I thought this was really interesting

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

Yes, very interesting indeed, but...

"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."

...is this a new idea? I was under the impression that this was now a widely held view of the possible origins of life on Earth.

At least it presents more evidence against the Cosmic Ancestry hypothesis (if more were needed):

http://www.panspermia.org/intro.htm

"We are calling the union of Lovelock's Gaia with Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's expanded theory of panspermia Cosmic Ancestry. This account of evolution and the origin of life on Earth is profoundly different from the prevailing scientific paradigm. The new theory challenges not merely the answers but the questions that are popular today. Cosmic Ancestry implies, we find, that life can only descend from ancestors at least as highly evolved as itself. And it means, we believe, that there can be no origin of life from nonliving matter in the past."

Now, wouldn't THAT suck? To finally find that there IS life "out there" but it's all just a bunch of coagulated dust?

Does this mean that my lint bunnies are living things? :-)

So the old Star Trek episode where the alien's a kind of crappy-looking-cloud-of-something was right all along!

Has anyone else read Fred Hoyle's novel, 'The Black Cloud' (1957)? His fictional 'cloud' character could yet turn out to be real.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud - This entry was modified on 16 Aug 2007, and includes a paragraph 'Possible Appearance in Reality' with the following link:

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1367-2630/9/8/263/njp7_8_263.html - which goes to the actual New Journal of Physics article referred to on the SAGG site (Kate's post, top).

These scientists are serious about the possibility of something close to Hoyle's 'Black Cloud', to the extent that they advocate expanding SETI accordingly:

"These structures can have all necessary features to form `inorganic life'. This should be taken into account for formulation of a new SETI-like program based not only on astrophysical observations but also on planned new laboratory experiments, including those on the ISS. In the case of the success of such a program one should be faced with the possibility of resolving the low rate of evolution of organic life by investigating the possibility that the inorganic life `invents' the organic life"