4 ms·

Why does this make me feel a little dirty and exposed? Like, who knows what kinda alien DNA strands or spores are carried by the ISM?! I wonder if it would be

Why does this make me feel a little dirty and exposed? Like, who knows what kinda alien DNA strands or spores are carried by the ISM?! I wonder if it would be possible to track biodiversity increases caused by the transit? Assuming there is biological material in the ISM, perhaps some of it made it into our biosphere! Very fun!

dylan604 2y ago
Maybe it was a large cloud of mushroom spores: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  This is an amazing idea! In my response to imiric, I detail an ICM Panspermia version of the Stoned Ape Theory, and hypothesize that we could use genomic dating techniques to experimentally falsify the theory (which is probably false because we probably had magic mushrooms for many millions of years). That makes it a fun theory to work with!
shiroiushi 2y ago
Remember, modern humans appeared around 1.5-2M years ago, so this event, geologically speaking, happened shortly before the arrival of modern humans. Perhaps this event had something to do with us evolving.
- bloopernova 2y ago
  Do you mean Homo Erectus or Homo Sapiens? Sapiens arrived around 300k years ago, according to Wikipedia. Erectus did indeed arrive around 2M years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Must be Erectus then. This must be the time the aliens placed the Monolith on Earth (and another one on the Moon that we haven't found yet because we're WAY behind on our Moon base program).
imiric 2y ago
If you accept that we're all made of stardust, with a little sprinkling of ISM, it should make you feel more connected to the universe, not less. :)
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  The more I think about it the more I agree with you. I don't know why I initially felt unsettled but now that I'm thinking we might be able to actually detect if it happened (through advanced genomics techniques), I am starting to warm up to the theory. There's even a fun tie-in with stoned ape theory (which I don't endorse, but is a fun theory). In one version of the theory, humans eat magic mushrooms and become conscious or develop higher thought. In the ISM version, magic mushroom spores - or the genes that make them psychoactive - were seeded from the ISM three million years ago, leading to the evolution of homo erectus and homo sapiens. This is a fun theory because it would be easy to falsify with a an experiment showing that magic mushrooms evolved their hallucinatory properties much longer than 3 million years ago. But note that you'd have to do so xenogenomic theory, to control for the possibility that the material came in from the ism itself as much older than 3 million years. Such material would show terrestrial genomic age metrics, which could make us think magic mushrooms evolved long ago on the earth, when in fact it evolved in another biosphere. Anyways, you're right! This IS making me feel more connected to the universe!
  - imiric 2y ago
    I agree that it's a fun theory. I wouldn't discard it, considering mycelia are some of the strangest organisms we have on Earth.
pvaldes 2y ago
> what kinda alien DNA strands or spores are carried by the ISM? None that we are aware (and would be fried by the earth atmosphere probably). > Would be possible to track biodiversity increases caused by the transit An entirely new set of new forms of life appearing from nowhere and without any known ancestor in a small line of the "evolutive script" would not be missed. This is the opposite that we observe in that age. Life evolving for the ice age, yes. A glaciation just would force the organisms to evolve or die. There is not need of any alien gardener to explain this.
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  I'm not saying this to be non-scientific or conspiratorial or anything. This is actually very cool! And respectfully, I think a real xenobiologist can come up with more creative ways to get spores from the ISM into the atmosphere. For instance maybe they come in on small meteorites, right? Maybe they come in around the modified heliosphere termination shock, as the earth swings through it. The turbulence in the boundary layer manages to decelerate the ICM so that components of it can drift into the atmosphere on low energy trajectories. Fun right? So to be clear if you were trying to reduce my anxiety here, that's not really what I'm feeling. I'm feeling wonder and creativity. I would prefer for you to brainstorm cute scientific mechanisms that might allow it to happen!
- barfbagginus 2y ago
  And I think that you're misunderstanding what I meant by a impact on the biosphere. We wouldn't see all new species. We might see some new genes in a few species, which would have started arriving around 3 million years ago in the genomic record, and would not be explained by the ordinary arrival of new genes through mutations, either because the arrival rate would be too high or the genes arriving would be too different. So the idea would be to think up genomic experiments and metrics that would be able to detect the arrival of exobiological material 3 million years ago, assuming that the effect would be very attenuated. Again I think that serious geneticists and xenobiologists would have fun brainstorming ideas here. I just want to be a fly on the wall for that conversation, lol.
  - 2y ago

dylan604 2y ago

Maybe it was a large cloud of mushroom spores: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
barfbagginus 2y ago
This is an amazing idea! In my response to imiric, I detail an ICM Panspermia version of the Stoned Ape Theory, and hypothesize that we could use genomic dating techniques to experimentally falsify the theory (which is probably false because we probably had magic mushrooms for many millions of years). That makes it a fun theory to work with!

