Up briefly

I got up in the middle of the night to do my monthly libation to Hekate (I just felt too tired to even open a bottle of wine earlier, isn't that sad?)

I came across this tonight:

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It's exciting news, although those who fancily thought we might have an announcement of extraterrestrial life were no doubt disappointed. Be patient, it will happen, although it may be awhile before we find intelligent life. As my professor Dr Moshe Elitzur once told us, though, statistically speaking, the fact that at least one intelligent life evolved in the universe gives us a one in one chance of extraterrestrial life evolving in all the billions of star systems. It's just a matter of whether we can find it in some sort of proximity to ourselves. The universe is a big place. But a bacterium that uses arsenic rather than phosphorus is still nifty. I thought the clips of those at the news conference seemed a little melodramatic, but how often do astrobiologists get to have news conferences, really? I also like 'Another reason to come to California. We have aliens, you don't.' :)

Dr Elitzur taught a class at UK on extraterrestrial life which combined astronomy and biology. I loved it. He had such a good sense of humour. I remember one session whee we were discussing that all life on earth evolved with left-handed amino acids in our protein molecules. Right-handed amino acids exist naturally on the planet, but were never incorporated into life. In order to process other protein (i.e., digest food), we have to find other left-handed amino acid proteins. That's no trouble here on Earth. Someone asked what would happen if we found people on another planet with right-handed amino acids. Dr Elitzur's reply was that we could not eat them. I loved that class. I learned a lot, it brought me back to my science roots (I was going to be an oecologist before I went into history and sociology), and it was terrible fun. And even though it was taught sometime in the early 90s, I still remember good bits of it because of the way it was taught. :)

Okay, someone has been roasting what smells life beef in the apartment building. It's making even the pseudo-vegetarian hungry, but it's really too late at night to eat anything (I should say early in the morning, really, it's 5 am.) It was even making it through the CPAP filtration. I will not get back into my pizza, but wait until my normal time to eat.

Have a good day. I'm going back to bed for awhile.