That’s sneaky. Ironically more like a computer virus than the classical viruses. Taking over the host and modifying its boot partition so that it permanently gets produced by the system.
The best you get to shutting off (without permanent cell death) would be the computer equivalent of hibernation. All the proteins and RNA are still there just waiting for the signal to activate again.
Life doesn’t reboot as you say, it is split off from other organisms whether seed, sperm, rhizome or any other method it’s just cells dividing and spitting off other cells.
Mind boggling to me.
Why expect that the universe wouldn't subsequently continue to let it happen, again and again?
It's possible our origin was from a community of ancestral organisms, but at some point all terrestrial life that we have discovered so far intermixed enough to create an effective universal common ancestor that we all appear to branch from.
There is some evidence that things like the genetic code, the choice of RNA/DNA nucleotides, and the set of the 20 aminoacids aren't really random. That would not rule out life arising multiple times, but the likelihood that it merged with other lineages would be even higher.
Short summary: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/why-these-amino-ac... . A more in-depth paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03781...
I think over the span of billions of years, evolution tends to converge too much for the trees to remain very distinct from each other.
Some of this has been solved by literally allowing the microbes to sit in culture for a year or so in order to either wake up from hibernation, or adapt to the culture composition.
> see if the universal metabolic molecules like, for example, the hydrogen carriers NAD+/NADP+/NADPH, are truly universal.
For anything that's based on DNA or RNA we now do direct sequencing of environmental samples. From this direct sequencing we can pull out individual genes and pathways.
> I think over the span of billions of years, evolution tends to converge too much for the trees to remain very distinct from each other.
We've got over 20 recognized genetic codes already from existing life. These are highly similar, but this probably points to similar origins instead of convergence.
This is supposing that certain parts of the periodic table are more hospitable to biochemistry than others (i.e. that we don't have transition-metal-based life forms that just operate too slowly for us to notice, or some other orthogonal sort of way to be alive).
We are survivors(!) from a long-dead process. And have become far more than that process could have ever imagined, if it could have imagined.
We are Tron!
Fungal spores[0][1] come to mind.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore#Fungi
[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/37268/can-mushroom...
https://www.livescience.com/58309-how-tardigrades-survive-dr...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/virus-genes-hu...
More like infecting compiler so every application build using it will include virus, including building compilers that will add virus code to their output and propagate it.
Ie, in the DNA => RNA => Protein cycle, viruses are a loop from Protein => DNA or Protein => RNA. Introners are a loop from RNA => DNA.
* DNA => RNA => Protein
* RNA => Protein
* RNA => DNA => RNA => Protein
As far as I know, there is no method to do Protein => DNA or Protein => RNA at the celular level.
It would be very surprising. RNA and DNA are quite similar and have similar encoding, so RNA <==> DNA is a 1 to 1 translation.
The translation to RNA to proteins is not 1 to 1, and the translations table is quite arbitrary, so untranslating at the celular level looks extremely difficult.