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Do You Believe In Aliens?

How so?

Evolution theory has been modified in few areas slightly to conform with genetic code.

What you said doesn't make any sense.
 
Nixiam said:
How so?

Evolution theory has been modified in few areas slightly to conform with genetic code.

What you said doesn't make any sense.
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The area of a spiece will not change it's dna no matter how many generations will come. The variety of spieces has to do with genetic recombinations.The fact that alive creatures tend to have characteristics which alow them to survive in the area they live is because the creatures that don't have those caracteristics won't survive.
 
Yes. Thank you for explaining adaptation to me.

I understand basic prinicples like genetic variability and geneitic diversity.

You still didn't defend your earlier statement.

And yes, DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) does change with generations.

I could change mine right this moment with some kind of mutagen.
 
I think the fact that DNA mutates is a good argument against the selfish gene theory.
 
swilow said:
Wouldnt energy also travel through a wormhole causing a feedback loop?
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I am not really sure what you mean by that... energy is a concept used in science to talk about physical processes (work, heat, radiation....), it is not an entity ( at least in my understanding). "Energy is the potential of a system to do work".

belligerent drunk said:
Yeah, I didn't really mean they have to translate the EM radiation they're receiving into a South Park episode. What I meant is that they'd need to somehow make sure it isn't just cosmic noise coming from whatever source. I'm not much of a physicist. What would happen to all sorts of EM radiation being currently emitted from Earth if it were to travel such distances? Would the intensity be enough to even detect it?
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well there are techniques to remove noise from the signal you actually want to monitor; otherwise we couldn't have done a precise "map" of the temperature of the CMBR. and yeah, signals get redshifted and weaker in intensity the farther they travel; but as far as I know, our current radiotelescopes are capable of detecting the tiniest signals coming from space.

ad the signals coming from pulsars: I am not sure, but isn't that a smoothly oscillating signal at a certain frequency? to send actual information, you need to use a linear combination of a lot of frequencies which corresponds to a certain "language". I don't believe that any scientifically capable society in the universe would mistake a natural signal for an artificial one.
 
Perhaps he's referring to EM radiation, which is also described as light energy.

The terms are quite blurred, but the most common definition and scientifically accepted one is that energy is the ability of ___ to do work.
 
There are some form of aliens, why else would the Government have people hired to come online to spread false information. Hilary Clinton even said if she wins this election she will reveal what we know about our interactions with extraterrestrial life. We do not know what these aliens are. deceptions maybe.
 
swilow said:
I imagine the and repetitive nature of the signal may be what would make human radio transmissions obviously artificial as bagseed said (though the whole idea of pulsars somewhat tests that idea). I guess if a lifeform had been monitoring the skies for at least, what, 100 years they would have noticed the sudden change in signals emerging from our universal address. Amongst randomness, order really jumps out.

Isn't that essentially what SETI are looking for?

As a love of sci-fi, I desperately want to believe that, when I gaze upon the endless heavens, I am potentially processing photons emitted by a massive galactic empire somewhere far, far away. In fact, I think that the size of the universe means that some kind of sort of sprawling civilisation probably dominates a tiny corner somewhere. I bet the think they are gods chosen too ;)
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I'm sure there are many many intelligent alien species out there. But no, they won't hear us any time soon.

Yes the signals from our planet are obviously artificial, but it's not going to be heard anytime soon. The speed of light is way too slow.

By the time the aliens version of seti detect us will be looooong after all of us, our children, our children children, all long dead.

It's only a hundred years if the aliens are in our solar system already. Odds are they are ffaaaaaar further away and it'll take a long time before our artificial signals reach them. Right now somewhere out there if they find out planet they're looking at it from likely at least millions of years in the past. As we are doing for them.

In other words, if seti found alien signals from a planet a hundred million lightyears from us, that means those aliens first broadcast those signals a hundred million years ago. And unfortunately the universe is only getting bigger, we're all getting further away from each other. And it's happening faster and faster.
 
To be totally accurate, light takes about 5 hours to get from the sun to Pluto, so about 10 hours from one end to the other (well I guess if you count the oort cloud, it become much longer, almost halfway to the next star so about 2 years, maybe you were counting that). But yeah I agree with you, the distances are prohibitive for any communication that relies on energy/waves to reach anything around other stars, let alone another galaxy.
 
strictly speaking no.
i do believe there is life on other planets but i don't think we have the ability to travel that far therefore culture/information is transmitted through radio waves.
or some shit.

don't joke about aliens.
 
