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Raining Extraterrestrial Microbes in Kerala?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Jan 07, 2006 02:10 AM
from the edge-of-science dept.
from the edge-of-science dept.
jdfox writes "World Science is reporting on a controversial paper to be published shortly in the peer-reviewed research journal Astrophysics and Space Science, describing a strange red rain that fell in India in 2001, shortly after a meteor airburst event in the area. The authors posit that the red particles found in the raindrops may be extraterrestrial microbes. The authors' last two papers on the subject were unpublished: this published paper is more cautious. The paper can be viewed online, and should obviously be considered in context. More info on the 'panspermia' hypothesis can be found at Wikipedia."
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Alien Rain Over India 241 comments
tintinaujapon writes "The Observer is reporting that scientists may have found the first evidence of panspermia, the idea promoted by Hoyle (among others) that life on earth was seeded from space, in samples of a strange rain which fell over India for two months in 2001. To quote the article: "There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers."" This is a continuation of a story two months back or so.
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Great. Space herpes. (Score:5, Funny)
Oh That Intelligent Designer... (Score:4, Funny)
Case closed! Who wants lunch?
Pern? (Score:4, Funny)
sing along~ (Score:2, Funny)
First ... (Score:2, Funny)
Venus (Score:5, Funny)
Red particles... (Score:3, Interesting)
Mike.
Re:Red particles... (Score:3, Funny)
Didn't this happen back in the 80's?
Oh wait, that was a flock of seagulls.
(OK, I'm sorry already, jeez)
Re:Red particles... (Score:2)
But I wonder: you often see cloud formation when a sonic boom is about to occur. Could it be that there was something in the air already that rained down from these clouds? Something that didn't come from the alleged meteor?
Re:Red particles... (Score:5, Informative)
They are about the right size though, these particles range in size from 4 to 10 m. And human RBCs [wikipedia.org] are about 6-8 m. It would explain the lack of a nucleus and DNA too.
But the TEM images are all wrong (thick "cell wall"), and the low Iron and high silicon content makes it very suspect too.
Spock's blood?
But seriously I hope they send some of these things over to other labs for investigation (like mine!) I would start with universal primers, PCR can amplify the tiniest amount of DNA, all they did was dunk the `cells' in Edithium bromide.
Parent
Re:Red particles... (Score:2)
In the interst of science they took the remaining samples and finally subjected them to a 4 million degree inferno created in a supercollider, just to see what would happen.
Re:Red particles... (Score:3, Informative)
I would start with universal primers, PCR can amplify the tiniest amount of DNA, all they did was dunk the `cells' in Edithium bromide.
I call shenanigans on their methodology. All they did was manually grind up the cells - once with a mortar and pestel, once with the same under liquid nitrogen. That **does not** ensure any breakage of many kinds of protist cells.
We do this kind of stuff in my lab. We frequently have to use a French Press with monstrously high pressures to get many single-celled euk
Would have to be a bloody big bird (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway you would expect other things, like hail of McNuggets in a meteroid vs bird incident.
It is a weird incident in anycase. If it is a life form then the fact that so much of it fell down could this mean the entire meteroid was made of it?
The previous theories suggested that small microbes might hide among the rocky part of the asteroid. Not the entire as
Re:Would have to be a bloody big bird (Score:2)
50.000kg is, logically, 50 metric tons, but it's also 55 short tons (US measurement system) or 49.21 long tons (UK system).
(How any educated writer could use anything but the metric system in a science-related article is anyone's guess)
Cheers,
Re:Would have to be a bloody big bird (Score:3, Informative)
Though, to correct your american ignorance, the thousands-separator varie between countries, as does the rest of the punctuation. In the USA you guys use commas, in the UK it's periods, in France just a space and in Switzerland it's " ' ", and that's just the ones I know.
Thus, one million dollars and fifty cents would be spelled:
In the USA: $1,000,000.50
In the UK: $1.000.000,50
In France: $1 000 000,50
In Switzerland: $1'000'000.50
Yup, it sometimes makes it
Contradicts Intelligence (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.
Re:Contradicts Intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't interested in understanding nature. They're just trying to redefine science.
There are a thousand ways to collaborate scientifically using the Internet. Intelligent Design propenents need to immediately begin describing their ideas more concisely and subjecting them to peer review and public criticism. Without these, their wild speculation will remain subject to extreme ridicule among the educated and their movement will continue to be shunned and exposed as a political and anti-intellectual project, standing for everything science is not.
