"NASA scientist finds evidence of alien life"
NASA WIN?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/nasascientistfindsevidenceofalienlife
"For most of this century, scientists have worshiped the hardware of the brain and the software of the mind; the messy powers of the heart were left to the poets."
I heard about this yesterday. I really hope it's true. It's probably nothing, but I can dream, right?
"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism." -Carl Sagan
"Am I cruel? Probably. Is she an idiot? Yes." -jane s.
Just skimmed Dr. Richard B. Hoover's paper. I'm nowhere near an expert in microbiology but I didn't expect to find misspellings.
Also, the photo as shown above is of a regular, earthly bacteria included "for comparison". Presumably, anyone reading the article for peer revue, would already know what one looks like.
Wonky.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Isn't water on Mars proof of alien life? I heard that somewhere.
No.
This is why we can't have nice things.
But, there were single cell orgasms in the water. NOW That's proof of life!
Single cell aliens planning to take over Earth when they become more complex forms of life.
Outstanding.
Didn't microbial fossils get discovered in meteors on Earth about 10-12 years ago?
"You've probably never seen one this big before...unless it was floating in a jar."
THIS JUST IN: Water remains wet.
Of course, I can't think of an instance where P.Z. wasn't correct in in similar situations.
PZ has made a career out of calling bullshi@t. And of being correct, yes.
No one has yet found any organisms - living, dead, or fossilized anywhere outside of earth's atmosphere. Every now and then, someone sees something in a spacerock that they swear looks like fossil bacteria and everyone gets excited. Not long after, it's determined to be mineral and there's far less press for the "Oh, we didn't really find aliens" announcement.
I do remember a while back there was some excitement about maybe there being a bit of ice on Mars, but it seems to have been dropped. I'm guessing it probably turned out to be nothing.
This is why we can't have nice things.
No, there is ice on mars. Mostly located at the poles. But there hasn't been any evidence of life it in yet.
Is it water ice though? Not, like, frozen methane or somesuch?
This is why we can't have nice things.
There seems to be thought of real potential in the seas under Europa's layer of ice.
I hope so. Like, 1/2 of the Space Odyssey series involves life in Europa's oceans. That would be awesome if a sci-fi writer was finally right about some modern life altering predictions. Maybe Jupiter will collapse into a sun also.
"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism." -Carl Sagan
"Am I cruel? Probably. Is she an idiot? Yes." -jane s.
O__O epic.
That's been speculated. It doesn't have enough mass, however.
Anyway, this alien thing has promise. PZ hasn't called "bullshit". He's said this is likely bullshit, considering the source. Besides, he's a household name of sorts these days. I don't trust household names. We'll know when we see some legit peer review, and this has been brutally reviewed to an unusual degree. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, and Hoover agrees. This shows promise.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
Geostationary sattelites are pretty darn life-altering.
Or do I mean geosynchrinous? I have kinda lost track.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Mkay, I'm up to date. From what I gather, everything's inconclusive. Some dramatic leaps were taken, and we have to wait and see whether any of what is claimed adds up. The paper itself needs some work. PZ just says that Hoover sees what he wants to see, which may be true, but is itself quite a leap. Experts agree the patterns are unusual, but there's no reason to think it's "alien"... yet. Dundunduuuunnn
Si vis pacem, para bellum
Geostationary sattelites are pretty darn life-altering.
Or do I mean geosynchrinous? I have kinda lost track.
I think both are right. And, yeah, you're right. But he wrote that paper proposing an actual plan and it worked. It would be cooler if something like this came true. Something out of actual science fiction.
H.G. Wells also did a lot of stuff right. He predicted aerial bombing 3 years(I think) before the Wright brother flew. And he predicted that trench warfare would lead to a stalemate and then the invention of the tank. He was awesome. These are why I included the word modern.
"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism." -Carl Sagan
"Am I cruel? Probably. Is she an idiot? Yes." -jane s.
I hate to keep coming back to one guy, but PZ is both a scientist and hella-entertaining. His blog, for those who haven't read it, will entertain you while simultaneously making you feel like an ill-educated doofus. Meyers is not one to mince words either. Witness his take in-full on this whole alien bacteria hub-bub:
Did scientists discover bacteria in meteorites?No.
No, no, no. No no no no no no no no.
No, no.
No.
Fox News broke the story, which ought to make one immediately suspicious — it's not an organization noted for scientific acumen. But even worse, the paper claiming the discovery of bacteria fossils in carbonaceous chondrites was published in … the Journal of Cosmology. I've mentioned Cosmology before — it isn't a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth. It doesn't exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s, and publishes lots of empty noise with no substantial editorial restraint. For a while, it seemed to be entirely the domain of a crackpot named Rhawn Joseph who called himself the emeritus professor of something mysteriously called the Brain Research Laboratory, based in the general neighborhood of Northern California (seriously, that was the address: "Northern California"), and self-published all of his pseudo-scientific "publications" on this web site.
