…and then God Formed Man of the Dust of the Ground
“In our solar system, the places most likely to have the right conditions are planetary rings, especially the rings of Saturn and Uranus,” says Morfill. There the “dust” would actually be fine ice grains, and the nourishing plasma would be supplied by the solar wind, channeled by planetary magnetic fields.
In the New Scientist, an August 10, 2007 article entitled, “Could alien life exist in the form of DNA-shaped dust” put out a fantastic scientific hypothesis which has taken off like wildfire in the science world. Gregor Morfill and a group of colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, have built a computer simulation that models what happens to dust that is immersed in an ionized gas, or plasma. What occurred during the simulation was that electrically charged dust can organize itself, passing on information from one to another, just like a living organism.
This new development surprised all those involved in the experiment, even though it was already known that, “this system can produce regular arrays of dust called plasma crystals, and some experiments have also shown hints of spiral structures.” But what developed in Morfill and his colleagues’ model was that dust could also form double helixes. Like our DNA, the dust spirals can store information, with the dust particles storing them in the scaffolding of their bodies. According to the article, the dust bodies have two stable states—“one with a large diameter and other with a small one”—which means that the double helix could carry a series of wide and narrow sections. This is similar to a genetic code, and can be copied from one dust spiral to another.
Still unknown in its processes, it appears that each narrow section of spiral has the ability to create a permanent vortex of moving dust outside it. This causes another vortex to pinch the same length into its narrow state if another spiral drifts alongside it. With a possibility to evolve into more complex structures, the spirals seem to have the ability to “feed” as they require fresh plasma, in order to grow and survive.
Due to the simpleness of the simulation, the theory is still speculative in regard to its complex processes as evolution based, but it is a very interesting theory. Hopefully, the experiments will continue on and become more than speculation.
This entry was posted on Saturday, August 11th, 2007 at 7:18 am and is filed under Mars News, Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
