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The Space Dinosaurs Don't Really Exist: How a PR Team Spiced Up Research

After science has ruined so many of our idle fantasies, it seems only fair that a Columbia University Ph.D. should finally come along and point out that there may very well be a planet ruled by super-intelligent dinosaurs somewhere in the universe...

After science has ruined so many of our idle fantasies, it seems only fair that a Columbia University Ph.D. should finally come along and point out that there may very well be a planet ruled by super-intelligent dinosaurs somewhere in the universe. Sort of.

Dr. Ronald Breslow's study, which appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, is an investigation of how and why amino acids, sugars and nucleosides (the basis for DNA and RNA), which can have either a left- or right-hand orientation, ended up so similar. On Earth, with the exception of a few bacteria, amino acids are left-hand oriented and sugars are mostly right-handed. The report states that for life to flourish on Earth (or elsewhere) it is critical that amino acids and nucleotides be predominantly uniform in shape.

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It’s quite interesting, albeit a bit dry, so it looks like a PR team tried to help him out. There's a real disparity between Breslow's paper, titled "Evidence for the Likely Origin of Homochirality in Amino Acids, Sugars, and Nucleosides on Prebiotic Earth," and the Journal of the American Chemical Society press release's headline, which asks "Could 'advanced' dinosaurs rule other planets?"

Calls to the journal were not returned, so it would pretty hypocritical to do the hyperbolic thing and call this a shameless grab at SEO or extra page views by a pretty dry and academic publication. But come on.

What we hoped the paper was about.

As far as Breslow’s work is concerned, it's not too surprising that life on Earth continues uniformly—since uniform enzymes produce the amino acids and what not—but how did amino acids become uniform, without mechanisms of selectivity?

Breslow posits the theory that life was "seeded" by meteorites that carried amino acids from asteroids. The passage through the short wavelength light of space made the amino acids more uniform than the light then filtering down to the earth's surface. Life followed from these building blocks in a uniform manner. The report concludes by noting that this is just a theory and is mostly unproven, and even lists how one can disprove the theory. As Breslow puts it, "showing that it could have happened this way is not the same as showing that it did."

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But then it takes a weird turn. Breslow notes that life could be different elsewhere in the universe, if the amino acids and sugars were subject to different light, they could be the opposite of our left-hand amino acids and right-handed sugars. And on those planets, life forms may well flourish that are different from those on Earth. "Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs," Breslow says, out of the blue, "if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth."

Naturally the dinosphere was pretty excited by someone in the scientific community allowing this, and Breslow even indulges us far enough to say, "we would be better off not meeting them," presumably because those advanced versions of dinosaurs would be awesome killing machines.

What it’s actually about.

But as the Smithsonian's Dinoblog points out, there's no reason really that life forms elsewhere should be hyperintelligent dinosaurs. As a matter of fact, dinosaurs only showed up and ruled the Earth through happenstance and mass extinctions.

The only really responsible response then is to point out that with all of the contingencies that have gone into life as we know it on Earth, it seems unlikely that creatures elsewhere would look like our dinosaurs and yet speak with British accents, but given the immensity of the universe (and number of multiverses, if you're into that sort of thing), anything is theoretically possible, even Sqornshellous Zeta, the planet of naturally occurring, good-natured mattresses that appears in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Hell, it also opens the door for the Dinosaucers to become a reality. And let me tell you: If having space dinosaurs also means a future with a bunch of power-ring wearing hipster kids, I’m glad they don’t exist.

Lead image via Space Dinosaurs Are Out There.

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