Personal Blogs

I'm sitting here right now contemplating never seeing another manned NASA mission. Its quite a sobering thought. Since the early days of Mercury through Gemini, Apollo and Shuttle the manned missions have been with us for 50 years, longer than I have been alive (just). With no replacement currently in sight and even the best of the commercial carriers not yet ready to step up to the plate, America has lost the capability to put humans into space.

The shuttle programme had a troubled birth. Teetering on the edge of cancellation since its inception. It finally made it only because it underwent a major redesign, enlarging it to make it capable of carrying spy satellites into orbit meaning it could get funding from the defence budget.

And yet this craft built the International Space Station. It launched and then repaired the Hubble space telescope as well as launching countless other satellites and conducting many experiments. It was ageing and needed replacing. it was never the perfect spacecraft but, then again, it was built by the lowest bidder. To cancel it with no replacement in sight is crazy.

Its not just shuttle and its not just America. Today we are told that gas and electricity bills are set to rise again due to having to buy gas on the world market. Last year Professor Brian Cox presented an Horizon programme called Can we make a star on Earth. In this programme we found out clean, safe fusion energy is less than a few decades away and yet he stated in his programme that more money gets spent on ringtones every year than has been invested in fusion. Am I the only one that sees something wrong with this picture?

Why can we find money to bomb yet another middle eastern country, to bail out another self serving irresponsible banking group but we cannot find the money to invest in the technologies that will make a difference. The Apollo programme alone pulled in far more Dollars than was ever spent on it and yet it was forced to scrape by on hand out after hand out.

There is something fundamentally wrong in our society when it prides the financial gains of a few greedy capitalists over the scientific advances that have been made by people who have to beg for grants just to survive.

In conclusion I wish the crew of Atlantis well and hope this final mission is the success it deserves to be. To the politicians and policy makers I say with out science and scientific advancement we are heading for a new dark age and you are the instigators of the fall.

Thank you for your time

So, after the initial disappointment that the NASA announcement this week of the news that "would impact on the search for extraterrestrial life" turned out to involve microbes in a lake in California, I find myself growing genuinely excited at what this could mean.

The phrase "Life will find away" seems to get over used however this might actually prove to be true. These microbes once, back through the mist of time, constructed their D.N.A. in the way every other organism on earth does by using a framework built of phosphorous at selected points. Once these organism's habitat became cut off from fresh water Arsenic built up in the lake just as it has in lakes all over the world, most noticeably in Bangladesh where it has caused toxic poisoning in thousands of people who have no choice but to drink the water. In Mono Lake though these simple, by our standards, organisms have learnt to metabolise Arsenic. Not only eating it but replacing the phosphorous in their D.N.A. with Arsenic as well.

While this should not surprise us totally (Arsenic is directly below Phosphorous in the periodic table and so shares many of its attributes) no other life form on this planet has been proven to do this before! All of the life we know uses Phosphorus and is constructed from carbon, until now.

Now the question this raises for me is does life just use what is available within a certain parameter. As long as its in the same column could it instead pick Nitrogen or Antimony? Could an organism base itself on Silicon instead of Carbon. If this proves to be the case then searching for "Life as we know it" might be the biggest mistake we ever make. Planets we have ruled out because there is no way a carbon based life form could exist may just have become the very places we need to search. I really do believe that life exists in some form or another out there and I think we are getting closer to discovering it. I just hope that we haven't already missed it because we had narrowed out sights too much.

Thank you for your time