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Plasma Blobs Hint At New Form Of Life

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Article - New Scientist 17/09
Link is dead. The MIA webpage (quoted in full below) can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20031001214310/https://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994174


Plasma blobs hint at new form of life
19:00 17 September 03

Physicists have created blobs of gaseous plasma that can grow, replicate and communicate - fulfilling most of the traditional requirements for biological cells. Without inherited material they cannot be described as alive, but the researchers believe these curious spheres may offer a radical new explanation for how life began.

Most biologists think living cells arose out of a complex and lengthy evolution of chemicals that took millions of years, beginning with simple molecules through amino acids, primitive proteins and finally forming an organised structure. But if Mircea Sanduloviciu and his colleagues at Cuza University in Romania are right, the theory may have to be completely revised. They say cell-like self-organisation can occur in a few microseconds.

The researchers studied environmental conditions similar to those that existed on the Earth before life began, when the planet was enveloped in electric storms that caused ionised gases called plasmas to form in the atmosphere.

They inserted two electrodes into a chamber containing a low-temperature plasma of argon - a gas in which some of the atoms have been split into electrons and charged ions. They applied a high voltage to the electrodes, producing an arc of energy that flew across the gap between them, like a miniature lightning strike.

Sanduloviciu says this electric spark caused a high concentration of ions and electrons to accumulate at the positively charged electrode, which spontaneously formed spheres (Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, vol 18, p 335). Each sphere had a boundary made up of two layers - an outer layer of negatively charged electrons and an inner layer of positively charged ions.

Trapped inside the boundary was an inner nucleus of gas atoms. The amount of energy in the initial spark governed their size and lifespan. Sanduloviciu grew spheres from a few micrometres up to three centimetres in diameter.


Split in two

A distinct boundary layer that confines and separates an object from its environment is one of the four main criteria generally used to define living cells. Sanduloviciu decided to find out if his cells met the other criteria: the ability to replicate, to communicate information, and to metabolise and grow.

He found that the spheres could replicate by splitting into two. Under the right conditions they also got bigger, taking up neutral argon atoms and splitting them into ions and electrons to replenish their boundary layers.

Finally, they could communicate information by emitting electromagnetic energy, making the atoms within other spheres vibrate at a particular frequency. The spheres are not the only self-organising systems to meet all of these requirements. But they are the first gaseous "cells".

Sanduloviciu even thinks they could have been the first cells on Earth, arising within electric storms. "The emergence of such spheres seems likely to be a prerequisite for biochemical evolution," he says.

Temperature trouble

That view is "stretching the realms of possibility," says Gregoire Nicolis, a physical chemist at the University of Brussels. In particular, he doubts that biomolecules such as DNA could emerge at the temperatures at which the plasma balls exist.

However, Sanduloviciu insists that although the spheres require high temperature to form, they can survive at lower temperatures. "That would be the sort of environment in which normal biochemical interactions occur."

But perhaps the most intriguing implications of Sanduloviciu's work are for life on other planets. "The cell-like spheres we describe could be at the origin of other forms of life we have not yet considered," he says. Which means our search for extraterrestrial life may need a drastic re-think. There could be life out there, but not as we know it.

David Cohen
 
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OK, how long before someone picks up on this as an explanation for 'orbs' or for 'flying rods' which also seem to be at best semi solid.

Perhaps those glowing masses of plasma that constitute life as we don't know it in Star Trek and a dozen other SiFi shows when the effects budget can't run to anything flashier aren't completely impossible.
 
These things sound interesting, but it sounds like the guy is getting carried away somewhat.
 
Yes, I have been considering these entities as a possible candidate for life-

Trouble is, no-one is really sure how to define life anyway.

most definitions you can come up with are also applicable to various non-living phenomena-
fire and crystals can grow and replicate for instance.

I have tried to define life for my own purposes ;
in my opinion,
living entities should to be able to
exist in a discrete form,
repond to stimuli
replicate themselves using a method of data transfer,
and a population of such entities should be capable of evolution in a changing environment...

what do you think?
Could these electromagnetic entities meet these, or other criteria for life?
 
