From: J. Maynard Gelinas <j.maynard.gelinas.nul>
Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 11:44:13 -0500
Archived: Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:22:49 -0500
Subject: Inorganic Dust Formations Could Be Alive?


This is an interesting article. Vallee once suggested that at
least _some_ UFO activity might be caused by space faring life
forms. I don't think that potential should be discounted. If
life exists to extract and use ambient energy to thwart entropy,
and there is no requirement for carbon as part of the energy
storage and transfer process (CH->H2O->CH), then one might
reasonably speculate that at least some of those strange things
witnessed by military and tracked in triangulation by multiple
radar streams could well be a life form and not Grays from some
random star system somewhere out there.

A silver disc-shaped object might well compare to a bacterium.
It might live in an environment near our sun for energy and
travel outside for reproduction. Or, perhaps, just by accident.
From this perspective, the UFO need not be "intelligent" the way
we view intelligence, it need only be able to behave at the
level of a single cell or small multicellular organism.

At least some flying saucers are definitely real. But the
phenomena needn't be anthropomorphized as little gray men inside
a dome shaped bottle as the only explanation.

The article is here:

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http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20070715030629data_trunc_sys.shtml

"Physicists Mull Whether Inorganic Dust Formations Could Be Alive"

Intriguing new evidence of life-like double-helix structures
formed from inorganic substances in space has been reported in
the New Journal of Physics. The physicists behind the discovery
are now pondering whether extraterrestrial life could be
composed of corkscrew-shaped formations of interstellar dust.
The findings hint at the possibility that life beyond Earth may
not necessarily use carbon-based molecules as its building
blocks and they may also point to a possible new explanation for
the origin of life on Earth.

The idea that particles of inorganic dust can take on a life of
their own is nothing short of alien, but an international team
has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of
inorganic dust can become organized into helical structures.
These structures can then interact with each other in ways that
are more usually associated with organic compounds and life
itself.

V.N. Tsytovich of the Russian Academy of Science, working with
colleagues there and at the Max-Planck Institute for
Extraterrestrial Physics and the University of Sydney, has
studied the behavior of complex mixtures of inorganic materials
in a plasma. Until now, physicists assumed that there could be
little organization in such a cloud of particles.

However, using a computer model of molecular dynamics, Tsytovich
and his colleagues demonstrated that particles in a plasma can
undergo self-organization as electronic charges become separated
and the plasma becomes polarized. This effect results in
microscopic strands of solid particles that twist into corkscrew
shapes, or helical structures resembling DNA. These helical
strands are themselves electronically charged and are attracted
to each other.

Bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a
counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they
also undergo changes that are normally associated with
biological molecules, says Tsytovich. He says they can divide
(or bifurcate) to form two copies of the original structure and
can also interact to induce changes in their neighbors. They can
even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break
down, leaving behind only the "fittest" structures in the
plasma.

Could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow
alive? "These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit
all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for
inorganic living matter," muses Tsytovich, "they are autonomous,
they reproduce and they evolve." He added that the plasma
conditions needed to form these helical structures are common in
outer space.

Interestingly, plasmas can also form under terrestrial
conditions, such as the point of a lightning strike. The
researchers speculate that perhaps an inorganic form of life
emerged on the primordial earth, which then acted as the
template for the more familiar organic molecules we know today."