shiroiushi 2y ago

Remember, modern humans appeared around 1.5-2M years ago, so this event, geologically speaking, happened shortly before the arrival of modern humans. Perhaps this event had something to do with us evolving.

bloopernova 2y ago
Do you mean Homo Erectus or Homo Sapiens? Sapiens arrived around 300k years ago, according to Wikipedia. Erectus did indeed arrive around 2M years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Must be Erectus then. This must be the time the aliens placed the Monolith on Earth (and another one on the Moon that we haven't found yet because we're WAY behind on our Moon base program).

imiric 2y ago

If you accept that we're all made of stardust, with a little sprinkling of ISM, it should make you feel more connected to the universe, not less. :)

barfbagginus 2y ago
The more I think about it the more I agree with you. I don't know why I initially felt unsettled but now that I'm thinking we might be able to actually detect if it happened (through advanced genomics techniques), I am starting to warm up to the theory. There's even a fun tie-in with stoned ape theory (which I don't endorse, but is a fun theory). In one version of the theory, humans eat magic mushrooms and become conscious or develop higher thought. In the ISM version, magic mushroom spores - or the genes that make them psychoactive - were seeded from the ISM three million years ago, leading to the evolution of homo erectus and homo sapiens. This is a fun theory because it would be easy to falsify with a an experiment showing that magic mushrooms evolved their hallucinatory properties much longer than 3 million years ago. But note that you'd have to do so xenogenomic theory, to control for the possibility that the material came in from the ism itself as much older than 3 million years. Such material would show terrestrial genomic age metrics, which could make us think magic mushrooms evolved long ago on the earth, when in fact it evolved in another biosphere. Anyways, you're right! This IS making me feel more connected to the universe!
- imiric 2y ago
  I agree that it's a fun theory. I wouldn't discard it, considering mycelia are some of the strangest organisms we have on Earth.

pvaldes 2y ago

> what kinda alien DNA strands or spores are carried by the ISM? None that we are aware (and would be fried by the earth atmosphere probably). > Would be possible to track biodiversity increases caused by the transit An entirely new set of new forms of life appearing from nowhere and without any known ancestor in a small line of the "evolutive script" would not be missed. This is the opposite that we observe in that age. Life evolving for the ice age, yes. A glaciation just would force the organisms to evolve or die. There is not need of any alien gardener to explain this.

barfbagginus 2y ago
I'm not saying this to be non-scientific or conspiratorial or anything. This is actually very cool! And respectfully, I think a real xenobiologist can come up with more creative ways to get spores from the ISM into the atmosphere. For instance maybe they come in on small meteorites, right? Maybe they come in around the modified heliosphere termination shock, as the earth swings through it. The turbulence in the boundary layer manages to decelerate the ICM so that components of it can drift into the atmosphere on low energy trajectories. Fun right? So to be clear if you were trying to reduce my anxiety here, that's not really what I'm feeling. I'm feeling wonder and creativity. I would prefer for you to brainstorm cute scientific mechanisms that might allow it to happen!
barfbagginus 2y ago
And I think that you're misunderstanding what I meant by a impact on the biosphere. We wouldn't see all new species. We might see some new genes in a few species, which would have started arriving around 3 million years ago in the genomic record, and would not be explained by the ordinary arrival of new genes through mutations, either because the arrival rate would be too high or the genes arriving would be too different. So the idea would be to think up genomic experiments and metrics that would be able to detect the arrival of exobiological material 3 million years ago, assuming that the effect would be very attenuated. Again I think that serious geneticists and xenobiologists would have fun brainstorming ideas here. I just want to be a fly on the wall for that conversation, lol.
- 2y ago