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From: bs_wab@ux63.bath.ac.uk (Bains)
Newsgroups: sci.bio,sci.astro,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: DNA for interstellar messages
Message-ID: <2763@bath63.ux63.bath.ac.uk>
Date: 6 Jul 88 10:26:25 GMT
References: <2743@bath63.ux63.bath.ac.uk> <2244@ur-tut.UUCP>
Reply-To: bs_wab@ux63.bath.ac.uk (Bains)
Organization: University of Bath, England
Lines: 37

In article <2244@ur-tut.UUCP> powi@tut.cc.rochester.edu.UUCP (Peter Owings) writes:
>>
>      ... I was fortunate
>enough to have several conversations with Sir Fred Hoyle when he visited
>the University of Rochester.  If there is anyone who has written about 
>stuff like "Bacteria From Space", Sir Fred has.  You might try looking at
>a book called _Grains_to_Bacteria_.  The only problem with this book is
>that it is very technical, going into spectral observations of interstellar
>particles.
>	Peter Owings
>	University of Rochester
Ah, not quite what I had in mind because
i) The interstallar grains that Hoyle was concerned about were meant to be
the remains of entire organisms (if I understand Hoyle's ideas right,
which I quite possibly do not), not of 'pure' message. If you use an entire
organism as a messenger, then you have the problem of how to stop your
message evolving into meaningless garbage. (The same problem attends the
idea put forward in a previous posting (sorry, I don't have it in front
of me) that such a message exists and 'we are that message'. Apart from
anything else, which 'we'? There is about 1% genetic difference between
different individuals, so which 'us' is the right message? But I digress.)
ii) If Hoyle is right, and a substantial amount of interstellar dust is
actually of biological origin, it would mean that our hypothetical
communicators would have had to dismantle their entire solar system, maybe
their entire globular cluster, just to send their message out. This seems
a little entreme.
iii) Hoyle's data are EXTREMELY shakey! His 'matching' between interstellar
IR spectra and biological sample spectra are essentially 'fudge-it-till-
it-fits' excercises, with different bacteria and protein molecules being
added to his 'biological' sample until he got the right spectra. As with his
advocacy of the 'steady state' theory, Hoyle's insistance in this hypothesis
appears driven more by his dislike of creationists than by scientific
rigour (if life is generated in outer space, then the chances that it arose
spontaneously are much greater than if it has to arise on Earth, as
there is much MORE space than Earth). His idea that the archeopteryx fossil
is a fake has similar motivation, apparently (according to a dinosaur
fanatic who has heard him speak ont eh subject).