Cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov suspects an extraterrestrial origin for bacteria found on the exterior of the ISS:
A Russian cosmonaut claims to have caught aliens. Cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov says he found bacteria clinging to the external surface of the International Space Station that didn't come from the surface of Earth.
Shkaplerov told the Russian news agency that cosmonauts collected the bacteria by swabbing the outside of the space station during space walks years ago.
"And now it turns out that somehow these swabs reveal bacteria that were absent during the launch of the ISS module," Shkapkerov told TASS. "That is, they have come from outer space and settled along the external surface. They are being studied so far and it seems that they pose no danger."
A recent study suggests that interplanetary dust can transport microbes to or from Earth:
Astronomers have long believed that asteroid (or comet) impacts were the only natural way to transport life between planets. However, a new study published November 6 in Astrobiology suggests otherwise.
The study, authored by Professor Arjun Berera from the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy, suggests that life on Earth may have begun when fast-moving streams of space dust carried microscopic organisms to our planet. Berera found that these streams of interplanetary dust are not only capable of transporting particles to Earth, but also from it.
Space Dust Collisions as a Planetary Escape Mechanism (DOI: 10.1089/ast.2017.1662) (DX) (arXiv link above)
Related Stories
Astronauts can now sequence microbes they find on the International Space Station (ISS) without having to send them back to Earth:
Being able to identify microbes in real time aboard the International Space Station, without having to send them back to Earth for identification first, would be revolutionary for the world of microbiology and space exploration. The Genes in Space-3 team turned that possibility into a reality this year, when it completed the first-ever sample-to-sequence process entirely aboard the space station. Results from their investigation were published in Scientific Reports [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-18364-0] [DX].
The ability to identify microbes in space could aid in the ability to diagnose and treat astronaut ailments in real time, as well as assisting in the identification of DNA-based life on other planets. It could also benefit other experiments aboard the orbiting laboratory. Identifying microbes involves isolating the DNA of samples, and then amplifying – or making many copies - of that DNA that can then be sequenced, or identified.
The investigation was broken into two parts: the collection of the microbial samples and amplification by Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), then sequencing and identification of the microbes. NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson conducted the experiment aboard the orbiting laboratory, with NASA microbiologist and the project's Principal Investigator Sarah Wallace and her team watching and guiding her from Houston.
Now Russian cosmonauts can test their crazy ideas. At least, until the ISS gets split apart and deorbited.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Wednesday November 29 2017, @10:00AM (8 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by coolgopher on Wednesday November 29 2017, @10:21AM (2 children)
Well it had to start *somewhere*. And this is a pretty hospitable rock after all.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday November 29 2017, @10:37AM (1 child)
From the Earthian Prison Niggers. They not only reproduce through rape, but also asexually through spores.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @11:49AM
Those are attracted to bait cars, not ISS missions.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday November 29 2017, @10:31AM (4 children)
If these interstellar transport mechanisms are being oversold, then yes, it probably had to develop on Earth by itself.
It could also be microbes that were ejected from Earth but stayed in the vicinity/orbit of Earth.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Redundant) by c0lo on Wednesday November 29 2017, @10:49AM
And this is true... because no extraterrestrials would be so dishonest to oversell anything, much less an interstellar transport mechanism, right?
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @06:31PM (2 children)
Wouldn't it be relatively easy to compare this bacteria's genetic makeup to other terrestrial bacteria?
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday November 29 2017, @06:48PM (1 child)
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=22816&page=1&cid=602924#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
For this swab, maybe, if they don't contaminate it on accident. Maybe it could be a little difficult to distinguish between Earth microbial DNA and Alpha/Proxima Centauri microbial DNA. Especially if one or the other seeded or was seeded in the distant past.