Eburacum45 said:
I have tried to define life for my own purposes ;
in my opinion,
living entities should to be able to
exist in a discrete form,
repond to stimuli
replicate themselves using a method of data transfer,
and a population of such entities should be capable of evolution in a changing environment...
what do you think?
Could these electromagnetic entities meet these, or other criteria for life?

On these criteria a case could be made for computer viruses being a primitive form of life, particularly the ones that can adapt to hide from antiviral software. What would clinch the argument it is when a random copying error enables one to start performing outside its original parameters.

Yes, I sometimes suspect that the software on my PC is alive but that's probably just paranoia. ;)
 
Physicists have created blobs of gaseous plasma that can grow, replicate and communicate

IMO this is absolute nonsense, they are projecting biological traits on a system that can quite adequately be explained by the laws of physics.


What would clinch the argument it is when a random copying error enables one to start performing outside its original parameters.

There are at least two problems that I can see with this:

1) Errors in copying genetic material can be transcription, transposition, addition or deletion, whereas corruption of data will tend to produce only the eqivalent of transcription errors. Thus the code would have no ability to grow in size/complexity.

2) Changing one or even several base pairs in DNA will usually have a very subtle effect overall, whereas changing even 1 byte of code will cause a serious dysfunction/failure.

There is no reason why someone couldn't write a virus that had virtual genes that allowed for some adaptation of function but it would lack the ability to develop any genuinely new traits.
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
There is no reason why someone couldn't write a virus that had virtual genes that allowed for some adaptation of function but it would lack the ability to develop any genuinely new traits.
To quote Jarvis Cocker---
Are you sure?
 
Yes, because ultimately it can only perform variations/combinations of it's original instructions.

DNA can and does effectively write it's own code because the replication process allows for culmulative errors of an incredibly subtle nature over incredibly long periods of time.

Machine code simply does not lend itself to this kind of manipulation.

And I can't help thinking that if it was possible, someone would have done it already.
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
Yes, because ultimately it can only perform variations/combinations of it's original instructions.

DNA can and does effectively write it's own code because the replication process allows for culmulative errors of an incredibly subtle nature over incredibly long periods of time.

Machine code simply does not lend itself to this kind of manipulation.

And I can't help thinking that if it was possible, someone would have done it already.

Conway's game of life would seem to fit the bill - it can form stable patterns, communicate, propagate, replicate, and store "junk" information until it becomes useful in a future communication (communication is usually typified by the "glider" pattern group, which moves stably across the grid and can therefore interfere with other "stable" patterns).

Randomly populate a game of life grid, and one or more stable (if tedious) patterns will almost certainly emerge. Take a few of the more interesting patterns, and they can start to perform much more interesting effects (such as logic gates, for example - the basis of all solid-state computation).

Stephen Wolfram, genius inventor of the "Mathematica" language, recently based his controversial 10-year magnum opus "A New Kind of Science" on Cellular Automata and argued for their importance in the origins of life.

Getting back on topic, I seem to remember that fire exhibits most of the characteristics required for life, except the inclusion of nucleic acids (a kind of catch-all to deal with viruses, which at some points in their life cycle can be little more than crystals of DNA information).
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
DNA can and does effectively write it's own code because the replication process allows for culmulative errors of an incredibly subtle nature over incredibly long periods of time.

Machine code simply does not lend itself to this kind of manipulation.

And I can't help thinking that if it was possible, someone would have done it already.


Writing my own code? Yeah, been doing or ages, even though people used to warn that it would make you go blind.........:eek!!!!:
 
Game of life is a red herring.

Although it can exhibit some apparently complex behaviour, the algorithms behind it mean that ultimately any one pattern will always lead to the next pattern in the algorithmic series.

While it can produce some interesting iterative patterns, there is no potential for anything genuinely new to occur.
 
Update ...

This 2007 research paper by the same Romanian authors extends their research findings and their suggestions for the implications.


Cell-like space charge configurations formed by self- organization in laboratory
Erzilia Lozneanu and Mircea Sanduloviciu
Department of Plasma Physics
Complexity Science Group
Al. I. Cuza University
6600 Iasi, Romania

A phenomenological model of self-organization explaining the emergence of a complexity with features that apparently satisfy the specific criteria usually required for recognizing the appearance of life in laboratory is presented. The described phenomenology, justified by laboratory experiments, is essentially based on local self-enhancement and long-range inhibition. The complexity represents a primitive organism self-assembled in a gaseous medium revealing, immediately after its “birth“, many of the prerequisite features that attribute them the quality to evolve, under suitable conditions, into a living cell.

