Nanobes - Life may be smaller than you think

kris writes "The existence of nano-sized organisms has been proposed for a number of years by geologists who refer to a range of mineralised structures in rocks as the fossil remnants of nanobacteria. Bacteria range in size from 150nm (Mycoplasmas)-50m in diameter while the proposed nanobacteria are an order of magnitude smaller with diameters reported to range from 20nm-150nm. How small can life be? See for yourself at the Nanoworld Image gallery. Can we build computers from microbes and nanobes? Or has this already happened in precambrian times? "

Did someone say desktop art? :)

[pen]

Microbes shmicrobes, as long as I get my pretty JPEGs and GIFs...

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Or did they shrink in the wash?

[DJerman]

What are the chances these fossils have been compressed during the mineralization process?

Re:Dammit, I tried to post a story about this toda

[BenHickman]

I don't think the size of the structure is that important, although there must be some lower limit.

The definition of what is and isn't alive is a difficult one, some people say the ability for a system to reproduce its self is the only criteria. For instance are viruses alive? (The herpes virus measures only 100 nanometres across} they contain genetic information but can only reproduce inside a host cell.

Plenty of people are working towards creating self reproducing man-made systems and I don't think it will be long before someone succeeds if they haven't already :-)

Dammit, I tried to post a story about this today

[Kaufmann]

Seriously, I think this would deserve index.pl!

Anyway, here's what troubles me. The largest atoms are about what, 10^-11m, right? So one of these thingies would be merely 2000 to 15000 atoms in length - about the length of some common complex organic molecules. How can a structure be so small and still qualify as alive?

Of course, if it can, that means that we can also build artificial assemblers at least that small. That's very cool.