Epic Discovery: China's National Radio-Astronomy Observatory Announces Monitoring of 'Dark' Satellite in Orbit Around Saturn -"Transmitting the Universal Genetic Code"

China's Xinhua News Agency, the official press agency of the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) announced Thursday that the National Radio Astronomy Observatory  has been monitoring signals from a previously unknown "dark" satellite in orbit around Saturn for the past 90 days. According to government officials, the signals appear to be the first verified transmission from an alien civilization.

China's leading astrobiologist, Dr. Xi Chang, a graduate of MIT, told Xinhua that "the sigal repeats itself continuosly in 2 minute long sequences and appears to be the four bases of the genetic code A,G, U and C that ribosomes must convert mRNA sequences into proteins and the twenty different amino acids that proteins are comprised of."

Dr. Rosie Redfield, the newly appointed director of the Astrobiology Program at NASA Headquarters, Washington, confirmed China's dicovery this morning. In a press release Redfield said that  "China's discovery has monumental consequences, and has been shared with the world's premier sciemtific instituions for vetting and peer review. If confirmed this will be the first proof of extraterrestrial life in the universe and confirmation that our DNA basis for life may be universal throughout the known universe."

"The genetic code," Redfield (left), explained, "allows an organism to translate the genetic information found in its chromosomes into usable proteins . Stretches of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) are built from four different nucleotide bases, while proteins are made from twenty unique subunits called amino acids . This numerical disparity presents an interesting problem: How does the cell translate the genetic information in the four-letter alphabet of DNA into the twenty-letter alphabet of protein? The conversion code is called the genetic code.

"The information transfer from DNA to protein, called gene expression , occurs in two steps. In the first step, called transcription , a DNA sequence is copied to make a template for protein synthesis called messenger ribonucleic acid -messenger RNA, or mRNA. During protein synthesis, ribosomes and transfer RNA (tRNA) use the genetic code to convert genetic information contained in mRNA into functional protein. Formally speaking, the genetic code refers to the RNA-amino acid conversion code and not to DNA, though usage has expanded to refer more broadly to DNA.

"Mathematics reveals the minimum requirements for a genetic code. The ribosome must convert mRNA sequences that are written in four bases—A, G, U, and C—into proteins, which are made up of twenty different amino acids. A one base to one amino acid correspondence would code for only four amino acids (4 1 ). Similarly, all combinations of a two-base code -for example, AA, AU, AG, AC, etc.- will provide for only sixteen amino acids (4 2 ). However, blocks of three RNA bases allow sixty-four (4 3 ) combinations of the four nucleotides, which is more than enough combinations to correspond to the twenty distinct amino acids. So, the genetic code must use blocks of at least three RNA bases to specify each amino acid. This reasoning assumes that each amino acid is encoded by the same size block of RNA."

Redfield added that NASA expects a more detailed press conference to be held at the White House later today or tomorrow, pending announcement from the Obama administration.

Dr. Dimitri Kardashev of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told The Daily Galaxy that "This discovery comes as no surprise to me. It was always just a matter of time. The Earth is only some four billion years old. Our universe is some 14 billion years old. There may be millions of advanced technological civilizations that are billions of years older than ours. Keep in my that the radio was only invented 120 years ago. Quantum computers and singularity are at most two or three gereration distant. The technologies of ET civilizations a million years old and older are beyond our comprehension."

Sir Martin Rees, a leading Cambridge University cosmologist and astrophysicist who is the president of Britain’s Royal Society and astronomer to the Queen of England, said: “I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”

If verified, China's startling annoucement means you don't need a miracle to arrive at the chemical cocktail for early life, just a decently large asteroid with the right components.  That's all.  The entire universe could be stuffed with life, from the earliest prebiotic protein-a-likes to fully DNAed descendants.  The path from one to the other is long, but we've had thirteen and a half billion years so far and it's happened at least once.

The other ten amino acids aren't as easy to form, but they'll still turn up - and the process of "stepwise evolution" means that once the simpler systems work, they can grab the rarer "epic drops" of more sophisticated chemicals as they occur - kind of a World of Lifecraft except you literally get a life when you play.  And once even the most sophisticated structure is part of a replicating organism, there's plenty to go round.

It's no accident that we see stars in the sky, says famed Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins: they are a vital part of any universe capable of generating us. But, as Dawkins emphasizes, that does not mean that stars exists in order to make us."It is just that without stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the periodic table," Dawkins writes in The Ancestors Tale -A Pilgramage to the Dawn of Evolution, "and a chemistry of only three elements is too impoverished to support life. Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kind of universe where what you see is stars."

China's discovery puts an end to the questions of whether DNA is inevitable as the foundation for the coding of life, or has life started with DNA in only one place in the solar system and then spread among the livable habitats through panspermia. Microbial life can land on and seed another planet, thereby not requiring that you have to create life from scratch multiple times and in multiple places.

It is the relentless shifting and mutating of DNA, says Dennis Overbye of The New York Times, that generates the raw material for evolution to act on and ensures the success of life on Earth and beyond. Dr.Paul Davies co-director of the Arizona State University Cosmology Initiative "that some sections of junk DNA seem to be markedly resistant to change, and have remained identical in humans, rats, mice, chickens and dogs for at least 300 million years."

China's epic announcement may shows that DNA the cosmic code for life in the universe, or is it possible that there's are alien, unknown foundations? At the Galaxy, we place our chips on DNA.

