Comets and viruses: a hypothesis

Laura said:
I suspect that Smallpox is what it mutated into. There is a hemorrhagic form of smallpox that sounds exactly like the Black Death.

If I am not mistaken the official medicine posits that the small pox has been known to plague humanity for at least 10000 years. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that earliest documented victim of small pox was one of the Egyptian pharaohs as they found evidence of small pox infection on the mummy.
Of course I wonder how can they claim this with certainty if they are basing their conclusions mostly on historical description of the symptoms or skin lesions in case of the pharaoh's mummy.
Whatever the case I think you are definitely onto something. I think the officially recognized culprit - Yersinia Pestis alone is just not capable of causing deaths on such a massive scale otherwise we would witness plague outbreaks all the time, given the ubiqitousness of this bacteria.

Every since I first got familiar with viral structure and their mode of existence I am convinced they are alien life forms completely out of sync with organic life on planet earth.
Herpetoviridae or herpes virus family which contains 7 types from herpes simplex to chicken pox is particularly creepy. Hence the name, meaning in old greek 'to creep' , suggesting virus' ability to creep into the body and remain hidden until the rest of life. The virus actually hides in nerve cells.
Given its prevalence in modern human population it would really be interesting to study to which extent herpes virus modifies psyche and behavior of its hosts.

Having in mind all we know about 'puppet masters' such as toxoplasma gondi and all sorts of other mind controlling parasitic organisms from insects to fungi - who needs spirit attachments and demonic possessions to explain erratic human behavior. But I don't want to digress too much from the original topic.
 
Herr Eisenheim said:
Every since I first got familiar with viral structure and their mode of existence I am convinced they are alien life forms completely out of sync with organic life on planet earth.
Herpetoviridae or herpes virus family which contains 7 types from herpes simplex to chicken pox is particularly creepy. Hence the name, meaning in old greek 'to creep' , suggesting virus' ability to creep into the body and remain hidden until the rest of life. The virus actually hides in nerve cells.
Given its prevalence in modern human population it would really be interesting to study to which extent herpes virus modifies psyche and behavior of its hosts.

Yes I'm "creeped out" by the herpes virus as well, since the Bell's Palsy I suffered in my early 20's is likely caused by a strain of this virus. I know it still lurks in the nerve and a healthy immune system is a must for me to keep it in check. What is most interesting about this is, when I came down with the Bell's Palsy, in the early 1980's - there was an outbreak of Bell's Palsy! Almost 2 dozen students at Michigan State University all had Bell's Palsy. So many, in fact, it made the newspaper. I however, was NOT at Michigan State, but at a college about an hour from Lansing.

I always had a conspiracy theory, that we were 'guinea pigs' for some dark agency. At the time, I was dating a Libyan, and the politics were not good with Libya & the USA. In fact, that was the year the US bombed Gaddaffi. So I felt I was targeted somehow. I may be totally off, but the thought did cross my mind. :/
 
I probably should've read the whole DCM #13 before posting!

The hypothesis in the Sixth Extinction article seems to fit the description of essential psychopathy. Now this makes me wonder about the variety of possible causes for other psychopath variants such as schizoid. I wonder if these variations are a result of mutation over time from the essential psychopath or whether completely different factors came into play. Perhaps it's possible this came about from cometary impact radiation, comet-delivered viruses altering genes, or even consumption of particular foods such as gluten altering brain chemistry and DNA. Now that I think of all the possibilities, it's no surprise there are many strains. And these are just the ones we know about!
 
Laura said:
I suspect that Smallpox is what it mutated into. There is a hemorrhagic form of smallpox that sounds exactly like the Black Death.

What a "coincidence" that scientists now have a "firm evidence" that Yersinia pestis was the cause of Black Death. Here is the link to the study.

Black Death bug identified from medieval bones

The Black Death infamously wiped out about a third of Europe's population in the 14th century, but until now there was no firm evidence that bubonic plague was the cause.

Some researchers have suggested that the epidemic was caused by a virus such as Ebola, but an analysis of DNA from a London plague pit seems to settle the argument in favour of the "plague" bacterium Yersinia pestis.[...]

To pick out the signature of Y. pestis, Poinar's team took DNA from a modern strain and made a molecular "probe" that would bind to DNA from this type of bacterium. The team attached a magnetic chip to the probe and tested it on around 100 samples of teeth and bone excavated from a London plague pit.

Then they used a magnet to fish out the chips, which carried bacterial DNA belonging to a strain of Y. pestis unlike any known today. The DNA was not present in teeth from skeletons buried elsewhere in London before the Black Death.