I haven't seen a single instance of a genome sequencer being sent on an unmanned space mission and it doesn't look like there are any in the planning. For example, the proposed Enceladus Life Finder [wikipedia.org] would not come with a sequencer.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Friday December 01 2017, @12:36AM
I think the plan with a place like Enceladus would be to first figure out if there is anything to sequence. If you find life, you can figure out if you need a scooper or a grabber or a harpoon to get a sample. Having the sequencer there on the first mission, with no way to actually get a sample into it would be a bit of a waste.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday November 29 2017, @10:32AM (9 children)
How about a dedicated sterilized satellite in Earth orbit, intended solely to collect and analyze anything that hits it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @10:55AM (8 children)
The point is that you can never be sure that the thing is 100% sterile.
This news makes me as a biologist very sceptical. The fact that you found bacteria on the exterior of the ISS, which weren't present during launch, isn't proof on itself.
There could be dozens of ways for the bacteria to get there (and evolved), from the earth afterwards. But even if we would find "extraterrestrial/alien bacteria", it could
actually be pretty hard to proof that it would be alien (even more if it remotely contains similar building blocks as those found on the earth).
Let's say you would have the following classes:
1 Earth bacteria
2 Earth bacteria "adapted to space", which look somewhat alien
3 Alien bacteria that contain similar building blocks as 1 or 2
4 Alien bacteria, that don't share any similarities with 1, 2 and 3
Everyone expects that we would get 4, which would be the easiest to identify (but earth could be lethal to them or very hard to grow in laboratory conditions), but 3 is
more likely as (bio)chemistry is limited by it's physical properties. How would be proof that 3 is different from 1 or 2? There would be a few leads, but even if they fail
you could en up with an alien bacteria that you can't be fully sure it's alien.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @11:21AM
Just import your alien life forms from Mexico. Why you gotta make thing so complicated?
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Wednesday November 29 2017, @04:08PM
It could be bacteria we were unable to detect when launching the parts of the ISS but are able to detect now with better or different tests.
It could be bacteria that migrated from the inside to the outside of the ISS.
It could be bacteria that traveled from the upper atmosphere of earth to the ISS. Another commenter mentioned this, and I think it's brilliant. We know there are many species of bacteria that we know next to nothing about because we can't grow them in the lab, but we can see their DNA fragments in soil samples, etc.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday November 29 2017, @04:20PM (4 children)
Any life that arose independently from that on Earth would almost certainly be composed of different amino acids (since there doesn't appear to be any particular advantage to the ones we utilize). To say nothing of having evolved different information-storing molecules, organelles, etc. Life is actually pretty inefficient since natural selection makes it extremely difficult to escape from local maximums. Basically, if it's similar enough to be honestly classified as a bacteria, it almost certainly shares common ancestry with Earth life.
Of course that doesn't rule out an extraterrestrial origin - the particular species may have originated on Earth and then spent millenia evolving elsewhere before chance brought it back here. Or Earth life itself may have originated elsewhere - for example Mars was potentially a lush Earthlike world long before Earth cooled enough to form oceans - and life-bearing Mars debris cluttering the solar system would certainly explain the fact that life appears to have been present on Earth from almost the moment it cooled enough to form oceans.
Assuming it is a bacteria, sharing common ancestry with Earth bacteria, given the mind-boggling variety of life on Earth it might be a real challenge to determine whether a newly discovered bacteria species actually originated here or not. Heck, the broad-spectrum DNA sequencing of sea-water suggests that something like 20% of species on Earth are some form of life whose very existence we never even previously suspected.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Crash on Wednesday November 29 2017, @08:28PM (3 children)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Wednesday November 29 2017, @08:43PM (2 children)
What does speed of evolution have to do with the efficiency of the results?
Some things (body shapes and surfaces of swimming animals) are relatively easily optimized. Many others, like photosynthesis, are prone to local maximums - most plant photosynthesis is between 0.1% and 2% efficient at converting available photons to chemical energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by Crash on Thursday November 30 2017, @05:29AM (1 child)
Well life is change. Without change there is not life. Evolutionary change has long been theorized to be on a geological time-scale. Yet we are finding evidence that that may not be the case.
Further, I don't see how stating some low value for the "efficiency of photosynthesis" as a proof of anything, let alone a proof that life is inefficient.
