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Friday, August 10, 2007

Invasion of the Plasmozoids

A handful of dust, a spark of electricity and - KAZAMM - life! This Frankensteinian scene is suggested by a simulation of the peculiar properties of dusty plasma. The simulation shows spiral patterns of dust that can reproduce, and may be able to evolve.

So is it plausible that a scattering of electrified dust grains in space, or in a lab, could be truly alive? I would guess that a majority of biologists will say "no, of course not", and a majority of physicists will say "sure, why not?"

I'm with the latter group. Perhaps that can be blamed not only on a physics background, but also on a youthful excess of science fiction: books like Sundiver, which features plasma creatures living in the Sun and feeding off magnetic fields, Strata, in which the universe is built from the relics of life, and Dragon's Egg, where nuclear beings live on the surface of a neutron star. So does that make me open minded, or gullible?

What's your position?

The other burning question of the day is what to call the new dusty plasma thingies. The researchers haven't come up with a name yet.

So... Dustites? Plasmanians?

Let us know your ideas. If one of them catches on, you might just have named an entirely new realm of life.

Stephen Battersby, correspondent (Image: A Caulet/ST-ECF/ESA/NASA)

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I wouldn't worry too much about any "youthful excess of science fiction". You missed the most obvious SF classic, The Black Cloud.
By Anonymous Herman Beeksma on August 10, 2007 6:48 PM  
CS Lewis (of "The Lion, The Witch.." also wrote a science fiction trilogy in the 1930's that speaks of "Eldila", creatures whose natural habitat is space and are described as having bodies of flame (i.e. plasma). Since around 99% of all visible matter in space is plasma, maybe this is not so far out an idea.
You should call them "Motes"
By Anonymous Chris Wedgwood on August 10, 2007 8:05 PM  
As long as we are on the topic of science fiction.... how about this: Ghosts may be explained by "dust" creatures from space that come to visit Earth :)
What else would you call creatures made of dust except "bunnies"?
By Anonymous Anonymous on August 10, 2007 9:55 PM  
It will be very interesting to have a ore detailled article on these plasma crystals... or dust plasmas. Morell and Tsytovich wrote a lot of thins on this subject. Has somebody more info on it, please?
If we are not to call them bunnies, (which is an EXCELLCENT idea), then the only other reasonable name they should be called, is Fred.


Think about it.

Then we could have dust Freds, star Freds. A veritable plethora of Fred and Fredly possibilities.

If we can have a Sonic Hedgehog protein, then we certainly should have dust Freds.
Since they are so far away, they should be called 'Remotes', with some deference to Chris, who already suggested 'Motes'.
By Anonymous Anonymous on August 11, 2007 6:34 AM  
This is probably another example of nature obeying the laws of physics, to create the structures of life. I read these books a couple of years ago : Bak, Per, How nature works: the science of self-organized criticality, OUP, 1997, 0198501641, and Ball, Philip, The self-made tapestry: pattern formation in nature, OUP, 1999, 0198502443. Think also of chaos theory and fractals. Most interesting.
Perhaps Stellar Dust Devils could be an appropriate definition, or SDD. Alternatively, as they seem to be life within dust, why not call them Oasis
Although I'm not a religious man, another suggestion might be something relating to the Biblical story of man being formed from dust. The Hebrew word for dust being 'apar', I suggest 'aparites' or maybe even 'aparitions' [sic].

Still think 'bunnies' wins it.
By Anonymous Anonymous on August 11, 2007 9:25 AM  
bunnies gets my vote... if this was a democracy :D
I'd go for "pie" though - plasma pie, space pie, saturnian pie, trans-galactic pie, martian pie... although those would probably work with "bunnies" too
A variation on the name 'mote' would be MOTEAN. An alternative could be HELIXIAN as I understand that the 'creatures' have a helical structure similar to DNA.
They have to be called Springfields. This brings in two elements. The fist after one of the greatest stars of the solar system: Dusty Springfield and the second element a touch of Alien life on earth, thanks to the home town of one of Earth's greatest citizens: Homer.
Bunnies or bust!!!!!!!!!
Call them "Dust Mites".
Finally, an alien species we can easily defeat with modern technology. If anyone's looking for me, I'll be out staring at the sky with my Dyson at the ready. They won't catch me by surprise.
Why don't we rather ask them what they'd prefer to be called?