Xorkoth said:
To be totally accurate, light takes about 5 hours to get from the sun to Pluto, so about 10 hours from one end to the other (well I guess if you count the oort cloud, it become much longer, almost halfway to the next star so about 2 years, maybe you were counting that). But yeah I agree with you, the distances are prohibitive for any communication that relies on energy/waves to reach anything around other stars, let alone another galaxy.
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I don't have the numbers on hand, but my recollection is the odds of life, even intelligent life, is still very high for elsewhere in the milky way. That considerably reduces the distance from absurdly ridiculously infeasible to just laughably ridiculously infeasible.
 
CFC said:
What do you mean mate? How so?
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Well, if the ultimate 'point' behind life on earth is to disperse and retain specific genes, the fact that we live in a highly mutagenic environment makes it statistically improbable that any single gene will persist unaltered for any long period of time. They will change according to the environment and the proclivities of the organisms housing them. So, rather than being the actual gene that is being preserved, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the 'point' of life on earth is the persistence of DNA as a molecule. Unaltered, unbound, non-coding, just a 'simple' protein found in every living thing. The information that is 'written' by DNA using genes changes over time but the actual language of this writing does not. If a gene is a word, and DNA is the letters, we see that words can change but the letters do not. I would imagine that the unchanging element here, DNA itself, is of primacy rather than the words it creates.

Bear in mind, I have very limited understanding of biology but find it interesting.
 
swilow said:
Bear in mind
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That's exactly what you should have in mind. water bears (aka tardigrades). they have been in the news the last couple days.

Japanese researchers just published eight years of work isolating a particular tardigrade-unique protein that stops their DNA from mutating when bombarded with radiation. The team was even able to use the protein to protect human DNA from radiation when the gene was inserted into human cells.
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how-water-bears-can-survive-massive-amounts-of-radiation/

sorry for the opportunistic segue swilow but I thought it was funny. l was just reading about these weird guys today and the whole panspermia hypothesis mentioned earlier in this thread. Certain genes do seem to offer remarkable protection against mutations from x-rays and even cosmic rays, but I have no idea if this has any bearing on the selfish gene theory. They've sequenced the entire genetic code of one species of tardigrade called Ramazzottius varieornatus, so guess that puts us one step closer to understanding what makes these weird creatures so unusual.
 
swilow said:
Well, if the ultimate 'point' behind life on earth is to disperse and retain specific genes, the fact that we live in a highly mutagenic environment makes it statistically improbable that any single gene will persist unaltered for any long period of time. They will change according to the environment and the proclivities of the organisms housing them. So, rather than being the actual gene that is being preserved, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the 'point' of life on earth is the persistence of DNA as a molecule. Unaltered, unbound, non-coding, just a 'simple' protein found in every living thing. The information that is 'written' by DNA using genes changes over time but the actual language of this writing does not. If a gene is a word, and DNA is the letters, we see that words can change but the letters do not. I would imagine that the unchanging element here, DNA itself, is of primacy rather than the words it creates.

Bear in mind, I have very limited understanding of biology but find it interesting.
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just because I'm a smartass and cannot help it: DNA is not a protein, it is a nucleic acid ;). proteins are macromolecules made from amino acids.
 
And in this, nucleic acids are formed by necleotides, which are monomers like amino acids (which are the monomers of proteins/enzymes)

DNA and RNA are the primary examples of nucleic acids.
 
JessFR said:
I'm sure there are many many intelligent alien species out there. But no, they won't hear us any time soon.

Yes the signals from our planet are obviously artificial, but it's not going to be heard anytime soon. The speed of light is way too slow.

By the time the aliens version of seti detect us will be looooong after all of us, our children, our children children, all long dead.

It's only a hundred years if the aliens are in our solar system already. Odds are they are ffaaaaaar further away and it'll take a long time before our artificial signals reach them. Right now somewhere out there if they find out planet they're looking at it from likely at least millions of years in the past. As we are doing for them.