The Daily Galaxy staff assumes that China is using supercomputers similar to those at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in the USA where Sukanya Chakrabarti has developed a mathematical method uncover  “dark” satellites. When she applied this method on a more vast scale to our Milky Way galaxy, Chakrabarti discovered a faint satellite might be lurking on the opposite side of the galaxy from Earth, approximately 300,000 light-years from the galactic center.

The technique involves an analysis of the cold atomic hydrogen gas that comprise the outskirts of a large spiral galaxy’s disk. This cold gas is gravitationally confined to the galactic disk and extends much further out than the visible stars—sometimes up to five times the diameter of the visible spiral. This gas can be mapped by radio telescopes.

With the help of NERSC systems, she successfully validated her method by analyzing the radio observations of the Whirlpool Galaxy, which has a visible satellite one-third of its size, and NGC 1512, which has a satellite one-hundredth its size. Her calculations correctly predicted the mass and location of both of the known satellite galaxies.

The headquarters of China's NAOC are situated in the northern suburbs of Beijing on the site of the former Beijing Astronomical Observatory.

The National Astronomy Observatory of China (NAOC, the acronym was officially claimed as standing for National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences) was founded on April 25, 2001 through the merging of four CAS observatories, three CAS observing stations and one CAS research centre.

Casey Kazan and The Daily Galaxy via NASA and Xinhua News Agency

Image top of page: "Dragon Storm" Saturn: Photo courtesy NASA

[Editor's Note: This post is an April Fools' entry, a day of fun and when many of the major US media sites, such as Google, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and The Daily Galaxy create fictional articles that appear real]

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Comments

[Alfonso Fanjul]

the staff of daily galaxy assumes that China is using supercomputers similar to those at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in the USA.

[April Fools' Day]

['Daily Galaxy' Readers: Internet sites in the USA have a long tradition of great April Fools' Day stunts, including media site such as Google, Huffington Post, and TechCrunch to name a few. Google has a tradition of creating April Fools' Day jokes. For example, Google MentalPlex allegedly featured the use of mental power to search the web. In 2007, Google's Gmail page displayed an announcement for Gmail Paper, allowing users to have email messages printed and shipped to them.In 2010, Google jokingly changed its company name to Topeka in honor of Topeka, Kansas, whose mayor actually changed the city's name to Google for a short amount of time in an attempt to sway Google's decision in its new Google Fiber Project In 2011, Google's April Fool's Joke announced Gmail Motion, an interactive way of controlling Gmail and your computer with body movements via the user's webcam. We hope you've enjoyed ours! The Daily Galaxy staff.]

[dus666]

1 April!! ;-)

[Mike]

Good one! :P

[Phiend]

That's Jupiter in the pic

[David]

Very evil joke :((

[Pierre]

I love I'm going to post it to other site..

[me]

this is f u k c i n g g a y

[dummy]

:)

[Dr. Moebius]

Somebody must have stolen my screenplay. Although a good April Fools story, imagine the day when this discovery is made. Oh, boy, I will be begging to send a manned mission (and it will take this kind of discovery for the space program to ever get any real funding again..)

Of course, it has to be discovered by the US, because we're the good guys. Ain't gonna let no Chinee upstage this biatch, nah!

[Astro]

I live in a country where that kind of "april jokes" does not exist.....
So....

Could you imagine my face when I started to read the so-called news?

Auto-Owned....

I just wished that it wasn´t no joke at all....

[pfff]

whoever sais "bulshit" is scared shitless! and whoever sais... ok i dont know, is mature enough.

[Brandon]

son of a biscuit. i was owned

[Sigh...]

My hopes are crushed once again, I bought it for a while until I saw the date >.>

[AJ]

damn it, i read this thinking holy $*!@ and then i realized its april fools, everything I had hoped for in my short but colourful life has been harshly ripped away in an instant because of a stupid date.

[NewsBlok.com]

If only this were true...well written article however, a lot of work put into Fool's day this year, certainly getting some attention, directed here from GLP.

http://www.newsblok.com - feeding the latest headlines from 20 alternative news sites all to one simple page. Includes Infowars, GodlikeProductions, AboveTopSecret and many more...

[Stephanie Norris]

Given that many people across the world do not "celebrate" this stupid day, I find it not very funny. They could have at least had it put under their "X-Files"......pissed me off for the day.

[aaron]

sometimes i hate april fools day

[deuem]

Seeing how we do not use April fools day in China, you started another problem. Now China will ban your site also and everywhere you get posted. Who ever did this, you made a stupid choice and now we will have to pay for it. We will be even further censored because of junk like this. Why don't you pick on another country that does not ban internet sites. You just went to the top of someones list. Also by the time most people read this in China it will be 4-2. It is now 4 minutes from 4-2 and I just got it. You are being very childish and should print at the top this is a joke.

[bandin55]

wtf, so this is a joke?

[kyle]

c'mon...is this really fake or what? can someone from the daily galaxy confirm what's going on? if it is a april fool's day prank, i wish the article would have been written onion-style. you guys are toying with us...

[Capt Captain]

the internet has murdered april fools

[Stephanie Norris]

Additionally, the trickery should have been noted at the end of the article. I hate lies. I hate being sucked into lies that could be potentially true. I always wondered why April Fool exists other than to make people look like fools which has a narcissistic feel to it....still pissed off.

[Stephen Foster]

Fucking douche bags!!!

[KLA]

The picture is of Saturn and is part of the free screensaver, The Lore of Saturn, created by RateMyScreensaver.com and contains 18 high resolution images of Saturn. - NASA Screensaver Picture Count: 18 Screensaver Type: Slideshow Credit: All images in this screensaver provided by NASA and the ESA 1.1 ...