No, Life Has Not Been Found In a Meteorite 68
The Bad Astronomer writes "News is going around the web that a scientist in the UK has found life (in the form of microscopic diatoms) in a meteorite, and has even published a paper about it. However, there are a lot of reasons to strongly doubt the claim. While the diatoms appear to be real, they are certainly from Earth. The meteorite itself, on the other hand, does not appear to be real. Many of the basic scientific steps and claims made in the paper are very shaky. Also, the scientist making the claim, N. C. Wickramasinghe, has made many fringe claims like this in the past with little or no evidence (such as the flu and SARS being viruses from space). To top it off, the website that published the paper, the Journal of Cosmology, has an interesting history of publishing fringe claims unsupported by strong evidence. All in all, this claim of life in a space rock is at best highly doubtful, and in reality almost certainly not true."
But the Higgs Boson--still good on that, right?? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Please, it's all I've still got left to believe in at this point!!!
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It's called the God particle, you insensitive clod!
Re:But the Higgs Boson--still good on that, right? (Score:4, Funny)
It's actually called the God-damned particle, you insensitive physicist!
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Stop wasting your mental effort trying to "believe" in things. Learn to find and understand evidence and either challenge it's validity (in which case, present contrasting evidence) or accept it's veracity.
If you do not enjoy the idea of your inevitable death and permanent cessation of existence, then feel free to contribute to an alternative reality either by getting involved in aging/ longeivity research. Or find a counter-example of a lifeform that
Next thing you know, you'll demand peer review (Score:2)
You know, at the rate those questioning this discovery are going, they'll next demand peer review.
If I wanted to be questioned by a bunch of nobility appointed by the Queen, I'd live in England. Or maybe Wales.
Re:Next thing you know, you'll demand peer review (Score:4, Funny)
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Hah! If you live in England, "peer review" is The Sun pouring scorn on the private lives of the members of House of Lords.
What's the half-life of scorn?
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In the UK's Sun emergency arse-wipe supply, it's variable but inversely related to the tit size of the woman on the opposite page.
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How can you read "before the evil general destroys us all with the Zeus Cannon" and not realize that that's a probably a fictional reference you're not getting? If someone says "Beam me up, Scotty", do you try to start a discussion on whether or not real-world teleporters would use beams? After all, if they're wrong, Star Trek must be written by anti-science shills!
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But it's exciting! (Score:2)
All in all, this claim of life in a space rock is at best highly doubtful, and in reality almost certainly not true.
But it's exciting, and isn't that what really matters?
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No.
Next question?
Breaking news (Score:3)
Re:Amazing Prejudice (Score:5, Informative)
The racist attack in the GP post certainly deserved some scorn. As for the people themselves, I don't know much about Wikramasinghe, but I know that Hoyle was brilliant and accomplished and also a bit of an over-opinionated nut. His absurd position on the authenticity of Archaeopteryx attests to that. Wikramasinghe was apparently his student and shared many of his ideas, including the ones about Archaeopteryx. It seems to me that they formed some pretty solid theories about the cosmological origins of various molecules fundamental to known life, along with some less sound, but still compelling theories about the origins of life itself, and then some over the top wild speculation and wishful thinking.
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Wickramasinghe - Sinhalese (from Sri Lanka)
Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Wickramasinghe [wikipedia.org]
He dosen't seem like a hack scientist by a long shot. But I've got to admit that his views on evolution are rather unconventional.
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Wickramasinghe was a perfectly respectable (junior) scientist until the mid-late 1970s, when he hooked up with the (senior and fully respectable) Fred Hoyle. The two seem to have then got into a mutually-reinforcing cycle of agreeing with each others theories and not worrying about other people's opinions. In short, they became kooks.
They're kooks. Hoyle is dead now, long gone,
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They do what they do best, i.e. bullshitting and trying to look legitimate
Bigot, heal thyself.
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However, other people have challenged the 1996 assertions on the grounds that there are inroganic processes which can be reproduced by non-biological processes. For example, as a geologist (relevant since the rocks are actually rocks, and geology is the science of how rocks behave and appear), I read the paper in in
Slow news day, is it? (Score:2)
This IS important (Score:4, Insightful)
There have been too many sloppy science news the last decades.
Please, recall when president Clinton was fooled into saying they had found a rock from Mars, on Earth!!! A few days ago, there was another rock from Mars, also found on Earth. The arguments why these terrestrial rocks were from Mars is sadly weak.
Another Clintonian Mars or even a Piltdown Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man) is what we all should dread.
Pushing the barrier between bad towards dishonest science is NOT good at all.
If we can once again ascertain that NO extraterrestrial life has been found, the better.
Re:This IS important (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite [wikipedia.org]
Apparently 'they' have found rocks from Mars, many times...
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A fresh fallen one will have a fusion crust, but it might be dismissed a a weathering crust.
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"The controversy about ALH 84001 was not that it is from Mars (that is pretty much agreed upon): the controversy was about nanofossils purportedly discovered in this meteorite."
Many, including myself don't agree with that it was from Mars. I am am afraid that such an "agreement" by others may have been reached because a president was made a fool in combination with wishful thinking. Look at the analyses, via the Wikipedia link above. They are not persuasive.
Kuhn would have loved to analyze that "agreement".
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Try MY science. (Score:5, Funny)
I refute the claims by Wickramasinghe due to the fact that his name is an anagram for Kiwi Ashcan Germ.
