h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Is this true? It is completely astonishing. And, as you say, food for thought. How do they know how old it is? How did they "reanimate" it? References please! (Sorry to be so bossy, but I tend to prod statistics to see what gives).

Have you read any Fred Hoyle?

I cannot remember the name of his book, it is in a cardboard box in my attic, along with far too much of my life. But he says that DNA and RNA are not of terrestial origin, but are - literally - universal building blocks of life, transmitted as spacedust across the galaxies.

Did you know that the dinosars lived in a world without flowers, because plants did not evolve flowers until after dinosaurs disappeared.

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OMG is all i can think of to say atm.

It was published in yesterdays "Nature" magazine, and that rarely gets caught by hoaxers.
The scientists know from the depth of the salt deposit and the fossil records in the rock _above_ it that the crystal they bored into was that old. Furthermore they took the sort of "clean room" precautions that are usual in the space industry so they are very confident the bacterium was in the sample all that time.

250 million years? Amazing... that's nearly as old as Status Quo!

Lol
Rofl

Surely not, nothing can be that old!

You haven't seen the stuff in my mother-in-law's fridge

No but I was a student for a while and saw some of the things in the back of the cupboards

Bacteria already get the balme for a whole host of nastiness. I think it is unfair to implicate them in the existence of "Status Quo" or students and their cupboards.

Well it's true that withoutthe first bacteria and proto life we wouldn't be here with Status Quo, student cupboards or other things like that. I think though those comments were to do with the age of this particular type of bacteria. So how did they work out how old the things were?

See Duncan's posting earlier.

BTW, I LIKED the name "spear carrier"; my associations were more Tolkeinesque than pornographic. Maybe I have an under-developed imagination.

Oh yes he did say didn't he, oops!

Still the way of determining the age of rocks is through fossil deposits. The age of the fossils is determined by the rock they're found in...

I think Carbon Dating is used...but am a bit wooly on this aspect.

In some but not all cases can carbon dating be used.

I'm not sure if Carbon dating is accurate that far back, as the rate of Carbon-14 production need not have been as high 250M years ago as it is now...but even if there is a margin of error of 25% this doesn't change the implications of this find.

I watched a prog a few weeks ago where they were saying that they'd found a vast ancient lake under the ice of central Antarctica. They were trying to find some method of drilling down miles to see if they could find similar sorts of life to the bacterium you've described. The problem they were wrestling with, was contamination.

Technically, they thought they could find a way to drill far enough down, but it could be liquid water at the bottom of the frozen lake and nothing from the surface would have contaminated it for millions of years - then their drilling equipment would poke it's dirty nose in. They're still working out how to go about it.

They said it had implications for finding life on Europa. If they couldn't drill down through ice on Earth (a relatively easy environment compared to a moon of Jupiter) without introducing contamination, they wouldn't have a snowball's chance on Europa.

Are you going to add more information to this and take it over to peer review? It's very interesting.

Right ho - the new and improved version....
I haven't found any counter claims and this is widely accepted by the scientiofic community...I shall therefore put it in peer review.
*pootles off so to do*

I thought they had decided to drill using a sort of mechanical mole. This would melt the ice and let it freeze behind. It would have instruments and a radio. Just before entering the lake, it would super-heat itself to kill any bacteria.

That rings a bell. I think it was one of solutions suggested. The programme was on a while ago so it's hard to remember. I think they came up with a few possible solutions and dismissed them one by one because of contamination or technical problems. The solution you mentioned (as far as I remember) was dismissed in the short term at least, for technical reasons. I don't think they had suitable materials to make such a device.