A lot of people don’t consider that the entire “crust” level of Earth is the product of billions of years of cosmic dust settling(100 million tons of consmic dust settles on earth everyday). Since we have never drilled beyond the crust and into the mantle, human beings have technically never touched the native mass of out planet. We have only interpreted the mantle, outer, and inner core based on what we know from the crust(geographic sound waves, etc.) That being said, everything we know of is from outer space.

Example: There is a set amount of gold on Earth. It can be melted down and dilluted into less than 24K, however, the mass will never change until Earth passes through another cosmic cloud of gold in space. Imagine that? Golden rain? Gold, like everything is alien to this planet, especially life, water, and viruses.

Parlaying off of Greg’s comment with viruses in space, what if the viruses here on Earth traveled from some distant region of space in a comet or some other stellar object? Could we be the hybrid of indigenous single-cell life combined with the instructions for more complex life from an alien source sent using viruses as the messenger? Sweet.

As you suggest J, this will have a profound effect on the understanding of evolutionary science – it shall be fun to which how this ripples through the scientific community. Also this piece plays nicely into the hands of the experimental astrophysicists who maintain that life is truly a virus that has an amazing ability to thrive in regions of space where just a few simple conditions are met.

This was good stuff.

…p53 was crowned ‘guardian of the genome’…Its job is to coordinate the surveillance system that monitors the well-being of cells. Indeed, p53 is so important that when it fails, cancer often results. About half of all human tumors contain a mutated or defective p53 gene. (Science Daily)

It’s kind of insane to think about how much activity goes on inside of our bodies without us ever knowing it.