Why would plants generate more energy than they need?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Thursday November 30 2017, @06:49AM
Certainly change (and thus evolution) is inherent in life as we know it, and I've never heard anyone make the claim that it only happens on geologic timescales - it happens in tiny increments with every birth and every death. But evolution just causes change - on its own it's extremely unlikely to cause two unrelated species to have any substantial similarities to each other.
Efficiency matters because that's what drives convergent evolution - sharks and dolphins have extremely similar body shapes because that is a fairly optimal shape for animals that need to travel quickly through the water - physics guides two completely different species to the same basic conclusion because it's an extremely efficient design. Photosynthesis on the other hand is nowhere remotely close to an optimally efficient design, and so if we find alien "plants" that use photosynthesis we'd expect them to use some other mechanism to perform the same basic function - efficiency would not guide a different species to find the same solution.
And efficiency matters because it increases your ability to survive and prosper, which is the driving force behind natural selection. Start with two almost identical seeds planted side by side, the only difference being that one has a mutation that makes it twice as efficient at photosynthesis. That difference means that from the moment they push their first leaf into the sun, the mutant is collecting twice as much energy from the sun as its twin. That means it can grow its leaves faster, absorbing even more sunlight, and grow its roots faster, absorbing more water an nutrients from the soil. And the bigger and faster it grows, the fewer resources are available to its twin. Even if the twin doesn't get starved out entirely, the mutant will be able to afford to produce a lot more seeds, and all the offspring that inherit its mutation will have a similar advantage - after a thousand generations there probably won't be any of the original non-mutant plant left - it will either have been outcompeted into extinction, or have developed new mutations that give it an advantage in some other way, possibly even letting it migrate into an ecosystem where the original mutants can't survive to compete in the first place.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday November 29 2017, @05:50PM
Considering that they have divided the Earth-native bacteria into separate kingdoms which branched apart during the Cambrian (the Precambrian?), I would expect that a genetic analysis of any alien bacteria to reveal at minimum that they weren't a member of any existing kingdom of life. This might not be literal proof that they were alien, but would be an extremely good signal.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday November 29 2017, @10:47AM (5 children)
Life, that thing we think started somewhere other than Earth, is capable of escaping the Earth and going elsewhere.
Is that a shock? We know that there are all kinds of insects that can reach amazing heights - bumblebees over Mount Everest and all sorts.
When you then dial down to any kind of microscopic, lighter-than-air, single-celled organism? That it can escape the earth, be blown by freak chance out into the void? Not surprising. The world isn't a snooker ball or perfect boundary and zero forces, it has tides, winds, is hit by waves of radiation and outside objects all the time (which must then splash *something* back up, no?).
Our own heavy equipment has floated off out into the void, so something that weighs almost nothing that gets swept up in the remants of a solar flare? Yeah, it's going to be pulled outside of Earth's gravitational influence. And then it might land on something and reproduce. And I imagine there is a vast - but extremely low density - cloud of "life" around us at all times, extending out to the sweep of other planets (on the planetary axes) and beyond. It doesn't have to be visible or even detectable. We're talking microscopic cells that multiply and freeze quite well inside a vast expanding sphere millions of miles square.
However... something on the ISS? I would be much more inclined to blame stuff we've sent to the ISS or the ISS itself rather than some magic space dust from a billion miles away suddenly landing on a tiny part of a tiny space station orbiting a tiny planet and breeding to the point it's visible in a matter of only years.
Not impossible. Practically guaranteed somewhere, in fact. Just improbable, given the statistics, and the vast overwhelming cloud of life just a few mm away inside or the huge active gaia sitting a few miles underneath it.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @10:58AM
I'll tell you what it actually is.
The global warming deniers and Trump supporters who excrete here, on S/N, an amount of septic matter which reaches astronomical proportion.
(Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Wednesday November 29 2017, @12:46PM
https://www.popsci.com/alien-bacteria-international-space-station [popsci.com]
+++
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @02:18PM (1 child)
At what point do we ever believe life that we discover did not originate from Earth? Maybe we find bacterial life on Mars - did it come from Earth? It's possible. Or maybe it came from whatever seeded Earth with life (if that's the case).
Seems the only irrefutable evidence would be to find life that's not carbon based.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday November 29 2017, @05:57PM
The thing is, there's no possibility of globally irrefutable evidence. All you can do is estimate probabilities. And that's true for everything. E.g. a flat-earther was in the news yesterday. To me that's a joke, but he appears to seriously disbelieve the evidence that they earth is not flat.
What evidence will cause you to believe that bacteria are alien? Different people will be convinced by different evidence. I'd be convinced that the evidence favored that if their genetic code didn't fit within the kingdoms of known bacteria. I wouldn't be convinced that the proof was irrefutable even if they were silicon based. I have a large range where I'm not totally convinced either way. Many other people seem to have a narrow window, and once their mind is made up one way they are reluctant to change when new evidence appears.
All that said, the summary didn't offer any evidence that I considered sufficient to cause me to read the article, much less to make up my mind.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Thursday November 30 2017, @11:37AM
Very likely microbes floating about in the atmosphere can be pushed out into orbit ahead of a volcano plume.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @11:16AM
I for one, welcome our new bacterial overlords and will gladly point them to purveyors of anti-biotics so they may be summarily rounded up into their internment camps.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @11:18AM (11 children)
That little quote, at the bottom of Soylent pages? This time, it says,
WTF happened to Gagarin? http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a20350/yuri-gagarin-death/ [popularmechanics.com] He hasn't been purged from history, has he?
So - America will assuredly deny that some Russian has made first contact with extraterrestrial life. If those bacteria eat the cosmonauts, and then the space station, they'll just be purged from history, so that an American can be "first".
Hmmm - maybe after eating the space station, those bacteria will drop in on Washington D.C.
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Wednesday November 29 2017, @11:41AM
He died, really, that is what happened to him.
Highly toxic environment, with lotsa scumbags competing on donations and influence traffic in that swamp.
Sorry, you'll need to vote them out, I doubt the flimsy space bacteria can do something about politicians and lawyers.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Informative) by requerdanos on Wednesday November 29 2017, @01:09PM (9 children)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Wednesday November 29 2017, @01:38PM (7 children)
I occasionally mumble that US lost the space race for exactly this reason. But US PR is better.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday November 29 2017, @01:55PM (6 children)
The U.S. actually won the space race (so far) because we won the Cold War. The space race improved STEM education in both countries. It hastened the development of spy satellites and other useful technologies. The U.S. achieved the sexier milestone of putting a man on the moon first, but didn't do anything useful with the Moon. Both countries threw some expensive space stations into orbit. The USSR collapsed, allowing the West to pillage Russia in the 90s, enabling today's dictator Putin to set back the Russian people some more. And now SpaceX and other domestic companies are making Russian launchers obsolete, while Russia's own feeble space efforts (in comparison to NASA, ESA, JAXA, ISRO, etc.) are going nowhere [slate.com] and launches are failing [siberiantimes.com].
Russia is garbage, and the space race doesn't end until many centuries from now or when there is only one participant "racing".
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @03:59PM (1 child)
I am not sure if the cold war allowed us to win; I think it had something to do with financial viability.
Even the US concluded it cost too much to keep chest pounding in space. After that last moon landing they shelved the rest of the plans related to it and here we are today. Still not any farther ahead in that regard (not too many moon or mars landings of people from what I can see in their plans... just spending money to look busy with that Orion capsule or something... if you call that winning, I am disappoint). Although I am impressed with the probe's visit to Pluto, and disappointed that the Cassini satellite couldn't be parked in an orbit that decayed until the plutonium decayed more than the orbit and became of limited use.
