This is not an idle question. It is one thing to anticipate a long
drawn out evolution of organic life from its raw beginnings once. We
are seeing parts of that argument falling into place. Yet it is sort
of pointless to try repeating the process when simple inoculation is
plausible even by the accidents of the universe but more convincingly
by deliberate choice.
Venus is ready to be terraformed by the simple expedient of adding
ample water and methane. Once the bombardment is over, it is no
trick to add a little biology to go to work. It is really just too
easy.
More pointedly, there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to
speculate that the current version of Homo Sapians was enhanced a
couple of times over the past 200,000 years. The break is huge and
abrupt from our obvious lineages. It is not a missing link but a
missing chain.
This item asks the more critical question of early coding. Is it all
better ordered that it needs to be by natural choices. Were
alternatives omitted to preserve patterns?
All we really know is that if we had the choices to make we would
produce the best possible launch code and then go send it out into
the universe.
What we are really saying is that once life is initiated, intelligent
design really takes over because life can do just that.
Another circumstantial aspect not yet understood is that someone saw
fit to cause Jupiter to calve
Venus quite recently. What is presently missing is the comet bombardment that brings water and carbon. This takes time to bring about once the Venus orbit is settled. However, sooner or later we can expect to activity. That would be mind blowing.
Venus quite recently. What is presently missing is the comet bombardment that brings water and carbon. This takes time to bring about once the Venus orbit is settled. However, sooner or later we can expect to activity. That would be mind blowing.
Is An Alien Message
Embedded In Our Genetic Code?
APR 1, 2013 11:27 AM
ET // BY RAY VILLARD
The answer to whether
or not we are alone in the universe could be right under our nose,
or, more literally, inside every cell in our body.
Could our genes have
an intelligently designed “manufacturer’s stamp” inside them,
written eons ago elsewhere in our galaxy? Such a “designer label”
would be an indelible stamp of a master extraterrestrial civilization
that preceded us by many millions or billions of years. As their
ultimate legacy, they recast the Milky Way in their own biological
image.
Vladimir I. shCherbak
of al-Farabi Kazakh National University of Kazakhstan, and Maxim A.
Makukov of the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, hypothesize that an
intelligent signal embedded in our genetic code would be a
mathematical and semantic message that cannot be accounted for by
Darwinian evolution. They call it “biological SETI.” What’s
more, they argue that the scheme has much greater longevity and
chance of detecting E.T. than a transient extraterrestrial radio
transmission.
Writing in the journal
Icarus, they assert: “Once fixed, the code might stay unchanged
over cosmological timescales; in fact, it is the most durable
construct known. Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable
storage for an intelligent signature. Once the genome is
appropriately rewritten the new code with a signature will stay
frozen in the cell and its progeny, which might then be delivered
through space and time.”
To pass the designer
label test, any patterns in the genetic code must be highly
statistically significant and possess intelligent-like features that
are inconsistent with any natural know process, say the authors.
They go on to argue
that their detailed analysis that the human genome (map here)
displays a thorough precision-type orderliness in the mapping between
DNA’s nucleotides and amino acids. “Simple
arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and
ideographical patterns of symbolic language.” They say this
includes the use of decimal notation, logical transformations, and
the use of the abstract symbol of zero. “Accurate and systematic,
these underlying patterns appear as a product of precision logic and
nontrivial computing,” they assert.
This interpretation
leads them to a farfetched conclusion: that the genetic code,
“appears that it was invented outside the solar system already
several billions years ago.” This statement endorses the idea of
panspermia, the hypothesis that Earth was seeded with interstellar
life. It’s certainly a novel and bold approach to galaxy conquest
if we imagine this was a deliberate Johnny Appleseed endeavor by
super-beings.
However, there are
other possibilities too. I’ve previously written about the far-out
notion that the universe we observe was built just for us and exists
inside a computer program (with apologies toThe Matrix film
trilogy). Therefore the idea that some programmer somewhere wrote the
genetic code for life in their model universe is consistent with the
authors’ suggestions.
Biological
SETI inevitably smacks head-on into an idea that is completely
antithetical to science: the concept of intelligent design (ID).
The proposition of ID is that our biology is so complex it must have
been engineered by a higher power.
To date, ID has been
nothing more than biblical creationism in sheep’s clothing.
Christian fundamentalists use it to push the teaching of creationism
in schools as an alternative to “secular” evolution. (Which, by
the way, is now being battled in school systems in four states.)
Can the claim of an
alien signature in our genetic code be any more believable, or
provable than biblical ID?
We know so little
about the origin of life on Earth it seems presumptive to identify
genetic structure that supposedly defies a natural explanation. Even
the discovery of life elsewhere in the solar system would not provide
an independent test of this idea. Panspermia could have naturally
occurred among the planets and moons.
And, even if the
genetic code is ultimately considered the handprint of an
extraterrestrial grand designer, then who designed the designer?
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