The findings are the first confirmation that these Black Death victims were infected with Y. pestis, Poinar says. The evidence was strong enough to convince two team members who had previously argued that the bug was not the cause[...]
 
There's an SOTT article from a few years ago that talks about microbial mutation in space, and seems relevant to what might happen to comet-bound microbes:

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/140491-Bacteria-sent-to-space-come-back-more-infectious

Microbes that cause salmonella came back from spaceflight even more virulent and dangerous in an experiment aboard the US space shuttle Atlantis, according to a study published on Monday.

The experiment by microbiologists at Arizona State University sent tubes with salmonella bacteria on a shuttle flight in September 2006 to measure how space flight might affect disease-causing microbes.

The salmonella sample that travelled millions of kilometers (miles) in orbit changed their pattern of certain genes compared to identical bacteria back on Earth, said the study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Following the shuttle flight, studies using mice showed the salmonella bacteria aboard the shuttle were "almost three times as likely to cause disease when compared with control bacteria grown on the ground," said a university statement outlining the study.

After about three weeks, 40 percent of mice fed the salmonella from Earth were still alive while only 10 percent of those given the bacteria from space survived, according to the study.

http://www.naturalnews.com/022634.html

Salmonella bacteria sent into outer space responded to the altered gravity by becoming more virulent, with changed expression of 167 different genes, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"These bugs can sense where they are by changes in their environment," said Cheryl Nickerson, from the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at Arizona State University (ASU). "The minute they sense a different environment, they change their genetic machinery so they can survive."

Researchers placed strains of Salmonella typhimurium, a common food-poisoning agent, into two separate containment canisters. One of the canisters was sent into outer space for 12 days, while the other remained in the Orbital Environmental Simulator at Kennedy Space Center. The environmental simulator remained in constant communication with the space shuttle, immediately replicating in real-time whatever temperature and humidity conditions were being experienced in the vessel. This allowed the two groups of bacteria to be exposed to identical conditions, except for the fact that one group was under microgravity conditions in outer space.

Since they only tested bacteria, it's not clear whether the same would be true for viruses. It does suggest, though, that if you wanted to develop a more deadly form of a pathogen and had the right 'connections', you could just send it into space, allow it to mutate, and then retrieve the mutated pathogen and do whatever you wanted to with it.
 
Keit said:
Laura said:
I suspect that Smallpox is what it mutated into. There is a hemorrhagic form of smallpox that sounds exactly like the Black Death.

What a "coincidence" that scientists now have a "firm evidence" that Yersinia pestis was the cause of Black Death. Here is the link to the study.

Yeah, I saw that. Problem is, science is so corrupt, and many - if not most - studies are so poorly designed and carried out, you can't trust anything they publicize anymore, especially about controversial topics.
 
It’s seems that not only bacteria can survive in space but some tiny little ‘Water Bears’.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/165824-Tiny-water-bears-become-first-creatures-to-survive-in-space

from this article _http://www.thejournal.ie/nasa-funded-maynooth-research-project-makes-evolution-breakthough-219274-Sep2011/

Pisano says that the researchers chose to investigate the 33 species of tardigrades for the study because “we knew that by focusing on the tardigrades we would be studying the most challenging species possible in terms of their genomic characters and the most difficult to analyse and classify as they evolve very fast”.

More info on water bears here– if interested _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

(From the smallest to the biggest, a virus arriving in a comet or from one seems reasonable)
 
Laura said:
Keit said:
What a "coincidence" that scientists now have a "firm evidence" that Yersinia pestis was the cause of Black Death. Here is the link to the study.

Yeah, I saw that. Problem is, science is so corrupt, and many - if not most - studies are so poorly designed and carried out, you can't trust anything they publicize anymore, especially about controversial topics.

Susan Scott & Christopher Duncan review some of the studies which linked Yersinia pestis with the Black Death in their book "Return of the Black Death: The World's Greatest Serial Killer".
 
Hey.

I was reading the latest article on smoking/comet diseases and had a sudden thought while reading the section on airborne particles seeding raindrops. As I recall (can't find the post) Laura dreamt of a large amount of rain falling within several days or something like that. Could this be a sign of airborne biological particles seeding rain, with their characteristic of doing this at higher temperatures than non-organic particles? This would make sense during the time we pass through the dust trail from Elenin. However it is equally possible the water to be from Elenin itself.
 
I was digging around in the Alternative Cosmology Group newsletter ( _http://www.cosmology.info/newsletter/2011.12.pdf ) and found this little gem.

