2 posts tagged “life”

A recent amazing series of computer simulations performed by a team of physicists from Russia, Germany and Australia reveals that dust clouds in space can harbour spiral structures capable of reproducing - and being selected - in the same way as terrestrial DNA. Read an Institute of Physics news article here, and read another brief article with useful links and discuss the implications at the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) community forum here.

The following image was lifted from the IOP article, but is presumably copyright the authors of the article which prompted the IOP news piece.

Spirals

Are we too parochial in our search for alien life? Can we define life, can we set limits on where it can or cannot exist, on what chemicals and in what environments it can and cannot persist? I'm put in mind of the engineers who believed train travel would be impossible for human passengers because above 25mph all the air would be forced out of the carriages. More probing analysis of the alien life question is here at the FQXi community blog.