Bacteria Found On ISS May Be Alien In Origin, Says Cosmonaut (independent.co.uk) 240
Kekke writes: Lots of buzz around this. Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov took routine samples from the outside of the International Space Station during a spacewalk. These samples were analyzed and found to contain bacteria that must have come from somewhere other than Earth or the ISS itself. "Bacteria that had not been there during the launch of the ISS module were found on the swabs," Mr. Shkaplerov told TASS Russian News Agency. "So they have flown from somewhere in space and settled on the outside hull." He made it clear that "it seems, there is no danger," and that scientists are doing more work to find out what they are. The Independent writes, "Finding bacteria that came from somewhere other than Earth would be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of science -- but much more must be done before such a claim is made."
Wrong conclusion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Wrong conclusion? (Score:2, Funny)
It was me, ok? I jerked off on the ISS. Are you happy now???
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We call software errors, "bug", because of certain hardware errors at the dawn of the computer age....
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Re:Wrong conclusion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because it wasn't there during the launch it doesn't mean it didn't come from Earth.
Just because they thought it wasn't there at launch doesn't mean it wasn't there at launch.
Re:Wrong conclusion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Low Earth orbit is pretty much part of Earth. Its in our outer atmosphere for a start. Bacteria from the moon (but not from the inside of a camera) would be a big deal.
250 miles up (Dallas to Houston), 6,200 mile atmos (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. Imagine you have an 8 inch volleyball, drenched with syrup. A quarter of an inch away, almost touching the syrup-coated volleyball, there is a coin and you find microscopic traces of syrup on the coin. How do you guess the trace of a syrup got on the coin?
Most likely, it came from the big ball of syrup right next to the coin. Or maybe somehow syrup came in from outside and got on the coin, without ever making it 1/4 inch further to get in the volleyball. Which seems most plausible?
That's the scale we're talking about with ISS. Earth is 8,000 miles diameter, 25,000 miles circumference. The atmosphere extends to 6,200 miles up (exosphere). ISS is below the exosphere, in the thermosphere. ISS is only 250 from the surface - nearly touching the ground.
As someone else hinted, IIS is also travelling 18,000 miles per hour. At that altitude, there are roughly 4,000,000,000 air molecules per cubic meter*. Meaning ISS is colliding with billions of air molecules per second. It would be surprising if they didn't get a bug on the windshield.
* Yeah I used imperial and metric in the same post. Get over it.
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Exactly. If it wasn't already on the ISS when it was launched they could have picked it up in the higher atmosphere. I would be surprised if there weren't any unknown bacteria living there that were specialized in living in the conditions at that height.
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The proof it's alien is that it is already starting to affect the brain of that cosmonaut.
Re:Wrong conclusion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong conclusion? (Score:4, Insightful)
I will say though, you're right in a way. Our methods of investigating life are all biased for a very small subset of possible life, even on earth. LB Agar plates grow only a small subset of earth bacteria. Investigations that took sea water and just sequenced the DNA they found in it suggested that an astonishing majority of bacteria on our own planet is totally unstudied. We simply don't know how to grow most earth bacteria enough to study it.
If this bacteria IS of ET origin, they'll smear it on a plate, it won't grow, and we won't be able to draw any conclusions. If it's of earth origin, odds are good the same thing will happen, and we again won't really know. We'll assume it's earth bacteria because it's pretty obviously earth bacteria, but we won't know.
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Why? With genetic analysis almost routine at this point, I would expect that they could at the very least state that the bacterium(s) in question are/are not genetically congruent with known Earth species. If they find an E Coli on the outside of the station, it almost certainly came from Earth. If they find a bacterium with a genetic structure that is distinct from pretty much all known Earth species, it won't prove that it is extraterrestrial, but it would make it a lot less likely. At the very least,
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If bacteria is that common in space, would it not have already fallen into Earth and thus be a KNOWN species? Or if unknown, just not discovered yet?
It think it pretty hard to believe that one unknown type of bacteria got into the ISS wind shield without also getting into Earth surface.
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Why? If a space bacterium fell to earth now, how long would it last? Chances are not terrible that it would be eaten almost immediately, or that it would fail to reproduce and eventually oxidize. I mean, you could be right and space bacteria could be falling to the Earth all the time but there isn't anything LIKE a guarantee that we'd see them, as we have a hard enough time finding and classifying the bacteria that we already have -- or separating out ones that might be falling from space all the time fr
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Also makes me wonder how many alien bacteria they have missed by not using the growing medium that's optimal for them.
