twice now). Unless it was directed panspermia, in which case where did the aliens come from and why did they travel light years to dump alien microbes and then never come back?

XPost, n/m, tempest in teapot--but I still wanna know who buys into this panspermia idea.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Some precursors of life (aminonitriles and simple amino acids) have been observed in insterstellar dust clouds. Primitive life may well exist in relatively non-hostile environments in this solar system. Prokaryotic cells, phages, etc. One hyposthesis for how we ended up with eukaryotic cells is infection of prokaryotes by phages resulting ultimately in a symbiotic organism - this was advanced some years ago to explain the origins of mitochondrial DNA within cells that is completely distinct from nuclear DNA. Really interesting stuff, but it takes a lot of familiarity with the technical literature and a solid background in the underlying sciences to understand the real stuff, not just the pieces watered down for the popular press.

[Elok]

Wait, how'd we observe microscopic chemical compounds in interstellar space? Has one of those probes from the seventies made it that far?

I'd heard of the speculation re: mitochondria, but don't see why either organism has to be extraterrestrial in origin. Still, if primitive life could exist on Titan or somewhere, I guess that makes things more plausible. Gracias.

[Uncle Sparky]

Unless it was directed panspermia, in which case where did the aliens come from and why did they travel light years to dump alien microbes and then never come back?

Adolescent male aliens?

[MrFun]

Having a hard time wrapping my head around the logistics of this. As I understand it:

-Our kind of life isn't believed to be possible outside an earthlike environment. So these things didn't grow in deep space.
-There's no earthlike environment in the solar system but Earth. Maybe Venus or somewhere used to be Earthlike, but then what happened?
-It takes one hell of a long time for anything to get here from other star systems.

Putting it all together, life developed on a suitable planet who-knows-where, but got blasted into deep space by some cosmic catastrophe. It then spent hundreds of thousands or millions of years drifting through space before coincidentally crashing into another suitable planet, namely ours. And, if one buys into this panspermia business, the stuff was still viable after all that time zipping through cosmic rays at about five kelvin (also this staggering happenstance has occurred at least twice now). Unless it was directed panspermia, in which case where did the aliens come from and why did they travel light years to dump alien microbes and then never come back?

XPost, n/m, tempest in teapot--but I still wanna know who buys into this panspermia idea.

I thought panspermia was a theory that organic molecules originated from meteors or comets. Not that life itself originated from meteors or comets.

[MrFun]

Besides that, given what we know about water bears here on Earth, why does life have to have a suitable planet similar to Earth, in order to evolve and survive?