Xref: utzoo sci.bio:1308 sci.astro:2361 sci.philosophy.tech:656 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!dcl-cs!bath63!bs_wab 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).