Re: In saner SARS news...

Posted by Uncle Al on May 24, 2003 at 13:38
(68.5.243.16)

Re: In saner SARS news... (DA Morgan)

"I've no doubt of the possibility of diseases being transported between planets and planetary systems."

Do you believe in radiation sterilization, gamma or e-beam? Anything genetic wandering about free space will be cooked by energetic solar protons and general cosmic radiation. Cosmonauts and astronauts to a man get radiation cataracts after only 6 months in space - within the Earth's magnetosphere that redirects charged particles to the poles, and behind hundreds of grams/cm^2 of de facto shielding.

Anything loitering in the van Allen radiation belts is burned toast.

If your belief has any legs, then the prime candidate for cosmic exogenesis is the microbe Deinococcus radiodurans. It survives megarad doses. It fouls nuclear reactor primary coolant loops and ruins radiation-sterilized food.
Its genome has been sequenced. There is nothing to suggest anything other than bland terrestrial origin.

SARS is a single-stranded RNA virus. RNA is vastly more chemically unstable than DNA - the extra hydroxyl on the ribose sugar residue intramolecularly attacks the phosphate linkage, cleaving the molecule. This is one reason why SARS like HIV has a high mutation rate. To suggest that SARS is of extraterrestrial origin is not only stupid, it is stooopid.

--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm
(Do something naughty to physics)

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