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[nonionay]

A pill to erase painful memories? "John Harris, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester, said: "An interesting complexity is the possibility that victims, say of violence, might wish to erase the painful memory and with it their ability to give evidence against assailants.""

Article with headline that pisses me off: Alien life 'may exist among us' This is actually stuff I'm really fascinated by--the idea that living things don't have a single origin back in the early, soupy days of Earth; that there might be non-carbon-based life right here.

Deadwood Valentines Via Making Light

Comments

[fenmere.livejournal.com]

Another thing that irks me about the "Alien Life" article is that it's not reporting on a new idea, just a new program someone's starting up. But that idea has seen press over 20 years ago.

[bsdotrand.livejournal.com]

"Remember - just because you are a chemical system which is self-sustaining and capable of Darwinian evolution, that doesn't mean that is the universal definition of life," he said.

One must agree with this statement. But on the whole I don't think it's at all likely that life/evolution have started here twice and certainly not coexistingly. Once life started it would immediately (in geological terms) grab up all the available resources. Any sort of life that came along later, and needed any of the resources of the existing life, would be instantly out competed and starved out.

[fenmere.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily.

There are portions of the planet where familiar life can't exist. Also, we're talking about alternative life forms that see different materials as resources.

Finally, life itself is a resource. With all the change over the course of the Earth's history, it's not to hard to imagine a niche opening up with just the right formation of chemicals available to spark it. And it could be that the current forms of life and their increasing complexity and force upon the environment might actually make it more likely for something weird to pop up.

Remember, it is current accepted theory that mitochondria were originally a symbiotic organism that was picked up by larger cells and worked into their structure. And there's the replicating proteins known as prions that need a host system to replicate in. And even during our current extinction event new species are still being discovered. Life feeds on itself.

I think it's more unlikely that we'll find something that appears distinctly different than it is that something started from scratch at a later date. Chances are that it's all part of the system by now, and nearly indistinguishable from the rest of it. But if you go to the outlying ecosystems, such as at the bottom of the ocean, that's where you have the best chance of finding it. Obviously.