FULL PAPER (PDF): https://arxiv.org/pdf/0708.4067.pdf
 
This 2007 blog article provides some broader context for the plasma life form research cited above and extends its possible implications to Fortean phenomena such as orbs and spirits / ghosts.
Plasma Life-Forms
Life-Like Qualities of Plasma:


Bohm, a leading expert in twentieth century plasma physics, observed in amazement that once electrons were in plasma, they stopped behaving like individuals and started behaving as if they were a part of a larger and interconnected whole. Although the individual movements of each electron appeared to be random, vast numbers of electrons were able to produce collective effects that were surprisingly well organized and appeared to behave like a life form.

The plasma constantly regenerated itself and enclosed impurities in a wall in the same way that a biological organism, like the unicellular amoeba, might encase a foreign substance in a cyst. So amazed was Bohm by these life-like qualities that he later remarked that he frequently had the impression that the electron sea was "alive" and that plasma possessed some of the traits of living things. ...

An international scientific team has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organized into helical structures which can interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic life. Using a computer model of molecular dynamics, V N Tsytovich and his colleagues of the Russian Academy of Science showed that particles in plasma can undergo self-organization as electric charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized in their paper entitled From Plasma Crystals and Helical Structures towards Inorganic Living Matter, published in the New Journal of Physics in August 2007. ...

This is not the first time in recent years that plasma life forms have been studied. In 2003 physicists; Erzilia Lozneanu and Mircea Sanduloviciu of Cuza University, Romania, described in their research paper Minimal Cell System created in Laboratory by Self-Organization (published in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, volume 18, page 335), how they created plasma spheres in the laboratory that can grow, replicate and communicate - fulfilling most of the traditional requirements for biological cells. They are convinced that these plasma spheres offer a radically new explanation of how life began and proposed that they were precursors to biological evolution. ...

In 2004 (as reported in the Physical News Update by Phil Schewe and Ben Stein) an experiment was conducted where particles in a plasma crystal arranged themselves into neat concentric shells (or rings - from a two-dimensional perspective), to a total ball diameter of several millimeters. These orderly Coulomb balls, consisting of aligned, concentric shells of dust particles, survived for long periods. This structure was described as an "onion-like architecture". (Dark matter halos around galaxies also have similar structures.)

Paranormal analyst, Allan Danelek (in his book The Case for Ghosts) says, "One could think of orbs as 'tiny ghosts' moving around a room, their essence being contained within a tiny sphere of pure energy, like air inside a bubble." This description matches the description of life-like pulsating plasma spheres generated in the laboratory by Lozneanu and Sanduloviciu. ...

Some believe that an orb is a human soul or the life force of those that once inhabited a physical-dense body. Psychics claim to be able to communicate with them on a regular basis, and ghost hunters encounter them quite frequently in photographs and video.

It is thought that they are conscious spirits that have stayed behind because they feel bound to their previous life or previous location for whatever reason - a typical characteristic of "Earth-bound" physical-etheric ghosts. According to plasma metaphysics, (genuine) orbs are plasma life forms and are identical to the physical-etheric nuclei observed by metaphysicists Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant that are released from dying persons. ...

Conclusion

As proposed by Tsytovich, Lozneanu and Sanduloviciu, the physical-dense plasma cell was a precursor to the biological cell in the early (physical-dense) Earth - acting as a template or mould for the biological cell to form in 3 dimensional space. However, the lightning strikes that generated the physical-dense plasma cells also generated physical-etheric plasma cells in the physical-etheric Earth.

As the conditions on Earth changed and the environment became progressively less ionized, the physical-dense plasma cell was less frequently generated. However, the physical-etheric plasma cell (existing in the physical-etheric Earth) remained as it participated in the development of the biological body to which it was attached to and subsequently was transmitted together with the biological cells in various forms of reproduction - both asexual and sexual. ...
FULL STORY: http://greathinkings.blogspot.com/2007/11/plasma-life-forms.html
 
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