Extraterrestrial Life and Censorship
_http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1104/1104.1314.pdf

My first inkling of any censorship relating to extraterrestrial life came when we made the
intellectual leap from prebiology in space to fully-fledged biology outside the Earth (Hoyle
and Wickramasinghe, 1976, 1982; Hoyle et al, 1984). In setting out to explore the hypothesis
that interstellar grains were not just abiotic organic polymers but bacterial cells in various
stages of degradation, we made a prediction that interstellar dust in the infrared spectral
region must have the signature of bacteria (Hoyle et al, 1982). Infrared sources near the
galactic centre were a prime target for this investigation and on our instigation approaches
were made to the Anglo-Australian telescope committees to provide time on the AAT to test
our seemingly wild hypothesis. An application for observing time for this project made by
my brother Dayal T. Wickramasinghe at ANU and David Allen was duly refused as “having
no scientific value” (Wickramasinghe, 2005). In the event, Dayal, who was allocated time on
the AAT for a totally different project, found a reason to illicitly study the spectrum of the
Galactic Centre source GC-IRS7. When he did so he discovered an amazingly close fit to our
predicted absorption curve for bacteria
– a prediction that was made a full 3 months ahead of
the serendipitous observations being made (Hoyle et al, 1982). See Fig. 1.


...and also, further in...

Extensive studies of comets after the 1986 perihelion passage of Comet Halley and the Giotto
Mission showed to the consternation of most astronomers that cometary dust did indeed
contain a large fraction of complex organics with spectra resembling biomaterial. Whipple’s
11
dirty snowball model of comets was seriously challenged. Cometary dust collections in the
Stardust Mission to Comet Wildt 2 also confirmed the presence of either degradation products
of life or the building blocks of life, in the destruction trails left by high-speed dust particles
as they were slowed in blocks of aerogel. Unfortunately, however, because the aerogel was
not sterilized, no biological inferences could be drawn. The Deep Impact Mission to comet
Tempel 1 in 2004 once again confirmed the organic composition of comets but also showed
evidence of clay minerals, consistent with the presence of liquid water at an early stage in the
comet’s history (A’Hearn et al, 2005; Lisse et al, 2006). This is important because it would
show that comets could provide habitats for the replication of cosmic bacteria – thus making
these celestial bodies viable homes for life.
 
I must say, a very interesting thread. I had recently started a thread elsewhere entitled "Comets causing Plagues, Really?", but it didn't go very far. Although, I believe this is quite an interesting subject and entirely a possibility. I did have more information to add to my thread, but as far as this thread, it seems you have covered, just abou,t the whole story.

There is another recent study, I didn't see, by a dendrochronologist [Mike Baillie] suggesting a cosmic connection to The Black death: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/145683-New-Light-on-the-Black-Death-The Cosmic-Connection . Apparently he has found evidence within tree rings.
 
Hi Kalopin,

Welcome to the forum. :) We recommend all new members to post an introduction in the Newbies section telling us a bit about themselves, and how they found their way here. Have a read through that section to get an idea of how others have done it. Thanks.
 
This adds more evidence for viruses being key to the evolution of species:

http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/5015/giant-viruses-shake-up-tree-of-life said:
Summary: A new study of giant viruses supports the idea that viruses are ancient living organisms. The study could have important implications in our understanding of the origin and evolution of life on Earth.

A new study of giant viruses supports the idea that viruses are ancient living organisms and not inanimate molecular remnants run amok, as some scientists have argued. The study reshapes the universal family tree, adding a fourth major branch to the three that most scientists agree represent the fundamental domains of life.

The new findings appear in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.

The researchers used a relatively new method to peer into the distant past. Rather than comparing genetic sequences, which are unstable and change rapidly over time, they looked for evidence of past events in the three-dimensional, structural domains of proteins. These structural motifs, called folds, are relatively stable molecular fossils that – like the fossils of human or animal bones – offer clues to ancient evolutionary events, said University of Illinois crop sciences and Institute for Genomic Biology professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, who led the analysis.

"Just like paleontologists, we look at the parts of the system and how they change over time," Caetano-Anollés said. Some protein folds appear only in one group or in a subset of organisms, he said, while others are common to all organisms studied so far.

"We make a very basic assumption that structures that appear more often and in more groups are the most ancient structures," he said.

Most efforts to document the relatedness of all living things have left viruses out of the equation, Caetano-Anollés said.

"We've always been looking at the Last Universal Common Ancestor by comparing cells," he said. "We never added viruses. So we put viruses in the mix to see where these viruses came from."