It doesnt seem reasonable that they're afraid to contaminate the moons when flying through gaps in a debris ring is considered less risky; one impact of something too small to see on camera would have blown that thing to smitheereens and sent whatever was growing in it in every direction and become part of the ring that rained down on the assorted moons nearby.
instead, it seems like they too ran out of money due to political constraints.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 29 2017, @04:20PM
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/analysis-nasas-cassini-probe-must-destroyed [pbs.org]
It seems to me that the "death dive" orbits into the rings had a low risk of destroying the spacecraft and a zero risk of sending the debris on a trajectory that would cause it to rain down on the moons thought to have life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Saturn%27s_Rings_PIA03550.jpg [wikipedia.org]
Meanwhile, sending Cassini to its destruction in Saturn allowed NASA to collect data that would have been otherwise impossible for it to collect.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday November 29 2017, @10:38PM (3 children)
I respectfully suggest that though the US won the cold war, it didn't win every battle; and the space race was a battle the US lost, despite that nice manned moon program that no one's beaten since.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 30 2017, @04:02AM (2 children)
There was a race to reach the moon with a manned landing, and the USSR failed there. The U.S. may have had a PR victory in the space race "battle", but it was earned. Since then, what we've done with unmanned probes and space telescopes has been far more interesting. Great exploration of Pluto, Ceres, Saturn, etc. And the science that has come out of Hubble [wikipedia.org] and Kepler [wikipedia.org] is just overwhelming. We pretty much dominate these types of missions, although ESA [wikipedia.org] is becoming more prominent.
Obviously, if China were to beat the U.S. to a manned Mars landing, we would be taking a huge L and the world would see it as another sign of the end of American dominance. A SpaceX manned landing would be acceptable but would be taken as a sign of increasing commercial importance of space activity. Or of Musky vanity.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 30 2017, @05:13AM (1 child)
US espionage of Soviet designs may also have been a factor. I have always been curious if the US actually copied any of the technology:
https://www.popsci.com/cias-bold-kidnapping-soviet-spacecraft [popsci.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 30 2017, @05:20AM
Slate link [slate.com] I posted has this:
Maybe that could be interpreted as NASA sucking up any Russian space station innovations that may have existed during the development of the ISS. Which we'll be applying in the future if we put stations around the Moon or Mars.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by J053 on Wednesday November 29 2017, @07:43PM
Kids these days...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Wednesday November 29 2017, @11:48AM (2 children)
Does its DNA match any earthly bacteria? Maybe give a hint as if it came from US?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 29 2017, @04:24PM (1 child)
If it has DNA as it's information storing molecule, we almost certainly share a common ancestor...
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Wednesday November 29 2017, @06:06PM
DNA wouldn't be quite sufficient to convince me of that. A genetic code with different nucleotides would convince me it was alien (unless it used RNA, of course). But DNA is one of the few things we know whose components exist in clouds of space dust. Of course, this could just be finding what we are looking for...
OTOH, the code that the ribosome uses to translate RNA messages into proteins appears to be totally arbitrary. It *that* matches, then it's almost certainly native, or else we aren't. And all known earth-native life forms use the same code (except for a couple of recent artificial ones).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @11:48AM (10 children)
Next they will tell us Aliens do exist and the universe is teeming with intelligent life. Not necessarily material in nature, but life. "Finding" bacteria is the first step. The trivial issues we are told about are just cover for what happens behind closed doors. There is 100% cooperation between U.S and Russia about Aliens and Alien technology and they both agreed to keep it under wraps. Alien technology and Human technology can solve all our energy and food problems but some people are keen on keeping us all slaves and reducing our population so the New World Order can be implemented. The NWO Army will be armed with exotic weapons using both Alien and Human technology and the soldiers will be brainwashed to get compliance. They are waiting for Humans to make better killing robots so Humans can be used less and less and eventually wiped out. I say let us put all those who make such heinous plots in prisons specifically designed and built for them.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @12:14PM (1 child)
The 1%'ers ( the banking elite ) could crash the entire system, sans them, anytime they want to right now. They've got everyone in debt. Just call the debt.
