Posted on 11/10/2014 1:52:15 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
In high school biology, we are taught that there are three types of life: eukaryotes (that's us, and most everything else we often think of as life), bacteria, and archaea (extremophiles and other very primitive life forms). But some scientists are pretty sure that there are entirely different, undiscovered lifeforms that could be prevalent on Earth, and they remain undescribed because we're not good at looking for them.
In a new paper published in Science, Tanja Woyke and Edward Rubin of the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute note that "there are reasons to believe that current approaches [to discovering life] may indeed miss taxa, particularly if they are very different from those that have so far been characterized."
In other words, there may be life out there that doesn't even use the four DNA and RNA bases that we're used to; there may be life out there that has evolved completely separately from everything that we have ever known to exist; there may be life that lives in places we haven't even looked.
Discovering a new type of bacteria or virus or, hell, even a mammal at this point isn't exactly news. It happens all the time, and there are tens of millions of species out there that aren't described. Scientists can at least place newly discovered life into specific categories, but that's because they've been using the same methods of finding it for decades....
(Excerpt) Read more at motherboard.vice.com ...
What about undiscoverable life?
It swims in the currents of indescribable oceans.
Like MMGW
Well, we know that many scientists believe there must be an infinite number of universes, so that means there must be a good chance those things exist somewhere.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3222942/posts
Progressives
Dark Science finds Dark Life. Maybe Dark Matter is a life form.
“Scienrists” also vouch for global warming. No credibility any more.
When Man ceases to worship God he does not worship nothing but worships everything.
-GKC
When I opened the link, there was a huge headline and a picture of Obama. Is Obama one of those unclassifiable forms of life?
Her jacket looks Great Aunt Emily's sofa.
/johnny
It is actually fairly hard to define what constitutes life. My preferred definition: Any system that ingests lower entropy energy and expels higher entropy energy, thereby persisting.
Think of a goldfish in a fishbowl vs. an ice cube: The goldfish eats food (i.e., low entropy energy), uses the lower entropy to maintain its form for a while (i.e., not dissolve), and expels higher entropy energy (i.e., feces). (Matter embodies energy in this example.) On the other hand, an ice cube just melts.
By that definition, there could be a LOT of lifeforms that we would not recognize unless we measured the change in the lifeform’s environment. To wit, the entropy of the environment should increase more than otherwise expected if no lifeform was present.
PS This is about “life,” not “intelligent life,” a whole other topic.
PPS By this definition, some crystals are “alive.” But they’re not really alive, so the definition is not perfect...
That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: (Acts 17:27)
CNA, for example.
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