Washington: The answer to whether alien life exists may be hiding inside our own body!
According to a new theory, human genetic code is embedded with a "designer label" that may be an indelible stamp of a master extraterrestrial civilisation that preceded us by many millions or billions of years.
Researchers Vladimir I shCherbak of al-Farabi Kazakh National University of Kazakhstan, and Maxim A Makukov of the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, hypothesise that an intelligent signal embedded in our genetic code would be a mathematical and semantic message that cannot be accounted for by Darwinian evolution.
Calling it "biological SETI", shCherbak and Makukov argue that the scheme has much greater longevity and chance of detecting alien life than a transient extraterrestrial radio transmission, the `Discovery News` reported.
"Once fixed, the code might stay unchanged over cosmological timescales, in fact, it is the most durable construct known. Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature.
"Once the genome is appropriately rewritten the new code with a signature will stay frozen in the cell and its progeny, which might then be delivered through space and time," the researchers wrote in the journal Icarus.
They said in order to pass the designer label test, any patterns in the genetic code must be highly statistically significant and possess intelligent-like features that are inconsistent with any natural know process.
Researchers said their detailed analysis of the human genome displays thorough precision-type orderliness in the mapping between DNA`s nucleotides and amino acids.
"Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language," said researchers.
The scheme includes the use of decimal notation, logical transformations, and the use of the abstract symbol of zero.
"Accurate and systematic, these underlying patterns appear as a product of precision logic and nontrivial computing," researchers wrote.
This interpretation leads to a far-fetched conclusion that the genetic code, "appears that it was invented outside the solar system already several billions years ago," endorsing the idea of panspermia - that Earth was seeded with interstellar life.