Dinosaurs from space may have advanced intelligence

Few scientific papers stir much interest in the general population.

At first glance, the paper, "Evidence for the Likely Origin of Homochirality in Amino Acids, Sugars, and Nucleosides on Prebiotic Earth" in the Journal of the American Chemical Society by Ronald Breslow of Columbia University, appears too dense and impenatrable for anyone without a PhD in chemistry.

However, at the end of Breslow's paper, the tone changes and the imagination is stirred when he speculates that there may indeed be living dinosaurs on other planets that have human intelligence or greater.

The paragraph reads, according to io9:

"An 
implication
 from
 this 
work 
is 
that 
elsewhere 
in
 the 
universe
 there 
could 
be 
life
 forms 
based 
on 
D 
amino
 acids 
and 
L
 sugars, 
depending 
on
 the 
chirality 
of 
circular
 polarized
 light 
in 
that 
sector 
of 
the 
universe or 
whatever 
other
 process 
operated 
to
 favor
 the 
L
α‐methyl 
amino acids 
in 
the 
meteorites 
that 
have 
landed 
on Earth.



He goes on to write, "Such
 life
 forms
 could
 well
 be
 advanced
 versions
 of
 dinosaurs,
 if
 mammals
 did
 not
 have the
 good 
fortune
 to 
have 
the 
dinosaurs 
wiped
 out 
by 
an 
asteroidal 
collision, 
as 
on
 Earth. 

We 
would 
be 
better 
off 
not 
meeting 
them."

According to TG Daily, Breslow's report takes on a more serious topic, that of the mystery of why the building blocks of terrestrial amino acids, sugars, and the genetic materials DNA and RNA take only one shape and only two possible orientations.

The mystery goes back to the origins of life itself.

One theory that Breslow agrees with is that meteorites carried certain amino acids billions of years ago 'seeding' the earth.

Thus, according to Smithsonian, the planet's flora and fauna would be constrained by their characteristics.

This might mean that on other planets there was an opposite biochemical orientation than that of life on earth.

Though just speculation, space dinosaurs, it seems, might not just be in the imagination of Star Trek creators after all.