Three New Species of Bacteria Found in the Stratosphere

[PipeBox]

http://www.isro.org/pressrelease/Mar16_2009.htm

Highly UV resistant, just floating around up there.  Gotta wonder what their diet is, or if they're photosynthetic, and what waste they produce.
That was the best article I could find, would've liked to see more but guess we've gotta wait for it to hit peer review.
I'm not normally into this stuff, but this is pretty unexpected territory for life, in my mind.  

[Hitsumei]

http://www.isro.org/pressrelease/Mar16_2009.htm

Highly UV resistant, just floating around up there.  Gotta wonder what their diet is, or if they're photosynthetic, and what waste they produce.
That was the best article I could find, would've liked to see more but guess we've gotta wait for it to hit peer review.
I'm not normally into this stuff, but this is pretty unexpected territory for life, in my mind.  

Carl Sagan together with others proposed a thought experiment once for how live could evolve on a planet with an extremely hot surface, and it involved live evolving far up off of the land, and into the cooler layers of the atmosphere.

I think that this gives some credence to that notion.

[Recusant]

Very interesting; thank you for sharing this link, PipeBox.

...this is pretty unexpected territory for life...

15 or 20 years ago, I would have agreed with you, but the discovery in the mid 1990s of micro-organisms living over three miles deep in the earth changed my perspective on how pervasive and adaptable the living things, especially micro-organisms of this planet are.  So while I'm not particularly surprised by this news, it's very cool to hear that they've found some little critters that seem to thrive in our upper atmosphere.

While the present study does not conclusively establish the extra-terrestrial origin of microorganisms, it does provide positive encouragement to continue the work in our quest to explore the origin of life.

I'm not quite sure what the first part of this sentence is implying.  From what I read, there is no reason why this discovery would have anything to do with "extra-terrestrial origin."  It strikes me as kind of bizarre that the subject was even mentioned in the article.  The fact that these organisms live in the extreme environment that they do really has no bearing on the viability of the panspermia theory, since it's already known that it's possible for life to survive at least for a while in the environment of inter-planetary space, given the right conditions.  I suspect that whoever wrote the article has a bit of an ax to grind, but then again, I suppose it's possible that this experiment was seen by the scientists who formulated it as a step in the direction of bolstering the theory.  In which case, the inclusion of "extra-terrestrial origin" in the sentence makes sense. It's unclear from the story itself if they had that in mind, or if it was put in by the author.
  I agree, it would be nice to have a more in-depth article about this available.

[PipeBox]

Yeah, that kinda got my attention too, and detracted a bit from the article.  But hey, they might run its DNA or RNA, faint, and then when they come too, start screaming that there's no possibility it evolved from terrestrial life.  But there's NO reason I think anyone should expect this is the case.  It felt a little the way they worded it, as it made it sounds like they're specifically looking for alien life in the stratosphere.  Which they're entitled to do, as they might just be zany scientists.

[budong4585]

Yeah, that kinda got my attention too, and detracted a bit from the article.  But hey, they might run its DNA or RNA, faint, and then when they come too, start screaming that there's no possibility it evolved from terrestrial life.  But there's NO reason I think anyone should expect this is the case.  It felt a little the way they worded it, as it made it sounds like they're specifically looking for alien life in the stratosphere.  Which they're entitled to do, as they might just be zany scientists.

it will be a nice discovery ..i just wonder if this bacteria could be safe or what...



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[Heretical Rants]

i just wonder if this bacteria could be safe or what... :drool

Seriously though, we don't know what it eats, but we can be fairly certain it's not finding humans up there.