Re:Wrong conclusion? (Score:5, Informative)
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Actually, the chance of some other life form not using DNA/RNA is very very low. Carbon based organic molecules and amino acids have been found pretty much everywhere we have looked including interstellar gas clouds. They're all over the place. And RNA is about as basic as you can get for consistent replication molecule.
Now hypothetically any other "sticky" atom could be a basis for organic type chemistry (like silicon) but they are all less likely due to the difficulty of the chemistry. It COULD happen und
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Perhaps, but would ET RNA or DNA use the same bases? There's little reason to believe that is the case.
But I agree with your post. We know bacteria live in the upper troposphere, if not higher up. I recall reading that Earth might actually be leaving a trail of bacteria as it travels through space. (Wish I could find a reference for that.)
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How fast is the ISS going? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How fast is the ISS going? (Score:5, Funny)
They came to great us and we splattered them. Remember this date. The first strike in the war with the aliens was from us. #ashamedtobehuman #buglivesmatter
They have DNA sequencer on board (Score:5, Interesting)
They have miniature DNA sequencer on board, they can find out if it matches at all with any sequenced earthly strain. (I have one also, it is a MinION by Oxford nanowire technologies. Although not perfect it should be capable of sequencing this).
If it truly of extraterrestrial origin it should be immediately obvious as it is would have diverged very far from the âoeTree of Lifeâ (thatâ(TM)s assuming there are any similarities at all).
It, would also be incredibly valuable and not just from a scientific standpoint. Just a single completely novel protein has caused multi-billion dollar biotech revolutions. Here would be an organism with potentially thousands.
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If it is non-terrestrial, why would it use DNA, and then specifically the exact 4 nucleotides that we use?
The only evidence here by the way is: we looked really careful and did not see it then so it must be from space.
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That's like asking why stars and planets exist outside of our solar system. Nature has order and DNA probably exists everywhere and not just on what you assume is our one-of-a-kind little world.
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Nature has order and DNA probably exists everywhere
That's just a wild guess on your part. Right now, we have no reason to assume such a thing.
Re:They have DNA sequencer on board (Score:5, Interesting)
That's just a wild guess on your part. Right now, we have no reason to assume such a thing.
DNA consists of commonly available ingredients, can guide its own self-assembly, is stable, and nucleotides form abiotically. No other known material has all of these characteristics. There are retroviruses that use RNA, and protein based prions, but neither of these has evolved beyond being parasites of DNA based life. If another mechanisms was more viable for the basis of life, then why have none displaced DNA on earth, despite 4 billion years of opportunities?
When we find life elsewhere in the Universe, I think it is very likely it will be DNA based.
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DNA consists of commonly available ingredients, can guide its own self-assembly
DNA needs a complex environment to duplicate itself, and that environment needs to be duplicated as well. It is highly unlikely that both a piece of suitable DNA, and that complex environment just happened to form by chance. Life must have started with something simpler, and gradually evolved towards the current DNA based system.
If another mechanisms was more viable for the basis of life, then why have none displaced DNA on earth, despite 4 billion years of opportunities?
Because DNA has a head start. Nearly all kinds of biologically active molecules would be interacting with current life forms and get broken down before they got a chance to self-org
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Really? What life would that be?
If you can prove that I think you'll get a Nobel Prize.
It is called an RNA virus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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It is called an RNA virus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
RNA based retroviruses use reverse transcriptase enzymes to produce DNA from their RNA genomes, They then use their hosts' transcriptase to replicate it back into RNA. They cannot replicate without using DNA.
Prions would be a better example of "life without DNA", except they also require a host, and most biologists would not consider them to be "life".
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Re:They have DNA sequencer on board (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet there'd be little reason to expect any similarity with the DNA codons to protein translations
Yes, they would likely have a different genetic code, and a different set of amino acids. But it is still likely that the fundamentals would be similar: using DNA codons to specify a sequence of amino acids.
If we found an alien world teaming with life much like ours here, it would be shocking if we could eat the fruit there, for example.
As long as we can have sex with their women, who cares about the fruit?
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I largely agree with what you say here.
The current DNA system very likely has advantages over alternate systems, on Earth's environment at least. A system with different chirality (direction of coiling) seems quite possible (indeed, it has been difficult to discover any convincing advantage for the chirality we observe on Earth); a DNA with different nucleotide pairing is another possible variation; and "DNA" is actually part of a complex system which can be modified in different ways. For example the codin
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But stars range from yellow dwarfs to neutron stars and planets from small balls of rubble to gas giants. The bandwidth of planets is so large, that we have been discussing for decades if Pluto is one at all!
