NASA finally made their big announcement about alien life this afternoon: They were looking around some mud somewhere and found a microorganism that is made of arsenic instead of the usual stuff of which every other living thing on Earth is made. This means life can perhaps exist in many other ways we can’t conceive, so there are probably a bunch of invisible arsenic dinosaur-like things walking on the Moon, and we didn’t even know it. It may turn out there are intelligent beings with structures of PURE GOLD on other planets, when we were stupidly looking for worthless carbon-based humanoids all along. THERE IS A NEW FRONTIER: WE MUST VENTURE OUT AND KILL AND MAKE NECKLACES OUT OF THESE KIND GOLD-BEINGS.
Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur are the six basic building blocks of all known forms of life on Earth. Phosphorus is part of the chemical backbone of DNA and RNA, the structures that carry genetic instructions for life, and is considered an essential element for all living cells.
But not anymore! Perhaps we can hoard this arsenic from these weird alien beings that need it and sell it to them at a high markup? Economy saved! [NASA]
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NASA speculates that no other planet has tea parties, fortunately.
Our little girl and English astronauts are going to be very disappointed, then.
The search for intelligent life continues.
Thanks god this breaking news didn't come up before the election. Otherwise Ms. O'Donnell would be your senator now.
I think Obama should appoint Palin as special ambassador to our new friends.
I, for one, welcome our microscopic arsenic overlords.
Did they find any "old lace"?
I'll bet these arsenic creatures are just FABULOUSLY gay! Oh wait, that was mercury, not arsenic. Maybe they live on planet Mercury?…
I thought it was Uranus.
Given the lack of Bieber, otherwise, in that Blinging, I hope 'It's a boy!' means the Arsenic Golden Child is Justin Bieber.
Yes. He's the one in the red party hat.
SEVENTEEN PEE?! WHO DID THIS TO ME? I BLAME YOU ALL.
Everyone else is also suffering from the case of the missing p.
Well, everyone else but me for some reason.
Not you, & not I. I don't know how many you've lost, but there're not many.
I'm down seven.
Well, I figure that you have George Soros evil minnions protecting you.
However, for some reason, I only lost 13 whore diamonds.
The big question is, why doesn't Jack know what is going on?
It's Mono Lake. You have to eat arsenic to survive.
So, brine shrimp then?
This THING was found in California! The aliens are already here!
And this is news, why?
Schwarzenegger basically proved that.
The aliens already came to California in the 80s, but phoned home and left.
Now we know where our p went. Ken, now living out near Mono Lake California, has switched to adenosine triarsenate instead of adenosine triphosphate. We are now ATA-driven instead of ATP. Can 'Murica get ahead of the curve on this and also switch to arsenic and old Lasix?
Ken took our p over to Gawker!
I knew it was Newell along along.
Never trust a Ginger.
a) I love you lots for being a microbiology nerd
b) do you think bacterial plasmids containing DNA with an arsenic backbone could be useful for creating an antibiotic-resistant pathogen infectious only to Orange Americans?
Does it really need to be antibiotic-resistant if the pathogen itself is essentially toxic?
I should think so. In theory antibiotics could still be created to kill the thing, right? The trick is making sure it only infects the 'actors' in Jersey Shore and the soon-to-be speaker of the house.
Agent Orange, once again?
Yes, but like any good redneck my first questions is: are these new arsenic DNA lifeforms edible?
If you bread them and deep-fat-fry them, you betcha!
And they're rat-pruf!
They can be turned into a high grade of 'shine'.
This is California, so the first question should be can they be snorted or smoked.
Can they be shot from a helicopter?
Gold?! I guess that means that the Paultards were right about going back onto the gold standard.
Do you think we can convince them to go look for these gold-based lifeforms?
The Great Gold Rush of the 21st Century. Here come the republitards to pillage every village.
So they found an earf Horta?
I'll bet that Space Jeebus will have some harsh words for the (un)intelligent designer tonight.
I'm a doctor, not a mason!
I do hope that the astrobiologists get one with finding out if liquid methane can serve as an alternate liquid medium to water for life, though; come on, life on Titan!
Hey, SorosBot still has his/her/its big Pee number… He/She/It's in on it! "It", of course, being the Peespiracy.
I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
So, strange life exists on earth. Slow news day?
So NASA discovered that life isn't exactly what NASA expected it to be? Christ, I find that out every fucking day but I don't make a big deal out of it.
I think I saw this episode of Star Trek. The structures turned out to be alien caviar.
I say it is time to put up an arsenic resisting wall around Texas!! We ain't havin any fucking aliens, brown, yella, full of beans, full of arsenic – WHATEVER!!! BUILD THE DANG WALL!!!
So this explains Justin Beiber. Finally.
I'm thinkin' the arsenic creatures are not a likely food source.
they taste like almonds. wrap 'em in cocoanut, sugar, and chocolate, and they'll be a joy.
Milton: We use only the finest baby frogs, dew picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope and lovingly frosted with glucose.
Praline: That's as may be, it's still a frog.
Milton: What else?
Praline: Well, don't you even take the bones out?
Milton: If we took the bones out it wouldn't be crunchy, would it?
lightly killed is my favorite. that's the way i do all my prey.
Tell that to any store selling food imported from China.
Everybody – can I get a high five on the sixth extinction? WOOOO!
At least our new space monster overlords won't give us syphilis when they tongue punch our scientific butthurts.
This means life can perhaps exist in many other ways we can’t conceive…
"There is no life we can't conceive" – The Palin girls
Glen Blech is right then? Goldline+Mormons/other planets=profit?
I was so hoping that they were going to say that they discovered Tribbles.
Soft, sessile creatures that do nothing but eat and produce children?
I don't think I have to finish this joke.
