Basis of life found on an extrasolar planet
More support for panspermia, Molecular Basis of Life Discovered on Extrasolar Planet.
Archive for tag Geek
Microcosms all the way down
So a black fungus has evolved inside the Chernobyl reactor last year. A fungus that feeds on gamma radiation. Keep that in mind for a moment.
Someday I believe that we are going to find out that our little oblate spheroid of earth has more in common with deep sea hydrothermal vents than most people realize. Deep sea vents have collections of life growing around them. Bacteria process the chemical energy pouring out of the vent into an edible food supply that allows a diverse collection of animals to thrive. It is the same for Earth: solar energy pouring out of the sun is processed by plant life which converts it into an an edible food supply that allows a diverse collection of animals to thrive.
The deep sea vents are almost entirely isolated from our solar energy cycle. If, somehow, the sun were to stop producing energy (say we encase it in a Dyson sphere within Earth’s orbit) the deep sea vent communities would go on living and thriving as long as Earth’s molten core keeps on chugging out energy. I only say they are almost entirely isolated because the collection of life around them must have collected from the general collection of life on the planet. In other words, they are self-sustaining now, but at some point the essential components for life must have filtered down and evolved into lifeforms that were capable of feeding on the chemical energy. Life probably didn’t originate at these vents, just as I believe that life didn’t originate on Earth.
The more places we look for life, or even just look as in Chernobyl, the more places we find it. Down at the bottom of the ocean so deep that the lack of solar energy means that life surely can’t possibly exist? Thriving, teeming communities of all sorts of life. In the heart of a massively irradiated reactor where life couldn’t possibly survive? A new form of life that is eating the radiation. Inside the boiling pools of Yellowstone National Park where the extreme temperature must preclude the existence of life? Microscopic organisms that could live nowhere else. Wherever we look, if there is some kind of energy source life is already there. Rather than the exception, it seems to me that we are just a deep sea vent, irradiated reactor, or boiling lake in the solar system. We have an abundant source of energy, so we are just teeming with life. If I put a piece of bread and some rocks on a table, should I be surprised when mold soon starts to grow on the available food source?
The problem with the theory is that we have, as yet, no real proof. Yes we have found organic compounds in metorites…maybe. Until we find somewhere else with a similar abundance of energy (Venus?) and find or not find life, there is nothing to compare. Maybe life is everywhere on Earth because we are the one lucky planet in the galaxy.
But let’s get back to that fungus. It literally eats gamma radiation in an environment such high levels that it simply shoudn’t be able to survive. It doesn’t need anything else, no oxygen or even an atmosphere. It is entirely possible that this fungus could survive a trip through space, and that’s all it would take. A planet with some kind of energy, being hit by microscopic life imported from space dust, comets, and meteors, would eventually find itself just as covered as a deep sea vent.
Look at it this way. Assume our planet is truly the only source of life in the galaxy (or universe!). As already described our planet is literally covered in the stuff to such a degree that even in a very short human timeframe, the right kind of life to feed on a new environment (Chernobyl Reactors) is able to form. Our planet is regularly spewing off ejecta from volcanos, minor meteor impacts, and major impacts (the last being about 65 million years ago). Much of that material eventually falls back to us, or trails along behind us like a streamer of matter. But some of that matter escapes our orbit. If we continue this scenario forward millions and millions (and millions) of years then some of the elements of life developed on Earth will reach other planets in our galaxy.
The biggest problem I have with this theory, Panspermia is that it doesn’t answer the question of where life came from or how it originated, but only moves the source and seemingly makes research into the origins of life on Earth a pointless gesture (of course it isn’t). But I still find it very compelling.
Balls are Geeks
It’s true. We Balls are just super geeks. From our parents embracing of all cool technology, it just gets more geeky. From cooking to programming to videogames to music, we just love to know, which is the true essence of being geek.
Through reddit I found Matt Ball’s blog post Is 91 prime? (also in the quicklinks). Geeky last name? For sure. Post on mathematics? Check. Personal wiki? Oh yeah. Fan of NCAA men’s basketball? Yes!
I swear it’s like we’re related or something.
Mario's Jumping Calculus
Mario’s jump moves are derived from basic physics of motion, and the calculus-based equations are in the source, nicely formatted
New Look
Now you see where all my blogging time has been going. Yes, it was time to work on design instead of content. I really like this new color scheme, but I’m not totally sold on this crowded three column layout. I was really hitting the limits of what I could cram into one sidebar.
On moving and movies
Happy Valentine’s weekend everyone!
Sarah and I have been enjoying a leisurely move back into our “new” house. So leisurely that this is the first time that I’ve booted up my laptop since it was packed away downstairs over two weeks ago. I’ve been online of course, but only in bits and pieces: at work, at home on the XO, on the powermac connected to the tv. There is a big difference between using any computer and using my computer though. My computer at work is awesome, but it’s at work. The XO is also a fine machine, but only for its niche of cool programs and easy interface. The powermac is great, but even connected to our beautiful 40” LCD television it’s still a little squinty for use from seven feet away. My still-kicking 800Mhz G3 iBook is where its at (ergonomics be damned).
