The Chase and SETI DNA research

[RAMA]

The Chase was a great story, but since the late 70s researchers have been trying to see if there are obvious gaps or keys in the DNA codes of humans to see if alien sent us a message. Today this search is still going on, and its seems to me to be a much more likely and long lasting way ancient aliens would communicate with us than the unimaginative way we've seen in the last 30+ years (lasting 10s of millions of years longer than stone or other means of recording)...so STNG may have had part of it right!

http://spacearchaeology.org/?p=80

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=40841

http://books.google.com/books?id=fK...ed=0CCUQ6AEwATge#v=onepage&q=seti dna&f=false

 

[Timo]

...What happened to communicating through decimals of pi?

The idea that the message would be left by tagging existing creatures fairly recently sounds like a recipe for failure, as it would appear impossible for the tagged party to avoid false positives if they ever got it into their heads (or other thinking organs) that there could be messages in all that noise. And from that it would follow that any positive should be considered a false one even after the most rigorous analysis, because this is by far the likeliest reason for seeing signal in noise. The very search would cast grave doubt on any results achieved!

Yet if the ETs tagged ancient protobiomatter and left markers that have stood the test of billions rather than millions of years, such problems ought to be even greater. The message would then almost by definition be a "natural phenomenon" and interpreting it as a communications attempt would be incredibly cheeky.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

This is easily as persuasive as the Ancient Astronauts shows on H2.

 

[The Castellan]

This is easily as persuasive as the Ancient Astronauts shows on H2.

Excellent series, trying to locate season 1, and I only have season 2.

 

[Gary7]

I don't think there would be any deliberate marker.

What's possible is that a comet containing amino acids and other biological elements crashed on Earth after it cooled and began life. Think of it... in the beginning the Earth is molten and nothing could possibly survive. Sterile. It cools. And then, it's just waiting for seeds. They'd have to come from somewhere external. How could it possibly appear spontaneously, unless you take the Creationist view.

I highly doubt there would be any "marker"... we just got the stuff, in its pure raw form, that became the building blocks for life that appears as we know it today. It came from a random path comet that collected the material extraneously from debris in space, or at the time of its original forming. It's possible comets could have been deliberately launched with the building blocks of biology purposefully tucked inside. But again, I highly doubt there would be any bother to put markers on it. The DNA would start building up from scratch, but the random chances introduced by the environment, making it impossible to code any kind of marker that could be read later.