Without wishing to spoil anyone's fun, it's clear -- both from the precedents of our relations with animal species and from the tone of this discussion -- that any species we might encountered in space would struggle to earn respect much less the recognition of sentience, unless it had bigger and uglier weapons than us.
I think "Plasmanians", as noted in the article, is perfect...it gives rise to the term "Plasmanian Devil"!
Any self-respecting alien life form must sport a name beginning with X- or K-

... instead of Plasmorroids around Saturn,

... you could have Klingons around Uran... oops
As Herman has just said... This sounds rather similar to the "Black Cloud", a central element of the book by Fred Hoyle (The Black Cloud) (published in the 1950s). I read it ages ago and the story is based on the idea of a highly intelligent gas cloud that arrives at the Sun from interstellar space and communicates with humans, before leaving again.

Quite a good read.
I think they should be called George for the boy ones, and Mildred for the girl ones
By Anonymous Anonymous on August 13, 2007 3:20 AM  
What did the intelligent gas cloud in Hoyles book refer to itself as? Please don't say bunny!.
By Anonymous Anonymous on August 13, 2007 10:29 AM  
If not "Bunnies" or "Fred", then how about "Bob"?
By Anonymous Anonymous on August 13, 2007 10:45 AM  
Anyone who accepts that life is not necessarily special, in the sense that it is god-ordained and created, will have no problem labelling these "bunny" life forms as some low-level form of life.

When you consider the entire spectrum of life, from humanity, down to the simplest replicators... these "bunnies" are just another piece of the spectrum.
By Anonymous Anonymous on August 13, 2007 5:27 PM  
We can't call them 'Motes,' it's too close to Moties, the fictional race in "The Mote in God's Eye" (Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle)

Dust bunnies already exist in the electrically charged dust around most vacuum cleaners, so I don't think that counts, either. It might cause intergalactic war or something.

Aparitions was my favorite, although I'll give 'devil' its due, if they turn out to have malicious intent.

Lacking sufficient nomenclature, I might even give a vote for 'They,' forgetting such memorable science fiction as "Them"
The possibility of the Plasmids or Bunnies or whatever we want to call them would require us to open our minds and expand our notion of life, and even our concept of "intelligence."

This is something that humans still have so much trouble doing: Consider the way we treat all the other life forms, such as whales, in our environment today ... even though these creatures are part of our own family tree and even have sizable brains, we still hunt them to extinction and most people dismiss the possibility that they may, in fact, be highly intelligent.
So imagine what would happen if we encountered an intelligent species based on a very different type of life form that we are not aware of yet.
By Anonymous Anonymous on August 13, 2007 8:54 PM  
I like the name of Motes. It seems rather apt. Or perhaps Plasmotes.

It's an interesting thought actually, that there might be creatures living in deep space. After all, Nebulae would make vast and tranquil habitats for anything that might evolve there...
By Anonymous Invader_Xan on August 15, 2007 11:23 AM  
By Anonymous Anonymous on August 15, 2007 1:34 PM  
Didn't Ben Bova's book Saturn have the rings populated with crystalline ice-mites?
I call them Pulsons. For a theory of these fundamental phenomena see Energy and Matter in Five Dimensions
How insulting. Why can't these beautiful "bunnies" be special and created by god? (by the way, I put Beauty in this because a lot of people seem to neglect the fact that a part of Creation is the beauty of it)
By Anonymous Anonymous on August 18, 2007 3:19 PM  
The most puzzling part of the article is the idea that Biologists would say no. Speaking as one... that's just odd. They might just saddle the creature with Plasmamarium lepus.
By Anonymous Anonymous on August 20, 2007 11:25 AM  
Join the club :)
I am a physicist, a young one all right, but still, I'd rather think this is possible. I mean, watch the sky. All that complexity on different scales. It's so big and so ordered. And so odd.