Q.E.D.
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No life inside (Score:5, Funny)
The top had been unscrewed from the inside and it was empty by the time scientists found it.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Fred Hoyle (Score:3)
This sounds like the guy who was supporting Fred Hoyle's claims back in the day.
Was is a blue asteroid ? (Score:1)
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You mean common Srilankan name.
Ad Hominem (Score:1)
"Also, the scientist making the claim, N. C. Wickramasinghe, has made many fringe claims like this in the past with little or no evidence (such as the flu and SARS being viruses from space). To top it off, the website that published the paper, the Journal of Cosmology, has an interesting history of publishing fringe claims unsupported by strong evidence."
Pure Ad Hominem attack. No content here. Invalid content is invalid innately regardless of source, similarly valid content is valid regardless of source. I
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He does point out down the page that the rock in question is unlikely to be a meteorite.
Re:Ad Hominem (Score:4, Insightful)
Pure Ad Hominem attack. No content here. Invalid content is invalid innately regardless of source, similarly valid content is valid regardless of source. It doesn't matter if the guy stands by the subway station carrying a sign that says magical leprechauns whisper in his ear it has no impact on the validity of his statements.
Not at all, the guy has a history of making dubious claims. It's perfectly reasonable to assign him a low a priori probablity of being correct. Sure, you could look at the evidence but life is too short to follow up every crank. It's not worth wasting the time reading if it can't even get published in a respectable journal.
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"Not at all, the guy has a history of making dubious claims. It's perfectly reasonable to assign him a low a priori probablity of being correct."
No, not it is not. That's why it's a well known and established logical fallacy.
"Sure, you could look at the evidence but life is too short to follow up every crank."
Sure but that is a reason to not personally choose to spend your time that way determining if he is wrong, not a valid basis for asserting that he is wrong.
"It's not worth wasting the time reading if i
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Pure Ad Hominem attack. No content here. Invalid content is invalid innately regardless of source, similarly valid content is valid regardless of source.
So, wait. We take the history of this guy's behavior and his disproven fringe claims in the past, and that's an Ad Hominem attack? We have a distinct historical record of this guy's previous claims and their validity, but that's not good enough to take a ballpark guess at the validity of his latest claim, and what's more, that's Ad Hominem to use this guy's own history in relation to him doing the exact same thing now?
Please tell me you're not in any form of law enforcement employment. "Sure, he's shot e
Re:Ad Hominem (Score:4, Insightful)
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At no point does it become valid logic to dismiss a sound argument on the basis of labeling someone a crackpot or dubious.
So how do you know if the claim is sound before investigating it, at some point it becomes a wate of time to investigate every claim from someone with a track record of unsound arguments. That is not an ad-hominem, it's the "boy who cried wolf".
"Boy who cried wolf" (Score:2)
I believe you need to go back and reread that particular fable. The Boy who Cried Wolf eventually was ignored by everyone else -- and then, when a real wolf came along, they ignored his warning.
The story is, of course, a warning against habitual lying for attention. But it can also be viewed as a cautionary tale against the easy ad-hominem dismissal.
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With added Streisand effect. Yes, Wickramasingh has some interesting ideas that we might find to be true one day.
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When you are judging a man's character, ad hominem seems the only way to go, and when a person has proven time and again to be an incompetent scientist and a kook, the chances of him producing valid results by accident are negligible.
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I'm afraid that it's necessary for logic, and science, to judge the _provenance_ of claims. This can be quite subtle, and dangerous when used to entirely reject claims without any review of actual data. When a a skilled colleague claims that the internal DNS is failing, they've generally earned credence by doing competent work. When the manager who resents your IT budget makes such a claim, and that manger's other claims have been ill-founded, you have to handle it differently or waste endless hours trying
Yeah, it's a diatom, but seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
No question those are diatoms. More specifically, most are pennate ones (Order Pennales), although there is a picture of a filamentous Centrales diatom in the appendix. But why the hell they would base the in-situ interpretation on an elemental analysis rather than identifying the species present and seeing if "coincidentally" they happened to be the same species as ones found in the local freshwater lakes and streams is a bit of a mystery.
The paper isn't exactly rigorous. For one thing they say diatoms date back to the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary. No, they date back to the Jurassic Period -- considerably earlier. Furthermore they attribute them to marine environments. No, they are found in marine and freshwater environments. They are also commonly observed as thin crusts on rocks in moist environments (i.e. it doesn't have to be standing or flowing water, just wet). "Hydrated silicon dioxide polymer"? Well, I suppose. But most people who actually work on them call it opaline silica (which is indeed the same thing, it's just weird terminology to use). I don't know what they mean by "fossilized". Diatoms don't have to "fossilize" in the sense of any mineralization or alteration being necessary. They're already opaline silica. All that has to happen for them to preserve for the long term is not dissolve away, and silica is already pretty low solubility, essentially glass. Diatoms are generally quite durable structures.
Not much of a peer review, that's for sure. It's pretty obvious this is almost certainly modern contamination. They don't provide a speck of useful information showing that it's not. A bunch of EDX chemical analyses merely confirm the composition. So what? It would have been a lot more useful to make a petrographic thin section and figure out the relationship of the diatoms to the mineral grains in the rock.
This is an extraordinary claim, but the case is extraordinarily weak.
Thats a relief (Score:2)
So the Wildfire alert has been cancelled then.
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And nobody has to get blown up.