Francis Crick (Nobel Prize Winner): Our DNA is from outta Space

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   Francis Crick discovered the key role that genes play in our lives. The genetic information itself is stored in an extremely long chain molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), whose molecular building blocks (nucleotides) in one test tube Millers sought in vain. Even the DNA of a bacterium consists of four million, regularly arranged nucleotides. In humans, there are even three billion. Something like Filigree said to have originated in the universe several times over? Impossible, said the French molecular biologist and Nobel laureate Jacques Monod. From its own and, as we now know to simple statistical calculations, he concluded: life in the universe is life on earth and at the same time unique and unrepeatable. We humans should finally come to terms with it, he wrote in his 1970 book "Chance and Necessity" to lonely "Gypsies on the edge of the universe" to be. Competition of the molecules in the same year, the German Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen showed that it is in principle possible to steer through the random selection process to legally live in friendly direction: First, develop the primal ocean, small networks of nucleic acids and proteins. The nucleic acids can already reproduce. The same is also capable of the networks as a whole. However occur always small errors. The resulting "mutants" are already a struggle for existence, for the limited number of the primal ocean, floating free nucleotides and amino acids as "food". Survive only those who are best able to increase and multiply. The other again disintegrate and release new nutrients. Nature had not so, as Monod believed to generate a random once the final, consisting of several millions of nucleotides, genetic material DNA. Evolution is so natural, but rather a self-organizing process, during which smaller units in dealing with the environmental necessity legally be greater and more perfect. At the end are not the "best", but the respective optimally adapted to the environmental conditions of life. Possible extraterrestrial life will be different so the less of our more similar environmental conditions. Events that are unlikely to say, also not that they do not occur. Alone in our Milky Way (Galaxy), there are about 200 billion stars. And so one must assume that some of these suns have Earth-like planets, what intelligent beings live. All attempts, however, no matter how elaborate, is received by such beings, at least some signals have so far failed. A water planet? Hope Good news came a few months ago from Switzerland and the USA. There, astronomers discovered three stars that have planets with reasonable certainty. At least one of them, the 35 light-years away from Earth, appears to provide good living conditions. Temperatures allow "only" 85 degrees Celsius, the existence of life-giving water.