Few days ago I was thinking that space is like the ocean in the past. People used to think about new continents as new worlds. They had to travel the ocean- a huge emptiness-full of life, but hostile to our life. They had to survive the lack of Earth and fresh water, so essential to our life. Also the bad food. The only elements they could rely on were the air and the fire in the face of Sun. And the time, of course as those journeys were so long. How humanity solved the problem? Raised to the 3d dimension and used plains to fly around the planet.
Now we have to learn to travel in the space-that immense ocean of space and probably life, but without basic element support to sustain our lives- no earth, no water, no air, even no fire, cuz it's all so cold. And we have to defeat time. I'm sure we'll figure that our sooner or later- we defeated the 3d dimension, provided enough energy and desire will defeat the fourth also.

Back on the question of life. What we have seen of life? Only our planet! We think it should be carbon-based, but that's only because we have carbon here. What is out there? Who knows...
Biologist can say whatever they want, my personal definition of life is- everything that menage to defeat entropy and sustain its energy level for a certain period of time, reproduction might or might not be important,but there should be some kind of evolution for this is the way to know it can actually process information. I know this include pretty much everything in certain moments in time. But still, without the knowledge of what life is how can we say what is alive. How can we know the sun is not alive? Or if there are no "things" in it that are alive. How can we compare our life with their or even acknowledge them... Don't know. But the Universe is so big, if we're to meet intelligent life forms, we have to admit a big, fat chance that they can be nothing like us. Then what?

As one my favorite author said:"Contradictions don't exist in Nature. If you see one- check your premises". I think we all should do just that.

Anyway, thinking about it, we try to figure out how the Universe works. That's already big. Anyone who can believe in SUSY for example, should have absolutely no problem to believe the theory of dust-life.

As for the name, I like plasmions :) Sounds cute. Though if we must be fair, the name should be something honorable, like plasmatrons or dustoplasms.

I'm a fan of naming them Oasis. I think it sounds cooler than taking some derivation of plasma and turning it into a name.

and to totally contrasict what I just said how bout we call them Plasmite(s)
Dustdudes, Dadeo!
By Anonymous Anonymous on August 21, 2007 7:46 PM  
O my god! They're now going to kill us!!! aAAAAA! Runaway!!
What about Aparians
By Anonymous Yurisnay on August 23, 2007 3:15 PM  
Plasmanian Bunnies!
*just a thoght
By Anonymous stormizer on September 09, 2007 9:53 AM  
I think the notion of life is maybe misplaced. The purpose of the universe is to evolve. The purpose of evolving is communication. Life is just a degree of complexity. People may be the most complex forms in the universe and they communicate in a unique way. Electons and protons communicate but their ability to evolve themselves is limited or even fixed. They have possiblities that are limited as well. As complexity increases so do the possibilities. The highest form of communication maybe consciousness. The idea that only people are conscious is also a misconception. Everything is conscious. Rabbits are conscious, but they have rabbit consciousness which is not at the same level of complexity or has the same communication abilities as human consciousness. The universe has a consciousness which we are a part of. It may be that the highest level of the universe's consciousness is present here with us on this planet. What a responsibility we have to not destroy the environment that supports it.
By Anonymous Anonymous on September 20, 2007 1:12 AM  
You could call them "Animotes."

(Animated motes, or animal motes)
Well, since I started using the handle Plasmite since '96, I think you are on to something...;)
By Anonymous Plasmite on December 16, 2007 4:01 AM  
By Anonymous Anonymous on January 10, 2009 6:12 AM  
By Anonymous Anonymous on January 22, 2009 5:34 AM