We are seriously loving our bamboo floors. It is ever so nice to be able to look in any direction and see elegant reflections and soothing wood tones instead of dingy carpet. The leisurely move is also quite fine and well recommended. Since we had to clear everything out of every room (including artwork) except for the kitchen and bathrooms and everything was moved into the basement and garage we have the opportunity to start the house over with a blank slate. We are only moving it what we need or want, just pieces at a time, and really making sure that we keep the house nice and neat while we are doing so. Every other move we’ve had has been a regular “move out and in as fast as possible”, but this is the way to do it. It also really helps to be ruthless with your culling of stuff. We have sent boxes and boxes to good will or the dump so far and don’t even really remember what exactly we’ve sent. As two packrats it was hard to get started, but after the initial break we’ve really gotten into the “use it or lose it” mindset.
Speaking of using it (oh man, I am awesome at segues): Sarah got me a Playstation 3 for Valentine’s day! With the HD-DVD format quickly dying after Warner Brothers commited exclusively to blu-ray it was time to get with the true HD movie bandwagon. After a couple days of playing with it I am forced to admit that the better format won. Whereas HD-DVD movies felt like an HD hack of the DVD format (slow menus, buggy discs, etc.), blu-ray really feels like a next-gen movie format. Of course, that impression could stem from the fact that we have a sony television and have been brainwashed by its subliminal messages (and supraliminal, it does force our XBox360’s HD-DVD player to 1080i afterall). Either way, Ratatouille and Casino Royale look gorgeous in high definition. It is a little weird to have a videogame system without any videogames, but all the best games for the PS3 are also on, and done better by, the XBox360. The 360 features better graphics, a much better controller, and achievements! It will be nice to be able to pick up the ‘Darth Vader’ version of Soul Calibur IV though. But without the achievements I might not even do that.
The PS3 doesn’t even have a single “must have” game. There are six contenders: Resistance, Motorstorm, Rachet and Clank, Heavenly Sword, Uncharted, and Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Two of those have really short playtime (perhaps good enough for the bargin bin though), one is a remake that I’ve already bought twice, and three are rehashes of game types done better by other games on other systems. The PS3 needs its own ‘Dead Rising’, ‘Mass Effect, ‘Super Mario Galaxies’, or ‘Metroid Prime 3’.
Merry Christmas
I hope everyone had a great time yesterday. We sure did!
If that weren’t reason enough to be cheery: Ruby 1.9 has been released, and it has a ton of new features.
A small selection: Classes no longer inherit class variables, String.each_char passes each character, not byte, bytes of a String can be accessed with String.bytes, Enumerable is part of the core, and hashes preserve order. Sweet!
Christmas Music, FTW
For a while I’ve been trying to liberate our music from the confines living room (it has the receiver and our tower mac with all of our music) into other areas of the house, particularly the kitchen. It’s much better to clean and cook with music than without, after all.
For months we’ve just been plugging an iPod into a dangling headphone connector plugged into Sarah’s old Aiwa stereo up on top of the cabinets. This solution lacked the ability to sync the music playback from room to room and only played back iTunes media: music, podcasts, etc. But it did work well enough to be a long-term temporary solution…until my iPod broke (clicking hard drive and all). Clearly, it was time for a change. True, we still have Sarah’s iPod and two laptops with perfectly working headphone outputs but it was time for improvement.
I considered just buying Airport Express, a nifty wireless network product from Apple that can connect to a stereo and allow you to play music through it. Playing back music in the kitchen would be as easy as selecting (‘kitchen stereo’) as an output. Nifty and wireless, but also over a hundred bucks and with the same restriction on content as the iPod. My ears desired a grander array of audio choices. Why stop at music when I could be playing DVDs and television in the kitchen as well? But how?
Being busy at work I just went with a laptop plugged into the stereo playing Pandora or Last.fm, not too bad. But then came the second catalyst for change: Christmas and, by association, Christmas Music.
Christmas music has always been big in my family. Growing up, we kids always looked forward (some of us more or less than others) to the time of Christmas music. While there were a few cassette tapes in rotation, the two that stand out for me are A Holiday Celebration by Peter Paul and Mary and A Christmas Together by John Denver and the muppets.
When my break from work started on Friday I started pondering a real solution and had a real duh moment. We have a receiver, a receiver with a speaker B option! All we needed was plenty of speaker wire.
Ten bucks and a hundred feet of (cheap) speaker wire later I connected two speakers from Sarah’s old stereo to the ‘B’ output of our living room receiver. Now whenever we want to hear music from anything playing on the reciever we just have to click a button on the remote and the sound is duplicated to a speaker in the kitchen and one in our other living room, nicely spreading sound throughout our first floor.