Instant civil war between the middle class and lower class, with the upper class absconding to underground shelter to wait out the melee.
Probably take three to five years for the aboveground melee to sort itself out, leaving maybe 1% of the original population. And of those surviving, they will have street fighting skills, not building skills. The type that hoard ammo, not tools. I believe that in a survival scenario, those best at taking other people's stuff will be better suited for short time survival than those who build stuff. Those who build stuff won't build because there won't be much sense building anything that someone else is going to take. The building class will probably suffer the worst, so when the melee is over, what the elite have to work with is people who are hell-bent on killing for survival, and will be pretty hard to manage. People who will shoot them in the back at the first chance they get. Like today in some "bad areas" of some of our previously prosperous cities.
So there won't be anyone left to do the grunt work of building all their fancy things, running the infrastructure, and preparing the elite all their fancy foods. When they run out of their stored cache of goods, its stone age again for the elite as well. Look at the Biblical account of the Kings of the Earth of the day. I believe all of us today live a better life than even the King of old. I believe few Kings want to regress to that kind of lifestyle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @02:01PM
Offtopic, sure.
Calling the debt but without enforcement of the call means no one will give back anything. All debts will go to zero all of a sudden and we can all start fresh. If some rat-faced banker shows up wanting his money back, he will be hanged from the nearest tree.
Humans when left to their own devices are quite smart and adapt quickly. Turn off the television and the population's I.Q jumps many points (over a period of time).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday November 29 2017, @12:38PM (6 children)
I would prefer for this scenario to be true, because it would likely (not necessarily) mean that faster-than-light travel is real, and it would mean that we have usable alien technological advances in our grasp that could solve a lot of problems and make colonizing every rock in the solar system a cinch. Defeating this global elite holding onto the technology would not be impossible. 100% cooperation between nations is probably more like 90%, and there is internal dissent.
Another scenario is that the U.S. and other nations did get a hold of crashed UFOs, but have kept the benefits secret and in-house (Air Force) out of a misguided protocol rather than an evil plot to dominate humanity. Maybe they have an alien power source, or at least an advanced alien version of EmDrive. If you read some of Roger Shawyer's EmDrive 2.0 and EmDrive 3.0 claims, you can gather that the flying cars and other stuff that would be enabled could be very destabilizing for humanity.
Back to reality, we have population likely cruising to 10-11 billion, a low skilled jobs crisis that will be made very apparent by AI and automation (no, all of the fry cooks in the world can't simply educate themselves and become engineers and lifestyle consultants), and individuals on the ground capable of a lot of destruction using small arms, explosives, or biotechnology. The people in charge have a good case (to them) for dominating humanity to prevent worse chaos. No alien technology is needed to build killbots or supersoldiers. I think overpopulation is an overrated concern, but you could easily see a cabal disagreeing and doing whatever they can to keep parts of the world at war (wow, so difficult). If shit really hits the fan, maybe the elites will move to Mars. They might have luxury beer [newsweek.com] there at least.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @02:24PM
The people of this world do not need to work to be fed. They are made to think that no work means no food and that we all need to secure employment otherwise we won't be able to afford food.
Machines make building stuff easier, but in the wrong hands (as now), machines can be harmful. A killer robot could have been a farm robot growing food. A giant aircraft carrier could have been a robot building housing for people to live in.
It is a possibility.
They start wars in different places and see what the effects are. Then they gather results of that war and decide the next step. Some members of the cabal may suggest civil war, an invasion or a nuclear war to further the agenda. The implementation details are left to the cabal members. The agenda was decided long ago between the forefathers of the cabal members and alien races.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 29 2017, @03:25PM (4 children)
"faster-than-light travel is real . . . colonizing every rock in the solar system"
Seriously, Takyon? FTL, and colonizing shitty rocks that won't support life without a LOT of time and effort expended? Tell ya what - I'll take the FTL, you can have all of the solar system's rocks. ONE of the rocks will be useful, I suppose, as a forward base, or outpost, from which to head out into interstellar space. The earth is pretty far down in a gravity hole. The moon is better than the earth, Mars is better than the moon, and it only gets better going further out. I already gave you all the rocks - I'm willing to sign a lease for a few square miles on one of them. Make it cheap, or I'll just build a huge-ass habitat to use for my outpost.
