Aliens Have Been Found

Posted by tomo at 11:58 PM in science .

Scientists at UCLA have used genomics software to reconstruct the likely history of all plants and animals (including people, of course) on this planet back to a single cell. Mentioned are "archae", the exotic, neither plant, animal, or bacteria creatures that survive in extreme environments like around volcanic vents on the ocean floor and locked in Antarctic ice (they can survive temperatures above boiling and below freezing as well as extreme acidicity and saltiness).

Which reminds me. There is all sorts of alien life for us to find right here on Earth, without having to spend countless billions of dollars on actual space exploration (if only NASA could do things without a. being so wasteful and b. fucking it all up). It's in the oceans. And, as this team found, hiding within the genomes of the species that are around today are alien life that are only alien in time rather than space. Of course, there are also projects like SETI@Home which attempt to locate signs of life radiating from space using spare processing power... but for the money, it really seems like Dr. Lake's team is finding real results today and there are probably some related genomics distributed computing projects that could better utilize any spare cpu cycles.