Recent research reveals that a peptide called “Nickelback” may have played a huge role in kick-starting life on earth. The substance may also serve as a clue in the long-standing search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Nickelback Peptide Molecule
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A team of Rutgers scientists dedicated to pinpointing the primordial origins of metabolism—a set of core chemical reactions that first powered life on Earth—has identified part of a protein that could provide scientists clues to detecting planets on the verge of producing life.
The research, published in Science Advances, has important implications in the search for extraterrestrial life because it gives researchers a new clue to look for, said Vikas Nanda, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine (CABM) at Rutgers.
Based on laboratory studies, Rutgers scientists say one of the most likely chemical candidates that kickstarted life was a simple peptide with two nickel atoms they are calling “Nickelback” not because it has anything to do with the Canadian rock band, but because its backbone nitrogen atoms bond two critical nickel atoms. A peptide is a constituent of a protein made up of a few elemental building blocks known as amino acids.
Scientists are abandoning conventional thinking to search for extraterrestrial creatures that bear little resemblance to Earthlings.
Machine intelligence is helping astronomers analyse vast datasets from radio telescopes — and finding previously unseen signals of interest.
Among “the jobs once done by God [that] can be done by natural entities” there is life after death. Dawkins “frequently affirms that there is no life after death”, but Steinhart shows that this is inconsistent with Dawkins’ own convictions. Dawkins “should have argued that false religious theories of life after death can be replaced with more plausible scientific theories of life after death” [**].
Steinhart describes two plausible scientific theories of life after death: promotion to the higher level of reality of the simulators, and revisions of entire lives in new universes, each better than the previous life and universe. Worth noting, promotion could preserve memories and implement “the ancient idea of the resurrection of the body.” These theories of life after death are only sketched in this book, see Steinhart’s previous book “Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death” for more. See also my review of “Your Digital Afterlives” in “Tales of the Turing Church” (Chapter 12).
In summary, Steinhart builds a thorough and philosophically consistent spiritual naturalism, inspired by Dawkins, which offers the main mental benefits of religion. I like (actually I love) philosophy, but I try to keep mine as simple and working-class as possible, because many people don’t have the patience (or the time) for too much philosophical sophistication. I think the two approaches are complementary. So I use the term “religion” for the spiritual naturalism of Dawkins and Steinhart, and I use the simple term “God” now and then.
The deeper you get into physics, the simpler it becomes. The starting point of this wonderful book about Stephen Hawking’s ‘biggest legacy’ (which no one outside of physics has heard of) is the problem of our insignificance. Make a change in almost any of the slippery, basic physical properties of the universe and we’re toast – life would not be possible. If, for example, the universe had expanded even slightly more slowly than it did after the Big Bang it would have collapsed in on itself. Result? No us. A fraction faster and no galaxies would form, let alone habitable planets. In the incandescent beginning of the universe, each of these basic physical properties was as vacillating as a dream: they could have ended up being pretty much anything. How did they all, so sweetly, settle on the minuscule range of values that brought about us?
One answer is to say God did it. He deliberately selected our universe (and not one of the overwhelmingly more probable alternatives) to go forth and be fecund. Another suggestion is that all the possible universes that could exist do exist, now, at the same time – trillions and trillions of them, humming about like bees – and we’re just in one of the ones we could be in. This idea is called the multiverse. In a multiverse there’s nothing special about the incredible unlikeliness of being. Leibnitz came up with the proposal first, adding piously that God has placed us in the best universe of all possible universes. People have been making fun of that since Voltaire. Another idea is that new ‘worlds’ are being created endlessly, all equally real. Every time you make a cup of coffee, a multiplicity of alternative worlds splits off in which you made it with more milk, or added honey instead of sugar, or the coffee machine exploded and you didn’t make it at all.
Summary: Scientists have developed a way to use artificial intelligence (AI) to find signs of life on other planets. They combined statistical ecology and machine learning to map the patterns and rules of how life survives in harsh environments on Earth, and then trained the AI to recognize those same patterns and rules in data from other planets. This method can help guide rovers and other exploration missions to places with the highest probability of containing life.
Source: SETI Institute.
Wouldn’t finding life on other worlds be easier if we knew exactly where to look? Researchers have limited opportunities to collect samples on Mars or elsewhere or access remote sensing instruments when hunting for life beyond Earth.
The development represents “an important advance in extraterrestrial research, in which biology has often lagged behind chemistry and geology.”
A new study has revealed a new way to enhance the search for aliens on Mars by teaching artificial intelligence to detect sites that could contain “biosignatures.”
And so, the researchers trained a deep learning framework to map biosignatures in a three-square-kilometer area of Chile’s Atacama Desert… More.
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