The researchers conducted a census of all the protein folds occurring in more than 1,000 organisms representing bacteria, viruses, the microbes known as archaea, and all other living things. The researchers included giant viruses because these viruses are large and complex, with genomes that rival – and in some cases exceed – the genetic endowments of the simplest bacteria, Caetano-Anollés said.

"The giant viruses have incredible machinery that seems to be very similar to the machinery that you have in a cell," he said. "They have complexity and we have to explain why."

Part of that complexity includes enzymes involved in translating the genetic code into proteins, he said. Scientists were startled to find these enzymes in viruses, since viruses lack all other known protein-building machinery and must commandeer host proteins to do the work for them.

In the new study, the researchers mapped evolutionary relationships between the protein endowments of hundreds of organisms and used the information to build a new universal tree of life that included viruses. The resulting tree had four clearly differentiated branches, each representing a distinct "supergroup." The giant viruses formed the fourth branch of the tree, distinct from bacteria, archaea and eukarya (plants, animals and all other organisms with nucleated cells).

The researchers discovered that many of the most ancient protein folds – those found in most cellular organisms – were also present in the giant viruses. This suggests that these viruses appeared quite early in evolution, near the root of the tree of life, Caetano-Anollés said.

The new analysis adds to the evidence that giant viruses were originally much more complex than they are today and experienced a dramatic reduction in their genomes over time, Caetano-Anollés said. This reduction likely explains their eventual adoption of a parasitic lifestyle, he said. He and his colleagues suggest that giant viruses are more like their original ancestors than smaller viruses with pared down genomes.

The researchers also found more evidence that viruses are key "spreaders of information," Caetano-Anollés said.

"The protein structures that other organisms share with viruses have a particular quality, they are (more widely) distributed than other structures," he said. "Each and every one of these structures is an incredible discovery in evolution. And viruses are distributing this novelty," he said.

Most studies of giant viruses are "pointing in the same direction," Caetano-Anollés said. "And this study offers more evidence that viruses are embedded in the fabric of life."

Very interesting in light of what may be on our collective door step so to speak.
 
Yes, the case is strong. I'll post here a synthesis of what has been discussed for the last few years.

“Junk” DNA includes a whole subset of names such as introns, retrotransposable elements, and non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). In fact, ncRNAs are often located near genes known to be important to both stem cells and cancer, to serve as enhancer elements which promote their gene expression. Stem cells are the cells that have the potential to turn into lots of other cells. So this junk DNA can influence how stem cells specifically differentiate into multiple cell types and in this sense it is now estimated that 80% of our genome is biologically active with only 1% of our genome encoding for proteins:

_http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/250006.php

A staggering batch of over 30 papers published in Nature, Science, and other journals this month, firmly rejects the idea that, apart from the 1% of the human genome that codes for proteins, most of our DNA is "junk" that has accumulated over time like some evolutionary flotsam and jetsam.

The papers, representing 10 years of work of the ENCODE ("Encyclopedia of DNA Elements") project, completed by hundreds of scientists from dozens of labs around the world, reveal that 80% of the human genome serves some purpose and is biochemically active, for example, in regulating the expression of genes situated nearby.

That was known for some time, but it is now official since the last couple of weeks or so.

Evolutionary speaking, it makes a lot of sense… From the information posted in this session:

http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,27027.msg330775.html#msg330775 , we learned that the greatest shocks of genomic science was to find that the human genome contains more viral than "human" genes. That is, the human genome is made from thousands of viruses that infected our distant ancestors. They got there by infecting eggs or sperm, inserting their own DNA into ours. Hyperdimensional engineering...

Most of the genetic diversity can be found in virus genes. Scientists agree that there are some 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 viruses in the ocean and it matches almost nothing to any gene from any microbe, animal, plant or other organism, even from any other known virus.

All living things have hundreds or thousands of genes imported by viruses. There are a group of viral species known as retroviruses which insert their genetic material into the host cell’s DNA. When the host cell divides, it copies the virus’s DNA along with its own. Retroviruses have “on switches” that prompt their host cell to make proteins out of nearby genes. Sometimes their switches turn on host genes that ought to be kept shut off, and cancer can result. This is precisely what our junk DNA –ncRNA- seems to be doing “next” to genes that have to do with stem cells and cancer cells.

What is known as endogenous retrovirus – endogenous meaning generated within, are the viruses that lurk in the genomes of just about every major group of vertebrates, from fish to reptiles to mammals. Virologists have found retrovirus-like segments in our human genome and they were able to track its genetic code down to an original functioning virus. The virus was called Phoenix, for the mythical bird that rose from its own ashes.

