14 DAY TRIAL // The world has been fascinated with the existence of little green (or gray) men ever since the idea of extraterrestrial life first caught the eyes and ears of the public. Fed by more or less real events, such as UFO sightings, abductions, and inexplicable phenomena such as crop circles, people's fantasies of aliens have grown over the years, and more so after Hollywood started depicting them in movies. Now, a group of researchers comes to argue that humans and possible aliens may share the same genetic architecture, on account of the fact that the building blocks of life are the same in all of the Universe.
According to researchers at the McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, led by astrophysicist Ralph Pudritz, this idea was prompted by the fact that the way in which amino-acids were found to bond in meteorite samples that were collected from Earth seemed very similar to the way the building blocks of proteins tied to each other inside all living organisms on our planet. “This may implicate a universal structure of the first genetic codes anywhere,” Pudritz says, as quoted by Wired.
“Thermodynamics is fundamental. It must hold through all points of the universe. If you can show there are certain frequencies that fall in a natural way like this, there is an implied universality. It has to be tested, but it seems to make a lot of sense,” he adds. Paul Higgs, also a biophysicist at the McMaster University, has co-authored the new study detailing the hypothesis, which has been published online on April 6th in arXiv.
The experts say that the amino-acids required for the formation of proteins are relatively simple in structure, and that a warmer meteorite would excel in providing the building blocks of life an appropriate environment to grow and to bind in ways that may facilitate the appearance of basic life forms. And this part of the hypothesis refers to celestial bodies moving around in Cosmos, but similar conditions could be met on a distant exoplanet, where millions of years of shifting conditions could meet the necessary requirements for alien life to occur at one point.
If it does, because it is based on the same type of construction as we are, the new organisms could also develop the same DNA patterns. It's doubtful that the entire genetic structure will resemble that found on Earth, but it may be possible that hypothetical researchers could find common ground between the two types of lifeforms.