You should read the Expanse series, or watch the movies. Inhabiting rocks with microgravity has some rather serious drawbacks. I'd rather go to Alpha Centauri, look around, and if I don't like what I see, I can move on, toward the galactic center. Somewhere down there, where stars swarm like bees, there have to be several hundred easily colonized earthlike planets. We can probably even take our choice of the number of moons, and still be very much like earth. The distaff portion of our species seems to put a lot of importance on the moon's cycles - why don't we pick a system with six moons, and really confuse the girls? "Not tonight, honey, moon number six is partially occluded by moon number 4, and I'm never comfortable having sex when six is occluded!"
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Wednesday November 29 2017, @04:00PM (1 child)
That PARENTHETICAL and COMMA are there for a REASON.
Even if aliens have visited or crash landed on Earth, there is no guarantee that faster-than-light travel is possible. Which means that going anywhere, even Alpha Centauri, will still take a long ass time. The aliens could have gotten here by sending out thousands of probes to nearby stars. What's more likely to crash in Roswell, the FTL-capable ship with alien pilots, or the throwaway "unmanned" probe controlled by an AI?
Colonizing or mining every rock in the solar system is today's goal based on today's assumption that we won't have FTL, possibly ever. I think we can safely assume that if the aliens don't come packing FTL, they would still have better propulsion than us. Without FTL, even places with craptastically low gravity like Ceres or Pluto are much better colonization targets than the nearest "Earth-like exoplanets". You see rocks, I see REAL ESTATE and RESOURCES. They're relatively accessible. Even places around 1,000 AU away (possibly including Planet Nine) are less than a half a percent of the distance to Proxima Centauri. If you can somehow get to Planet Nine's hypothetical location in 10 years, it would still take thousands of years to get to Proxima Centauri.
That said, even with FTL + EmDrive we get a good deal. We could mine all these rocks and credibly bring the material to the surface of Earth. Iron, gold, platinum, titanium - it's all out there for the taking. Put it on the Moon or Mars instead. There's no biomes to disrupt, and industrial greenhouse gas emissions on Mars are desirable.
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(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday November 30 2017, @11:37PM
> the FTL-capable ship with alien pilots, or the throwaway "unmanned" probe controlled by an AI?
After needlessly offending AI (duly noted) parent travels into his ABS ESP parking sensors automatic transmission car, following the gps instructions.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 29 2017, @05:25PM (1 child)
Once you've got the habitat, then all you need is raw materials. Dead rocks will offer that just as well as a living world. Not nearly as exciting, but if you're going to wander between stars without already having a good idea as to whether there's anything interesting there, then even with FTL you're going to spend a long time living in a cramped tin can, when you could have been living in a much more spacious and luxurious tin can back home (at least assuming mass constraints still apply to FTL)
Also, you might not want to pin too many hopes on the galactic core for life - where the stars swarm like bees, so do the frequency of world-baking, atmosphere-stripping supernovas.
(Score: 1) by Crash on Wednesday November 29 2017, @08:48PM
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday November 30 2017, @11:31PM
> and the universe is teeming with intelligent life.