It is known that part of our junk DNA, the retrotransposable elements, are viral in its origin. It includes the endogenous retroviruses. But it is now argued that ncRNA might be viral in its origin as well. This has interesting implications in the sense that epigenetic control of gene expression involves this junk DNA – ncRNAs. It would mean that our entire junk DNA (98%) might well be very functional epigenetically speaking, and in the induction of regulatory genes that code for stem cells, or for reprogramming o modulating genes known to response to oxidative stress, DNA damage and p53 – a protein that regulates the cell cycle and is implicated in about half of all human cancers.

Evil lectins from carbs can initiate a cascade of events once they attach to the cell “mem-brain” that may lead to attraction of the immune system, cell death, production of chemicals, multiplication of the cell and so forth. It depends. And it might well depend on the adaptation response from the viral-like properties inside the cell, our “junk” DNA.

Harmful lectins - such as the ones found in gluten, soy, dairy, corn – cause inflammation and damage without a defense/immune response which end up being secondary to the initial damage. Some response in quite a drastic way (i.e. autoimmune diseases) others respond in a milder way, constituting thus the wide nature of symptoms among people.

Moreover, wheat’s evil lectin (WGA) and viruses share similar properties. For instance, when the influenza virus incorporates its own genetic material into our cells, the defense/immune system must attack its own virally transformed cell in order to fight the infection. WGA has access to our bodies and to our cells “mem-brain’s” through viral ports. Then they influence gene expression and trigger autoimmune attacks like viruses do. As John B. Symes, D.V.M. pointed out back in 2007 :

http://dogtorj.com/main-course/viruses-friend-or-foe/viruses-and-lectins/

Our medical histories all line up with this once the role (and ultimate purpose) of viruses in nature and our bodies is grasped. They are not the malicious entities that we have labeled them to be. They are simply doing their job. The noxious stimuli being thrown at them is the real issue. We are literally forcing them into becoming pathogens. In addition to the plethora of obvious offending agents being imbibed, most individuals are compounding matters through poor nutrition, polluted environments, fast-paced lifestyles, and lack of sleep. All of these things add up to self-induced misery. [...]

I have suggested many times that, when reading a paper of genetics, the word “gene” be replaced with the word “virus” to see if that treatise makes more sense. Suddenly, answers to the above questions start coming. Coupled with the knowledge of viral stimulants (e.g. carcinogens, lectins, and other viruses), we can start to see what…or who…the real culprit is.

Mutations in ncRNA are associated with cancer, autism, and Alzheimer’s disease AND ncRNA can sense a viral infection within the cell, giving off signals that indicate the pathogenic virus presence.

An endogenous retrovirus has also been associated with multiple sclerosis, meaning that viral genes that are part of our genome can be “woken up”. As the authors of this study say, "retroviral infections often develop into running battles between the immune system and virus, with the virus mutating repeatedly to avoid the immune system, and the immune system repeatedly catching up. One can see the episodic nature of multiple sclerosis as such a running battle."

It is crucial to understand that what we eat is information the effect epigenetic changes that regulate gene expression, and that can be passed from generation to generation.

Also, the one thing that may be contributing to mitochondrial dysfunction is latent viral infections such as the ones of the herpes family. That plus, our toxic food and environment makes a very bad combination.

Herpes simplex virus is a widespread human pathogen and it goes right after our mitochondrial DNA. A latent viral infection might be driving the brain cell loss in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. Members of the herpes virus family, including cytomegalovirus and Epstein-Barr virus which are most have, can go after our mitochondrial DNA, causing neurodegenerative diseases by mitochondrial dysfunction. But a ketogenic diet is the one thing that would help stabilize mDNA since mitochondria runs the best on fat fuel. As it happens, Alzheimer's disease is the one condition where a ketogenic diet has a profound positive effect.

Our mitochondrial energetic sources are essential if we are to heal from chronic ailments and we need to stabilize our "viral" genome so that epigenetic changes can be unlocked in a beneficial way.

It is our mitochondria the one that lies at the interface between the fuel from foods that come from our environment and our bodies’ energy demands. And it is a metabolism based on fat fuel, a ketone metabolism, the one which signals epigenetic changes that maximizes energetic output within our mitochondria and help us heal.

A ketogenic diet promotes the die-off of pathogenic viruses through autophagy. It seems to be the key to stabilize our junk DNA ("viral" DNA) and activate it in a positive way.
 
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