"A most curious creature, Captain. It's trilling seems to have a tranquilizing effect on the human nervous system."
If Palin's a tribble, then I must be a Klingon.
What do they look like going through the TSA Death P0rno Tubes? Are they tearists too just like teh brown?
Horta: "No Kill I"
Hortas are silicone based. Katherine Harris lives!
I assume that Sarah Palin has twatted that we now must nuke California to save us from the alien menace?
Or did she just call for the nuking of California to stop the Urban menace to society?
Either way, I'm sure she wants something nuked in California. It is what her North Korean allies would want.
Boring. So some bug that used to rely on phosphorus adapted to use arsenic instead? WTF Why not?
Too late! They've already developed a taste for Lady Gaga's meat dress.
Oh hell, join the club!
And did NASA explain how they knew that the bacteria were not just taking arsenic to look thin and pale?
Tony Perkins and Mike Hickabee are already beating the drums for a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting Arsenic-Based Life Form/Human Marriages.
Huckabee is still trying to figure out on what day God created that other genesis.
Hickabee: Living proof of Evolution….Reverse Evolution.
Didn't people use to snort arsenic back before they discovered meth? If only we could discover aliens made of Bombay Sapphire with olive eyes and big straws sticking out of their heads.
The 21st Century equivalent of Manifest Destiny… Let the lands be explored and mauled and desecrated in the name of alien life. Go git 'em tea tards. Spank those bad, bad alien life forms. I hope some survive. Someone has to be in charge once the republitards get done fucking the planet.
I envy the British right now who get to make a bunch of jokes about alien arsenic creatures from uranus. If you're American it's only half a joke, and not particularly funny.
Curse you Noah Webster!
NASA's Headline: NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical
Surely they could have just gone over to the Naval Observatory between 2000 and 2008 and figure that one out.
"If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven't seen yet?"
By Jove, I think we've found the epigram for Bristol Palin's autobiography.
So this makes me wonder, who would win in a bacterial cage match, the Mono Lake Arsenic Muncher, or MRSA, the plucky hometown hero from a hospital near you…?
Mormons are flocking to Mono Lake in the attempt to covert these arsenic based life forms to Mormonism.
It's going to be a real mindfuck when we finally meet the beings of pure gold, and they're tablet-shaped.
I want a website: LOL GFAJ-1z! "I can haz arsenic?!?" nom nom nom.
The Governor of Kentucky is already trying to figure out how Noah safely collected these toxic creatures from Lake Arsenic for his theme park display.
are they sure it isn't mel gibson on a bender?
Is this anything like when BP discovered that Corexit was a beneficial sentient being that offered maternal, life-giving protection to the oceans?
Inexplicable: Todd discovers new forms of life in Sarah's vagina almost everyday, but US Gov't can't discover microorganisms on treasonous balls of gas, billions of miles away?11!
There's a dinner theatre somewhere in the Alpha Centauri doing a production of "Carbon and Old Lace."
The possibilities are endless with this news.
I've always thought there were aliens made of fart clouds that come out of pig-eyed entertainers mouths and pass through TVs and radios and crawl into ears and hijack cognitive function.
Then the unsuspecting host victim starts to believe a whole host of paradoxical shit like expanding the military while cutting the revenue stream to pay for it.
I don't know where I'm going with this…hurray rat poison is aliens!
This sort of explains that aroma wafting off Ann Coulter.
Presumably phosphorus compounds are just as poisonous to these bacteria as arsenic compounds are to us. Which means the only thing keeping these creatures back was all the phosphate we were dumping into rivers and streams. Now that that's disappearing, I assume the bacteria will soon emerge and arsenate the whole world. Thanks, EPA.
Look on the bright side–maybe after we're gone, the arsenic-based life forms will evolve into intelligent beings. And maybe next time it'll stick.
Nah, that's what the dinosaurs used to say about mammals, before they blew themselves up with their iridium reactor. It didn't work then any better than it would work now. In fact, I suspect the great grandmother of Arsenic Sarah Palin has already been born.
Should we send these new people small pox blankets yet?
I just polled my co-workers, and it's a fact: I'm the only person I know who thinks this is interesting and and fantastically exciting news.
You were probably the only one who knew there was anything unusual about an arsenic based life form.
He's probably the only one of his colleagues who knew that arsenic is an element.
Big deal, this finding will never make it into the textbooks with all the creationist crap that has to be inserted in the name of Texas.
I'd like to say that it isn't NASA's fault that this got blown insanely out-of-proportion, but honestly the entire precedent of NASA press releases is media outlets loudly proclaiming during the run-up that there's LIFE ON MARS and WE'RE COLONIZING JUPITER and OMG THE SUN IS EXPLODING TOMORROW. You can't work for NASA, think "maybe we should have a press conference!" and not know what's coming.
NASA should probably just never send out a press release ever again, or at least not until FOX and CNN don't exist anymore.
But the real question is how much money can be made with these organisms, how they can be packaged and marketed. Focus groups are up and running… Then there is the secondary market, potential derivatives of the contractual agreements and so forth, Christ, this thing could be bigger than Ling-Temco-Vought!!!
Dibs on the top tranche!
We're looking for new life. God, this is so exciting. Meanwhile we are throwing the old onto the ice floes, the unemployed onto the streets, the sick into their graves and the helpless into the maw of our military machine. There's no consequential life here. I'm ready for that Arsenic yogurt (bourbon) now.
"Jim, I'm a doctor not a bricklayer…"
That's an "Arse-based" life form.
Sorry, NASA, but if I can't kill it, deep fry it, and smother it in cream gravy, it ain't "life."
Or maybe the question is why does Jack pretend he doesn't know what's going on, hennggghhhhh?
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