Scientists reveal alien life discovery

[DavidU]

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/offbeat/19022934/scientists-reveal-alien-life-discovery/

FULL pdf here
http://journalofcosmology.com/JOC22/milton_diatom.pdf

[multiweb]

Alien Lifeform :scared:

[Wavytone]

I'm be pretty skeptical.

Scientist catches a few diatoms at 25km up in the stratosphere.
The Perseid meteor show is taking place.
Scientist immediately concludes the only way diatoms could have got up there is that they are raining down from the Perseids - despite at least one being identifiable as a terrestrial species.

Methinks he prefers to clutch at loopy explanations (rather like von Daniken's "Chariots of the Gods") rather than the obvious one... that they were thrown up in sea spray in a storm and carried by winds...

[JB80]

This is probably the important part and will be the main counter argument.
The conclusion does at least make sense and based on current knowledge.
I'd say at this point comparing the guy to von Daniken is a bit harsh although I agree there are other more likely scenarios.

[AstroJunk]

Junk science degrading the profession - Occams razor sugests it came from space - what a lot of rot! Not a single meteorologist in the authorship or referenced, and a sampling density of 1. Good grief.

[Stardrifter_WA]

So they have met my ex wife then? :lol:

[Irish stargazer]

The isotope ratios from the mass spectrometer analysis should shed light on whether it is alien or terrestrial. I'm betting it is Earthly in nature but lets see the data.

[jjjnettie]

Here's the video to go with the story.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-tech/british-scientists-claim-to-have-found-proof-of-alien-life/story-fn5fsgyc-1226723186041
I'm highly skeptical about it too. Just because he has a bunsen burner, doesn't make him right.

[el_draco]

I can add a second sample for comparison. :eyepop:

[AndrewJ]

Damn
When i read this, i thought scientists had finally made it to Frankston.

Andrew

[RobF]

Its ok - Halley's going to comment on it to sort this out once and for all (that's what the last sentence says at least :P)

[AstralTraveller]

This is a bunch of well-known suspects and their escapades have been the topic of previous threads (perhaps I'll search for them later). The Journal of Cosmology is a sham (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Cosmology) and at least some of the authors have published other widely-discredited claims of extra-terrestial life.

Looking at the present pail of fertilzer we see the whole silk purse revolves around one diatom fragment that is 'certainly' not contamination. That is because the 'control flight' found zero but the real flight found .... (drum roll) ... one fragment. Is that proof that their protocol is effective and the fragment is not contamination or did they just get lucky the first time (or unlucky the second)? I mean if they found 50-100 fragments the argument would be clear but to say the difference between 0 and 1 is significant is drawing a pretty long bow. I also notice that the protocol for examining the stubs was not detailed. A SEM can't see a whole stub at once and so it must be scanned. AFAIK it is unusual to scan the whole stub.

They claim that the diatom could be identified by an expert but failed to get an expert to look at it! Unforgivable. Of all the thousands of experts around the world none would offer even an opinion? Did they ask or are they such untouchables in the scientific community that no experts would go near them? FWIW I don't think it's a Nitzschia. Perhaps it was on the grass that the balloon was lying on as it was inflated. Perhaps it was in settled out of the air as the equipment was readied. (BTW you have inhaled many many diatoms while reading this.) Perhaps it really is possible for a fragment as small as this (I'm guessing about a nanongram) to be lofted to that altitude.




John, I'm afraid I can't find the reference to isotope ratios but I am intensely interested. Can you point it out to me?

My day job is running an IRMS so this is an area I could really get my teeth into. I commonly analyse carbonates, which are much easier to work with than the silica of a diatom, and I can do samples probably as small as anyone in Australia can do. On a good day with a tail wind I can get good results on 15 micrograms of material. Their fragment is about 10,000x smaller than this and it is presently covered in gold. I hope the technician enjoys a challenge. ;)

[Irish stargazer]

Here is one reference I Googled. Quite a bit of literature on oxygen isotopes and ET

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002AGUFM.P52B..05B

The authors are "probably" referring to carbon isotope ratios to see if they are similar to that found on Earth (but I'm no expert).
I'm amazed the paper got through the referee process without some analytical data to back it up.

[Baddad]

I can see several possibilities on this. Also it raises questions.

If this biological material is floating down from space, then I'd expect the Earth's surface to be "contaminated" with it.

Curiosity has so far not detected anything similar. That is curios to me. Particularly because the rover is designed to search for that kind of material. Mars is not that distant in comparison to the mission of a comet.

Is it possible that the material originated on Earth and has managed to hitch a ride on comets.

If it did come from a dirty snow ball, did it start from the comet or somewhere else? And what is that somewhere else?
Apart from perhaps Mars there is not much else where alien life could start from. "Alien visitors"???

I agree with the majority of the posts. I am observing at the moment and I would like to see it to be a first. Wouldn't that rock the creationists' theory? I shouldn't call it a theory, a theory has some substance to it.

Cheers

[Wavytone]

Marty,

If you could put up a spacecraft with a trap having a small area for just a few seconds, and find these, if it were of extraterrestrial origin the moon and mars would also be covered in them.

In particular the lunar regolith has been undisturbed for billions of years and should by this time be millimetres deep in diatoms, yet the samples brought back by Apollo show no sign.

In this sense the lunar regolith is a perfect trap to record the history of the extraterrestrial material raining down.

Bleeding obvious that the claim is rubbish.

[avandonk]

Major claims need irrefutable self consistent evidence.

Bert

[5ash]

Better get out Fred Hoyles books "diseases from space " and "evolution from space" where he puts forward very convincing scientific evidence for life originating in space. He is not a crank but a respected astrophysicist who coined the expression "big bang theory " for the present theory of cosmic evolution that conflicted with his steady state theory. Both books are worth a read despite the former book being 34 years old .
Philip

[AstroJunk]

Actually, Fred Hoyle was both! A rare feat :rofl:

[5ash]

Whoops , forgot to say that those books were coauthored with N.C.Wickramasinghe another respected Astrophysicist. Interestingly the times literary supplement commented on the book when it was published saying " When two extremely distinguished astronomers cogitate upon the origin of life in the solar system we should not ignore their conclusions. Entertaining and stimulating". If your interested In this subject they are a good read! Fred Hoyle also wrote many well known science fiction novels , the best known was serialized by the BBC in the 60's , " A for Andromeda" . This story must have led to the ideas used in the movies "species" and "first contact"
Philip

[Baddad]

Hi Wavytone,:)
I agree. I only scratched the surface of the number of possibilities. You caught on to more and the whole issue smacks of sensationalism.

Cheers:)

[Wavytone]

Marty,

The idea came to me more than a decade ago when NASA flew a spacecraft with a gadget containing "aerogel" about the size of a tennis racket to sample the dust in the solar system, then it returned to earth.

The aerogel was silica, in an incredibly low density soft matrix, 99% empty space, to provide a soft landing for anything collected.

The regolith is a very fine powder and below a certain size microscopic particles just embed themselves in it without significant damage in much the same way. The challenge is sorting out which bits are "moon" and what isn't.

[Irish stargazer]

Is it possible that some material could have been transported up there decades ago or even longer but is so small that it takes a very long time to settle back to Earth. A previous large volcano or the result of atomic tests in the 50's and 60's??

[Rob_K]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/09/20/et_claims_of_alien_life_in_earth_s_ atmosphere_are_unfounded.html
http://astroblogger.blogspot.com.au/search/label/scepticism
http://theconversation.com/proof-of-alien-life-you-need-a-lot-more-evidence-than-that-18439

Cheers -