Theories of life (and UFOs?)

The July 9th, 2015 edition of The New York Review of Books provides reviews of two books that show brilliant scientific speculation and resolute methodologies that increase our knowledge of microbial infused evolution (one with a very indirect connection to UFOs):

Life’s Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable by Paul G. Falkowski [Princeton University Press, 205 pp., $24.95]

A New History of Life: Radical New Discoveries About the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink [Bloomsbury, 391 pp., $30.00]

The article/review by Tim Flannery, How You Consist of Trillions of Tiny Machines, presents the view (by Falkowski) that “we … consist of trillions of electrochemical machines that somehow coordinate their intricate activities in ways that allow our bodies and minds to function with the required reliability and precision. As we contemplate the evolution and maintenance of this complexity, wonder to grows to near incredulity.” [Page 30]

“ … our cells are comprised of a series of highly sophisticated “little engines” or nanomachines that carry out life’s vital functions, [ibid]

“The most primitive living entities are known as archaea … [and they] seem to have exploited almost every energy source available on the early Earth. [ibid]

“Microbes control the Earth … They created it in its present form, and maintain it in its current state by creating a global electron marketplace that we call the biosphere. Falkowski argues that we can conceive of our world as a great, unitary electrical device, driven by the myriad tiny electric motors and the other electrochemical nanomachinery of cells. Viewing the world this way reveals hitherto unappreciated dangers in some modern science.[Page 31]

“Some molecular biologists are doing research on ways of inserting genes into microorganisms in order to create new kinds of life that have never previously existed. [ibid]

Falkowski writes “rather than tinker with organisms that we can’t reverse engineer, a much better use of our intellectual abilities and technological capabilities would be to better understand how the core nanomachines evolved and how these machines spread across the planet to become the engines of life.” [ibid]

Flannery writes “Just how far we are from obtaining a understanding of the evolution of the nanomachines is conveyed in [the] Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink [book]. Both authors are iconoclasts, and their book is at times breathtakingly unorthodox.” [ibid]

“Joe Kirschvink argues that Earth’s rocks are the wrong place to look for the nanomachines’ origins. He is a leading proponent of the seemingly radical theory that the nanomachines, and perhaps, life itself, originated on the ice caps and glaciers of ancient Mars.” [Page 32]

The process that brought about life here on Earth, stems from “meteorites originating from Mars [that reached] Earth without being sterilized.”

“But if the nanomachines did originate on Mars, where might they have crossed the ‘Darwinian threshold’ and become truly living things?” [ibid]

The Nobel laureate Christian de Duve, Flannery writes, believed “life would have emerged from nonlife very quickly, perhaps in minutes. Safe behind its lipid cell walls, the RNA could enter the ocean, finding the rich trove of nutrients that exist …From then on, Darwinian evolution would have ensured the survival of those that operated most efficiently in a hot environment.” [ibid]

And while “This story is, of course, almost entirely unsupported by evidence. It is a scenario – a vision of how things might have been – rather than a fleshed out scientific theory. It is nonetheless useful because it provides a target for future researchers.” [ibid]

Fascinating speculation, but where do UFOs come in?

The U.S. incarcerated psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich theorized that an energy force he called “orgone” imbued human beings and flying saucers with a kind of life force.

He thought that the atmosphere contained “Deadly Orgone Radiation (DOR)” and he created a “weapon” he called a “cloudbuster” to dissipate the radiation.

Obsessed with UFOs, or “energy alphas,” (as he called them)…

He and his son would spend their nights searching for UFOs through telescopes and binoculars, and when they believed they had found one would roll out the cloudbuster to suck the energy out of it. Reich claimed he had shot several of them down. Armed with two cloudbusters, they fought what Reich called a “full-scale interplanetary battle” in Arizona, where he had rented a house as a base station while his cloudbuster cleaned up the desert. He wrote in Contact with Space in 1956 of the “very remote possibility” that his own father had been from outer space. [Wikipedia]

(To read more about Reich see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich)

It seems that Reich, in his odd, insane-like way, had understood, at some level, the idea about microbial nanomachines that Falkowski has developed in his thesis.

The problem is that Reich’s orgone is a metaphorical construct whereas Falkowski’s nanomachines are based in substantive scientific speculation based mostly on what we know from studies of the formative evolutionary processes, enunciated by Darwin and concretized, in part, by scientists of various disciplines.

Reich was being intuitive; Falkowski is being “scientific.”

Both books, noted above, should be accessed by those who think they are UFO researchers.

They will be disabused of that sobriquet by reading the books referred to here.

RR http://ufocon.blogspot.com – The UFO Iconoclast(s)