In other words, if seti found alien signals from a planet a hundred million lightyears from us, that means those aliens first broadcast those signals a hundred million years ago. And unfortunately the universe is only getting bigger, we're all getting further away from each other. And it's happening faster and faster.
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A lot of people fail to consider what you mentioned, light doesn't travel instantly through the universe. It travels at a speed that frankly doesn't cover much distance very quickly. It literally takes billions of years for light to make it's way through a lot of the universe. So, I definitely agree that broadcasts probably haven't reached any intelligent life inhabited planets. There are several hundred planets within the right distance (e.g. 80 light years or so) that could be theoretically habitable (e.g. the right distance from their star). However, life is likely statistically rare in on planets in the universe...... intelligent life at least. When you think of the fact that there are millions of types of other animals and only one species of 'intelligent' life, it seems unlikely that among these particular stars there would be intelligent life with the ability to detect an unimaginably faint radio signal and listen in on it.

Although, I would imagine ones that are visiting Earth have likely listened to radio/television signals, as if they were visiting Earth they'd be able to simply turn on the local radio stations like everybody else =D..... kidding in a way, yet also probably true if they are indeed visiting us, which I would be inclined to think is the case.
 
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I have a question from way back in this thread but anyone could answer it.

If a planet has a debris cloud of dust gas etc will it always pull into a ring structure on the planets equator?
 
Yourbaker said:
I have a question from way back in this thread but anyone could answer it.

If a planet has a debris cloud of dust gas etc will it always pull into a ring structure on the planets equator?
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No, not always. There are different ways the ring structure can form. Sometimes, the ring structure can have a different orbital pattern. Sometimes, this pattern causes the ring structure to form from pole to pole rather than around the equator, or follow a different orbital path altogether. Uranus is an example of a planet that has a ring structure that is not an equatorial orbit. Additionally, as planets are forming, they always have dust around them. Sometimes, this dust ultimately makes it's way to the planet's surface. Earth had a temporary ring structure while it was forming, but the material within it's thin 'ring structure' has made it's way to the surface. There are many different factors that go into what orbital path a planet's rings will follow, along with whether or not the rings are temporary or permanent. It is very difficult to predict how rings will orbit a planet, if at all, without the use of computer modeling.
 
swilow said:
Well, if the ultimate 'point' behind life on earth is to disperse and retain specific genes, the fact that we live in a highly mutagenic environment makes it statistically improbable that any single gene will persist unaltered for any long period of time. They will change according to the environment and the proclivities of the organisms housing them. So, rather than being the actual gene that is being preserved, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the 'point' of life on earth is the persistence of DNA as a molecule. Unaltered, unbound, non-coding, just a 'simple' protein found in every living thing. The information that is 'written' by DNA using genes changes over time but the actual language of this writing does not. If a gene is a word, and DNA is the letters, we see that words can change but the letters do not. I would imagine that the unchanging element here, DNA itself, is of primacy rather than the words it creates.

Bear in mind, I have very limited understanding of biology but find it interesting.
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If the genome (/DNA) of organisms was left unchanged, then evolution couldn't take place. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, mutations actually aid survival in the long term. You have to remember that sexual reproduction produces an organism with different genome than its parents. Miosis (the cell devision mechanism which produces sperm and eggs) purposefully produces cells with different genetic makeup than its parent cells - as opposed to mitosis, the usual cell division in an organism, which produces cells with identical genome.

Mutations over time change the genome of an organism, but that only harms that particular organism, and it usually manifests later in life, after it's reproduced - in the form of cancer for example. Mutations and miosis allow for daughter organisms to have different genetic makeups, and as such (on the big scale) allow for natural selection to take place.

What you say about gene survival is debatable. If there was random selection, then individual genes would have little likelihood of survival (assuming mutations etc). However, the mechanism for evolution is natural selection: organisms with appropriate genetic makeups can survive and reproduce (again, on the big scale). That means if a particular gene is beneficial for said organism in its environment, then organisms with that gene will be more likely to survive and give offsprings. While less beneficial genes will be slowly eliminated because of mutations etc (because organisms carrying it will reproduce less likely).

Evolution is a fascinating subject IMO.

E: I may have misunderstood you. Your understanding of the DNA structure and its purpose is correct: the basepairs and whatnot is like letters, and the sequence is the "words". Obviously the structure doesn't change, only the sequence (similarly to proteins). However, gene is a sequence of basepairs, and that sequence is what is responsible for the properties of that gene. That is what changes.

In that sense, the structure of DNA and RNA is universal on Earth - every known organism has the same structure of their DNA and/or RNA (albeit different sequences) - but that also holds true to some degree in the case of proteins. There are a little over 20 proteinogenic amino acids, and it's pretty universal throughout life on Earth.
 
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