So while it's likely that life is based on DNA elsewhere in the universe, it may be quite different. Or it may not, because our ACGT-version just works and is therefor widely used.
Re:They have DNA sequencer on board (Score:5, Informative)
So while it's likely that life is based on DNA elsewhere in the universe
We don't have sufficient data to claim that it's likely. We only have a single data point, and very little understanding of the mechanism that led to evolution of DNA.
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Aren't there large quantities of human waste in orbit? Specifically faecal waste? If some gut flora has managed to survive (unlikely) and mutate (highly likely due to radiation) it could present as "not previously catalogued". Highly unlikely to reproduce, though.
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Our DNA uses AGCT
While RNA uses AGCU
RNA is very similar to DNA and can do the same functions. Apparently some of the processes in our body have things switched between DNA & RNA.
There can be other bases being used, which would be different letters. We've even synthesized some, and they seemed to have worked and were replicated along with the rest of
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Apparently some of the processes in our body have things switched between DNA & RNA.
There are viruses that use RNA for their genome, but all human cells use DNA as the genome and RNA for the transcription template, transporting amino acids to the ribosome, and for the ribosome itself. DNA does not do anything that RNA does in human cells.
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Oh, I was assuming that they found some DNA in it and that they were still wondering if it was non-terrestrial.
Obviously, if it was a living organism and managed to live and reproduce without DNA it would be extra-terrestrial. (Only some viruses managed to use RNA instead, some people don't consider them alive). That would make this discovery even more astounding!
No, if it had DNA it might still be extra-terrestrial. Of course if it used different bases or a different "Code of Life" (codon triplets) or di
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If it is non-terrestrial, why would it use DNA, and then specifically the exact 4 nucleotides that we use?
For example because previous sample reached Earth few billion years ago and mutated a lot on Earth, while one they found now is either original or yet another mutation from elsewhere.
Chances of finding life nearby (cosmic scale) is very small - but if we do find it, I think that it has bigger chances of being similar on basic level due to travel through panspermia, rather than appearing from inanimate matter in completely independent fashion.
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Some argue that life on earth came from external sources, such as an asteroid. It also possible such things are not rare - that lots of bits of interstellar crap flying about the universe have little gobs of life clinging to them. If that's the case, then human biology was seeded by such "universal" biology, and we're bound to have some things in common with whatever they scraped off that ISS windshield.
Btw, how long does that sequencer take to do its stuff?
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Yeah the MinION is capable of giving close to real time results (you can let it run for a few minutes and see what you've got!).
If it really is "Alien Life" and does use DNA then the key will be sample prep. Hopefully they've got the ability to do PCR up there, that should amplify the DNA enough for them to get some reliable data.
Don't think the people/equipment on ISS are capable of doing the relatively new (and difficult?) technique of single cell sequencing. Of course you could (and will be) brining it
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If it was found floating in the rarefied atmosphere 250 miles up, it is already on the surface of the planet.
You can find plenty of stuff floating around Earth right now that wouldn't survive the journey to the surface, and some of it even got here from outer space.
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Oh there are several that immediately come to mind. First is the protein used in PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) it is a DNA polymerase that can withstand very high temperatures (it was found in thermophilic bacteria living in deep sea volcanic vents). That is now extremely widely used in molecular biology and garnered the person who figured it could be used as a DNA copy machine, a Nobel Prize. Another is the protein(s) used in CRISPR-cas9; that allows the precise editing of DNA and was found in bacteri
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Good luck with the library prep in zero G! I'm intrigued to know how well pipetting works in these conditions!
Quite well, I should think. Capillary action, Van der Waal forces and surface tension are incredibly much stronger than gravity. There's no problem preparing a microscope slide upside down, and only mildly problematic sideways (due to a problem they won't have on the ISS).
Not a likely explanation (Score:5, Informative)
The claims of alien bacteria on the ISS are being met with widespread skepticism [nationalgeographic.com].
Mutated bacteria (Score:5, Insightful)
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While in space most likely. The fact that we're even able to classify it bacteria rather than a foreign micro organism is telling.
There is no we.
While I beleive this find only a matter of time. This is from one Russian cosmonaut without any real cites.
Anton Shkaplerov Education:
"Shkaplerov completed Yak-52 flight training at the Sevastopol Aviation Club in 1989. After graduation from Sevastopol High School in 1989, he entered the Kachinsk Air Force Pilot School graduating in 1994 as pilot-engineer. In 1997 he graduated from the N. E. Zukovskiy Air Force Engineering."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I find it ironic that it was release
Probably terrestrial (Score:2)
It would be cool if these were alien, but I'm willing to bet that these are just terrestrial bacteria.