The continued silence from ID is not an encouraging sign for their "theory". But there is no shortage of new research that tests, supports, and expands upon the existing evolutionary framework. Evolutionary biology is the only theory which is making real progress with understanding nature.
Parent
I for one .... (Score:2, Funny)
Ah well
Interesting conclusion... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Interesting conclusion... (Score:2)
There's a teeny wittle woblem with panspermia. Remember the Shoemaker comet, the one that crashed into Jupiter ? Remember the resulting explosions that were visible from Earth ? If Shoemaker was carrying microbes, those microbes were in the middle of the explosion. See the problem ?
You should read this one (Score:5, Interesting)
Nonsense (Score:5, Funny)
The red particles that landed in sector omega-3 were obviously not a virus know as MindGobblers designed to manipulate the portions of your puny brains involved with sensory reception effectivly allow us to transform you into a slave race.
I suggest you fellow humans all make bad jokes about human researcher and realize his findings are not true.
Iron Oxide Chrondules (Score:2, Insightful)
These are iron oxide chrondules from the vaporisation of a nickel-iron meteorite. There's no need to invoke aliens or intelligent designers.
Re:Iron Oxide Chrondules (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Iron Oxide Chrondules (Score:2)
OP made a typo. Try googling: chondrules.
Re:Iron Oxide Chrondules (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Iron Oxide Chrondules (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see anything clearly biological here, and even if there was, the connection to something extraterrestrial rather than terrestrial is tenuous. Don't get me wrong -- it's interesting, but A) there's already a long history of such hunts in ordinary meteorites, and B)
you're being unscientific (Score:2)
Re:you're being unscientific (Score:2)
Sure there are other possibilities, but in the absence of evidence of life, let alone origins of life in other locations, those ideas must remain speculation at best.
Re:Iron Oxide Chrondules (Score:3, Interesting)
Common occurance (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Common occurance (Score:5, Interesting)
The authors clearly have no understanding of biology beyone "it has DNA in it and is carbon-based". Their methods, in particular their "study" of the DNA content, are laughably off-base and reveal a total lack of understanding of how to handle microorganisms which have a thick cell wall.
Trivial test - stain them for bloody cellulose! This is such an obvious damn thing to do that the only excuse for not doing it is (a) they don't know enough to try, or (b) they did and didn't like the results so they didn't mention them, which is probably more likely.
This is a stupid paper.
Parent
The research and paper seem quite factual (Score:5, Insightful)
Not at all. Their research examines quite a large range of characteristics of the particles and of the rainfall, and even presents some controls. It's not as tight as some nor, as sloppy as others, but falls well within the mean of the scientific method.
The fact that one particular type of test was not performed by them does not make this a stupid paper --- it just leaves that analysis for some other team to perform. Indeed, they seem to have covered a collosal amount of ground for a single research group already.
Their Discussion section is not part of their scientific findings, but merely provides room for discussion. Non-DNA-based "life" from outer space is a *possible* handwaving interpretation at best, but since no other interpretation matches both the microscopic visual structure and the chemical composition and the rain-distribution pattern simultaneously, it's the best we have at this stage.
>> Trivial test - stain them for bloody cellulose!
Go right ahead and do it yourself, or communicate with them about it. But who said that ET life would employ cellulose anyway? That notwithstanding, it would be a useful test to perform anyway, as it would help discount other possibilities.
Their earlier non-peer-reviewed papers might have been worth your label of "stupid" (meaning non-scientific) in part, but this one is quite factual in all its research sections.
Parent
Quick, geeks (Score:3, Funny)
Good grief - more stuff sent to India (Score:2, Funny)
I guess we're safe.
Re:Good grief - more stuff sent to India (Score:2)
i saw that movie (Score:2)
This could be more serious than we thought... (Score:3, Funny)
I was going to post a longer comment, but two Marine officers have arrived at my house in an unmarked car. All they said was:
"Dr Titzandkunt? There's been a fire."
Gotta go!
T&K.
Elemnetal composition of the particles (Score:4, Insightful)
45.4% quartz (!) 49.5% carbonate calcium
Doesn't look like life or organic at all. Another case of wishful thinking.
My $.02 (Score:3, Insightful)
Intelligent Design (Score:4, Funny)
Meteor theory amusing but not necessary (Score:4, Insightful)
bad paper (Score:3, Interesting)
This illustrates a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently, two years ago a scientist in India wrote a paper about a long series of tests he conducted on a potential non-dna based life form that can reproduce at 300C and may have arrived on a comet.