Unfortunately for this planet, intelligent life is not distributed evenly.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @11:57AM
"More recently, fullerenes (or "buckyballs"), have been detected in other nebulae.[81] Fullerenes are also implicated in the origin of life; according to astronomer Letizia Stanghellini, "It's possible that buckyballs from outer space provided seeds for life on Earth."[82] In September 2012, NASA scientists reported results of analog studies in vitro that PAHs, subjected to interstellar medium (ISM) conditions, are transformed, through hydrogenation, oxygenation, and hydroxylation, to more complex organics—"a step along the path toward amino acids and nucleotides, the raw materials of proteins and DNA, respectively".[83][84] Further, as a result of these transformations, the PAHs lose their spectroscopic signature which could be one of the reasons "for the lack of PAH detection in interstellar ice grains, particularly the outer regions of cold, dense clouds or the upper molecular layers of protoplanetary disks."[83][84]
In June 2013, PAHs were detected in the upper atmosphere of Titan, the largest moon of the planet Saturn.[85]"
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday November 29 2017, @12:16PM (2 children)
Sounds like the introduction to The Blob (the good one, not the horrible remakes), without the meteorite and it hasn't started to devour cosmonauts (yet).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Sourcery42 on Wednesday November 29 2017, @02:39PM
I was thinking the Andromeda Strain. Didn't it begin a little like this, it's been a while? Of course everyone on the ISS would be dead by now...
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Wednesday November 29 2017, @05:07PM
I was thinking Andromeda Strain. But Blob too I guess, yeah.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Wednesday November 29 2017, @12:47PM (2 children)
That's kind of like saying that our food came about by trucks carrying it to our local supermarket: It says how it got there, sure, but not how it 'may have begun' at all.
Space dust trucking company would have had to pick up a load in order to deliver that load. It would have to have already begun to be picked up thusly. Saying 'life is alien' does not mean you have solved 'how did life begin,' or even 'what was your last port of call.'
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @02:49PM
Obviously, it started on the planet of the first race:
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ancient_humanoid [wikia.com]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 29 2017, @06:15PM
That depends on how organized you thing the delivered components were. Fairly complex chemicals have been detected in dust clouds out in space, and the larger chemicals are more difficult to detect. So large organic molecules could well have arrived as the planet finished being built. (Earlier it may well have been too hot.) If so, similar life forms might be widely spread on every suitable planet, and perhaps on planets that aren't suitable for our variety of life some different form might be fostered. Titan may be a good test site for this, though Jupiter or Saturn would be better.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by ewk on Wednesday November 29 2017, @01:21PM
Well, no danger that we can think of right now....
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(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday November 29 2017, @01:24PM (1 child)
For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return (genesis 3:19)
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @03:49PM
Or in your case, bots are silicon based, made of sand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @04:19PM (2 children)
The key to ruling out an Earthly origin would be unrecognizable DNA and perhaps chemistry that doesn't match known organisms. Being on the outside of the ISS is not evidence of non-Terran life by itself.
It's also possible it came from another planet but still has DNA and chemistry similar to Terran life, for Earth may have gotten its life from the outside also. But in that case we couldn't really tell the difference because it would share a common ancestor(s).
If they really did find extraterrestrial life, that would be a Yuuuuge discovery; and finally something to justify the station's huge cost.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 29 2017, @04:33PM (1 child)
I don't think any space mission has added or integrated a DNA sequencer yet. The technology has gotten cheaper and more compact in recent years but you haven't seen a miniature life detection + genome sequencing instrument on a Mars rover or flown into the geysers of Enceladus or whatever.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 30 2017, @02:25AM
It would probably have to be verified with sample returns. Even if a DNA sequencer did go into space, the possibility it's merely detecting contamination would be hard to rule out. The context would have to be carefully studied.
(Score: 2) by leftover on Wednesday November 29 2017, @04:33PM (2 children)
How about this: take an assortment of well-known Earth bacteria, paint them on Petri dishes, mount them on the outside of the ISS. Monitor them for survival certainly but also for changes in DNA and chemistry as they get mauled by the various energies out there. I wonder if any would be recognizable after a year.
And by the way, if you find dust on the ISS you should think first of the dustball you are orbiting closely rather than some hypothetical other dustball light-years away.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday November 29 2017, @04:35PM (1 child)
https://phys.org/news/2010-08-microbes-survive-year-space.html [phys.org]
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(Score: 2) by leftover on Wednesday November 29 2017, @08:43PM
This, exactly! Did they try to sequence the DNA? The article doesn't say. Nothing about what form they were in either. As for tardigrades, I vote alien.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.