I tole you! (Score:5, Funny)
What'd I tell you? I said aliens coming. I tole you and you didn't listen.
They're our space brothers coming to protect the President from all the haters and libs. Oh, it's happening, now. Bet on it. Check fucking mate.
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That's why you don't want a wall...just to let all the aliens in to be on your side. We need a wall now, to protect us from those vacuumbacks, and anchormicrobes!
ISS orbit is within our atmosphere (Score:5, Interesting)
The ISS orbit is so low it is within the upper reaches of our atmosphere. That is why it has to be given regular boosts to keep it in orbit. Though super thin, it does encounter enough atmosphere to induce drag.
Just as we have found unusual organisms in the deepest oceans and even miles down in rock, we should expect to find bacteria at the limits of our atmosphere and even beyond. It should also be expected that they have evolved dramatically, as organisms living off of heat and sulfur deep in our oceans have done.
There are some out of this world organisms right here at home. I'm not even sure how you could prove extraterrestrial origin. Almost anything you find could just be evidence of a previously undiscovered unique ecosystem 100+ miles up.
It's sort of neat to imagine the possibility of some life form surfing around on the auroras in the thermosphere.
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The simpler explanation is that 1) the guy was wrong and it was there before launch or 2) that an astronaut brought it with them when they walked out on a spacewalk
The Russians are not exactly known for cleanliness in spacecraft, either, not after Mir was eaten by space fungus [rense.com].
Oh, come on!! (Score:5, Informative)
ISS har for 20 years been orbiting - a close distance - around a planet with gazillions bacteria an microbes, and been visited by more than a hundred people, and it was lanuched through the atmosphere containing lots of microscopic life, and as soon as bacteria is found on the outside, it is considered likely to be of alien origin?
Gimme a break!
I would be very surprised if we could keep it completely clean from earthly contaimination, even if we are talking about the outside.
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...and it was lanuched through the atmosphere containing lots of microscopic life...
The parts that make up the ISS were launched as payloads on other vehicles. I don't believe they were ever exposed to the atmosphere during ascent.
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agents Mulder and Scully will investigate this (Score:2)
Don't get your hopes up (Score:3)
All of this makes it seem fantastically likely that, hey it's just earth bacteria. Stuff can grow almost anywhere.
More Russian Fake News (Score:5, Funny)
This 'bacteria' will be analysed and found to be a mixture of borscht and jizz.
Lots of service modules! (Score:2)
I was under the impression that lots of service craft come into contact on a regular basis. It's not hard to imagine organic material taking a ride on most of those. So it's just a question of how easy the contaminant transfer becomes.
Calvin, but no Hobbes. (Score:2)
I heard about this [wikipedia.org]. Doesn't end well for the ISS crew.
Very much terrestrial. (Score:2)
Is it so much of a stretch to assume that these same high-flying bacteria are the ones caked on the ISS?
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Slow news day? (Score:2)
Thats nothing ... (Score:2)
Edgar Mitchell saw seven-foot alien monsters walking on the moon. Or something like that.
Pitiful Russians. USA wins!
Reminds me of the "Phantom" that hauted Germany (Score:5, Informative)
Of course it turned out in a slightly different way than police had expected. The DNA that was found was actually from a female factory worker packaging the cotton swabs that were used by German police to collect DNA, so these DNA traces were simply a contamination. Here is the whole story: http://content.time.com/time/w... [time.com]
You can expect something similar from the bacteria on the ISS. Everybody of course wants some spectacular news, but unfortunately there are far more mundane ways how the bacteria could have ended up there.
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> That's ridiculous. If swabs were sold for this purpose, contamination testing should be part of regular manufacturing QA.
But, but, but... "teh profits". Firing your QA staff boosts profits. Ask Microsoft.
Travel (Score:2)
NASA or a private party could settle this (Score:2)
The next time a long-range sample return mission like the recently launched OSIRIS-REx is sent up, it could include a surface collection system to trap dust it encounters enroute. If panspermia is hiding in this stuff, revealing it in dust collected far from Earth's atmosphere would be much better proof, especially if the findings correlate with analysis of the returned sample itself. OSIRIS-REx will sample the surface of an asteroid, so whatever it finds will have been sitting out there for eons. That ship
Re: Sample return probeS (Score:2)
>That ship has sailed, but there will be other sample return probes.