Of course it sounds unlikely, but if he's right, it is the scientific find of the century.
And, he has samples of the purported organism.
If scientists were really seeking uncover truth, they'd have repeated his work at five different labs and see if it held up.
Instead, they're all to scared of looking silly to their peers, and they barely even let the Indian researcher publish his findings!
Does anyone else see this as a problem?
Access Forbidden... because my Browser is too old? (Score:3, Informative)
wtf??
No... I'm using Firefox 1.06. I know 1.07 is available, but seriously!
Sadly your webmaster is a moron.
Right, you've never heard of robots.txt. And according to logs generated on my webserver, my User-Agent is: "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050912 Firefox/1.0.6 (Debian package 1.0.6-5)"
I think it's your administrator that needs contacting.Yes, that must be it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, Occam turned in his grave.
"peer review" is not always peer review (Score:5, Informative)
To understand how this article could be published, you should be aware that for all scientific journals the editor has the last responsibility for accepting a paper, not the peer reviewers. In the case of Astrophysics and Space Science, the editorial board [springer.com] contains N.C. Wickramasinghe, who is one of the inventors of the panspermia theory. So, even although peer reviews might have been dodgy, it could have been an editorial decision to accept this paper.
I happen to know that Astrophysics and Space Science operates this way, as a manuscript I co-reviewed with a PhD student of mine several years ago appeared in the journal without taking any of our recommendations into account. This has not happened to me with any of the 30odd manuscripts I have refereed since and is even more astonishing since the journal decided to print the original manuscript, without even addressing the large number of grammatical mistakes and spelling errors pointed out by us (which were so bad that we, as referees, could not understand what the authors were trying to say). I have declined to referee for Astrophysics and Space Science since and consider the journal a "scientific tabloid" as opposed to a "scientific broadsheet". And you wouldn't believe the "Sun" and the "News of the World" either, right?
So, to conclude, "peer refereed" does not always mean what you might think it does, and although I am not a microbiology specialist, as long as a report on the "red rain" is not accepted by a mainstream journal, would doubt any claims made in the article.
Life != DNA and ET Microbes != Panspermia (Score:3, Interesting)
DNA is not a requirement for life, as many commenters here have written. DNA (and/or RNA) is at the core of all life on Earth because all present life forms appear to have a common ancestor that used these molecules for it's genetics. The fundamental mechanism used to replicate oneself is the most likely of traits to be highly conserved in evolutionary biology and this is exactly what we are seeing. However, this does not imply that DNA (or RNA) is the only such mechanism possible, especially when the environment that fostered the transition from inorganic to organic is in a different temperature/pressure regime (300 degrees C!). Just as DNA would be useless as a genetic mechanism in the kinds of environments the paper's authors say they see replication in, a molecule that is useful in that environment would not likely be chemically functional in our relatively frigid and low pressure Earth surface environment.
Therefore, absence of DNA is not unexpected.
If this does turn out to be extraterrestrial life, then the possibility that life could drift from world to world becomes a fact. This does not, however, mean that the origin of life here on Earth is due to such transport. Just because it is possible doesn't mean it has happened, let alone is responsible for the modern biosphere.
The people that make the instant leap from the possibility of interplanetary spores surviving to the assumption that this must be how life began here have always puzzled me. After all, the life in such a scenario had to develop somewhere before traveling to Earth. Why is it so difficult to believe that the life we see today is truly indigenous?
I think I now realize why these people are so ardent that life came from somewhere else: they continue to be mired in the historical notion that the beginning of life required some unique event to get started. In this way, they have much in common with creationists and the general public. The lesson to take from this if it is real is not that life came from space, but that life springs out of non-life with relative ease.
Well making a giant leap (Score:2)
I don't know what killed it although exploding on entry might be a clue.
Anyway anyone knows that all alien invasions start of slowly at first. They are probably biding their time infiltrating our culture and drawing key companies under their evil control. You don't think outsourcing to india is just a coincidince right
Re:The Reds are coming! (Score:3, Interesting)
"Kerala boasts the highest literacy rate in the country (70%), a low infant mortality rate, and is the only state in which females outnumber males. Land distribution is among the most equitable in India, at least partly due to the progressive land ownership policies instituted more than a century ago in what was then the princely state of Travancore. Further extensive land reforms in the 1960's