Physicists Discover Inorganic Dust With Lifelike Qualities

Science is beginning to sound like mysticism and shamanism. People of ancient times and even some to this day (i.e. shintoism) believed that everything has a living ‘spirit’ associated with it. It was simplistic, but maybe there is something to it.

Science Daily — Could extraterrestrial life be made of corkscrew-shaped particles of interstellar dust? Intriguing new evidence of life-like structures that form from inorganic substances in space have been revealed in the New Journal of Physics. The findings hint at the possibility that life beyond earth may not necessarily use carbon-based molecules as its building blocks. They also point to a possible new explanation for the origin of life on earth.

Could extraterrestrial life be found in particles of interstellar dust (like that which obscures the giant molecular cloud DR21, shown here in an infrared image taken recently by the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope)? (Credit: A. Marston (ESTEC/ESA) et al., JPL, Caltech, NASA)

Life on earth is organic. It is composed of organic molecules, which are simply the compounds of carbon, excluding carbonates and carbon dioxide. The idea that particles of inorganic dust may take on a life of their own is nothing short of alien, going beyond the silicon-based life forms favoured by some science fiction stories.

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