It is not an auspicious beginning. Finding credible evidence of extraterrestrial microbes is the kind of thing you'd expect to see published in Science or Nature, but the fact that it found a home on a fringe website that pretends to be a legitimate science journal ought to set off alarms right there.
But could it be that by some clumsy accident of the author, a fabulously insightful, meticulously researched paper could have fallen into the hands of single-minded lunatics who rushed it into 'print'? Sure. And David Icke might someday publish the working plans for a perpetual motion machine in his lizardoid-infested newsletter. We've actually got to look at the claims and not dismiss them because of their location.
So let's look at the paper, Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites: Implications to Life on Comets, Europa, and Enceladus. I think that link will work; I'm not certain, because the "Journal of Cosmology" seems to randomly redirect links to its site to whatever article the editors think is hot right now, and while the article title is given a link on the page, it's to an Amazon page that's flogging a $94 book by the author. Who needs a DOI when you've got a book to sell?
Reading the text, my impression is one of excessive padding. It's a dump of miscellaneous facts about carbonaceous chondrites, not well-honed arguments edited to promote concision or cogency. The figures are annoying; when you skim through them, several will jump out at you as very provocative and looking an awful lot like real bacteria, but then without exception they all turn out to be photos of terrestrial organisms thrown in for reference. The extraterrestrial 'bacteria' all look like random mineral squiggles and bumps on a field full of random squiggles and bumps, and apparently, the authors thought some particular squiggle looked sort of like some photo of a bug. This isn't science, it's pareidolia. They might as well be analyzing Martian satellite photos for pictures that sorta kinda look like artifacts.
The data consists almost entirely of SEM photos of odd globules and filaments on the complex surfaces of crumbled up meteorites, with interspersed SEMs of miscellaneous real bacteria taken from various sources — they seem to be proud of having analyzed flakes of mummy skin and hair from frozen mammoths, but I couldn't see the point at all — do they have cause to think the substrate of a chondrite might have some correspondence to a Siberian Pleistocene mammoth guard hair? I'd be more impressed if they'd surveyed the population of weird little lumps in their rocks and found the kind of consistent morphology in a subset that you'd find in a population of bacteria. Instead, it's a wild collection of one-offs.
There is one other kind of datum in the article: they also analyzed the mineral content of the 'bacteria', and report detailed breakdowns of the constitution of the blobs: there's lots of carbon, magnesium, silicon, and sulfur in there, and virtually no nitrogen. The profiles don't look anything like what you'd expect from organic life on Earth, but then, these are supposedly fossilized specimens from chondrites that congealed out of the gases of the solar nebula billions of years ago. Why would you expect any kind of correspondence?
The extraterrestrial 'bacteria' photos are a pain to browse through, as well, because they are published at a range of different magnifications, and even when they are directly comparing an SEM of one to an SEM of a real bacterium, they can't be bothered to put them at the same scale. Peering at them and mentally tweaking the size, though, one surprising result is that all of their boojums are relatively huge — these would be big critters, more similar in size to eukaryotic cells than E. coli. And all of them preserved so well, not crushed into a smear of carbon, not ruptured and evaporated away, all just sitting there, posing, like a few billion years in a vacuum was a day in the park. Who knew that milling about in a comet for the lifetime of a solar system was such a great preservative?
I'm looking forward to the publication next year of the discovery of an extraterrestrial rabbit in a meteor. While they're at it, they might as well throw in a bigfoot print on the surface and chupacabra coprolite from space. All will be about as convincing as this story.
While they're at it, maybe they should try publishing it in a journal with some reputation for rigorous peer review and expectation that the data will meet certain minimal standards of evidence and professionalism.
Otherwise, this work is garbage. I'm surprised anyone is granting it any credibility at all.
- http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/did_scientists_discover_bacte...
This is why we can't have nice things.
So why does it have an S on it? Are aliens vain and get things monogrammed also?
Damn you "Species", I knew you looked too good to be true!
(but carry on)
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You can't spell manslaughter without laughter.
When a report surfaced about finding alien fossils in a meteorite surfaced last week, online media outlets easily spread the word. A National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineer using an electron microscope to scan a meteorite said he discovered mysterious filaments that could possibly be a fossilized alien life form. The author's claims and the journal they appeared in were roundly dismissed by the scientific neighborhood.
NEWSFLASH: P.Z. Meyers calls bullshi@t.
THIS JUST IN: Water remains wet.
This is why we can't have nice things.