Isn't it kind of awesome to live in an era where you can say that, with confidence, we're going to bring back more stuff from space to have a look at it?
I still want my O'Neill cylinder and Orion drive, though.
the collision would have vapourised them (Score:3)
Hard to believe any bacteria could survive the collision velocities involved with an orbiting object, whether they floated in from space or up from the atmosphere. They were there when it launched.
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...or carried from Earth on the surface of something floating near the ISS. Like a spacesuit or docked capsule...
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That's not hard to believe at all. Bacteria have almost no mass, getting hit by an object going very fast would only result in a tiny amount of energy being released as a result of the collision, certainly not enough to kill the bacteria.
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Why? We know of bacteria that lives in methane environments, at extreme cold, extreme heat, extremely acidic environments. We know of things extremely hard and extremely soft, and combine all that with bacteria being extremely small and thus having extremely low inertia the question of whether or not an extremeophile can survive hitting a windscreen isn't anywhere near as interesting as how it got there in the first place.
Obligatory (Score:2)
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Deeply flawed reasoning (Score:2)
Bacteria that had not been there during the launch of the ISS module were found on the swabs,
Umm, how would they possibly know that the bacteria was not there? It's not as if they have some means of sterilizing on the launch pad and It's not hard to show how a previously unknown bacteria could have been missed. Not to mention that there is such a thing as mutations, particularly in a high radiation environment.
So they have flown from somewhere in space and settled on the outside hull.
Unless they have some means to conclusively rule out all sources of terrestrial contamination (and they do not) then this is the same sort of idiotic thinking that makes people think a UFO
Uh-oh (Score:2)
Ripley, we've lost contact with the colony on the ISS.
601 (Score:2)
It Makes A Lousy Movie (Score:2)
Mutant (Score:2)
My money is on it's just an earth bacteria that's undergone some mutations while in space.
Would definitely be exciting if it's really not from earth. Would definitely have to study it extensively.
Re:Perhaps it's just radically mutated Earth bacte (Score:5, Interesting)
Despite sterilization we have found bacterial colonies many times on our space hardware, and they've always been from Earth.
Not only does it only take a single bacteria to survive and reach that location, as the article mentioned, there are things that can loft microorganisms to insane altitudes. I have doubts they can go as high as the space station, but there are rockets they can hitch a ride on, and again, it only takes one to start a colony.
Don't forget that "just because it wasn't there before" only means that it was undetected for some reason, maybe because it was too small.
And also, even if they don't have a match to a known terrestrial DNA sequence, still doesn't mean it's alien. It could just be that their database isn't complete. Actually we know the database of microbial DNA is not complete, so that's a given.
Now if it doesn't match anything from Earth, and it's not close enough to be related to any known microbe, and an analysis of it's DNA doesn't show any real matches of any terrestrial DNA sequences at all, then it might be alien. (There are lots of shared sequences among all life on Earth, since they all share common ancestors, it's just some are more closely related than others.)
If it's DNA uses something other than AGCT or AGCU, then it's almost guaranteed it's non-terrestrial/alien.
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If it's DNA uses something other than AGCT or AGCU, then it's almost guaranteed it's non-terrestrial/alien.
Or if doesn't use DNA, or if the *entire* genome is different to anything we've ever seen before, etc.
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The bacteria is not alien, it comes from north Korean missile launches.
Now you may argue that there is little difference between alien and north Korean, but north Korea is still on Earth.
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Let's go back to the rock and see it at 440. Hey I welcome any news stories that remind me of fun books.
Re:I'm not saying it's aliens... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...or it came from the Earth following a large ejection of material when the Moon and any number of large meteors slammed into the Earth.
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Still much much much less likely than regular old earth microbes of course, but if you're going to come up with a second gues
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And, while interesting, it's also basically unprovable. We can't prove that the bacteria didn't come from Earth, at best we can prove that we've never seen that bacteria on Earth. We also can't prove it did come from Earth, at best we can prove that it exists on Earth.
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APK, you are a lying, ignorant, willfully dishonest, no-class, spamming, racist, moronic cunt with nothing to offer anyone. Again, I have zero time for someone as worthless as you. Stop wasting your own obviously worthless time by trying to stalk me around the site you dumb sack of shit.
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They cannot be illegal aliens, as they have not yet migrated to any country. The ISS is in a sense exterritorial.
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"They cannot be illegal aliens, as they have not yet migrated to any country. The ISS is in a sense exterritorial."
The article states, that a cosmonaut said it, so the illegal alien bacterium must come from the American 'sector' of the ISS.