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Raining Extraterrestrial Microbes in Kerala?
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 The authors' last two papers on the subject were unpublished: this published paper is more cautious.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."
Just what we needed.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Spreading his Glorious seed.
Case closed! Who wants lunch?
At least it's not Thread.
it's raining spacemen, Alleluia it's raining spacemen! Ramen!
I love humanity, it is people I hate
Contact!
It was just Venus' time of the month, and it made it's way through space to reach us here.
I skimmed over his paper briefly... looking at the images of the red cells and all of that. I noticed that in a few pictures, the cells resemble red blood cells. Perhaps the meteor smashed into a flock of birds? Hah.
Mike.
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
Seems this theory has gained some flack from the Intelligent Design community.
p hp/id/849
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.
welcome our new red extraterrestrial microbe overlords!
......
Ah well
I strongly suggest looking through this article (Yes, I know this is Slashdot, how could I suggest such a thing) as I found the summary made me extremely skeptical. If the information is not falsified, I would say it is certainly worth investigating, even with a hefty grain of salt. . . or would that be grains? . . .anyway I digress. I found the electron microscope pictures quite intriguing, it certainly "looked" like a cell, though I understand this sort of observation is hardly irrefutable. I did not see any evidence of the particles replicating which would suggest life (they could replicate and still not be considered "life" ofcourse). I believe a good analog would be the potential bacteria found in a Martian meteor.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
This human researcher is clearly incorrect.
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.
I stole this Sig
From the paper: "Under low magnification the particles look like smooth, red coloured glass beads. Under high magnifications (1000x) their differences in size and shape can be seen,"
These are iron oxide chrondules from the vaporisation of a nickel-iron meteorite. There's no need to invoke aliens or intelligent designers.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I've read about quite a few of these colored rain falls and most of them have an obvious terrestrial source. They usually are volcanic or caused by birds or insects. It's one thing for trace amounts of organic matter to survive reentry but large amounts are highly unlikely. Organic material would mostly be incinerated. A comet fragment would have a better chance with the ice protecting the organic matter. I doubt the paper will survive peer review.
Look for the woman infected with an alien micro-organism that gives her the powerful urge to mate quickly in order to produce her world-dominating alien-human crossbid progeny. Of course, she'll probably kill you afterwards, but it's all the change some of you will get before you die anyhow!
If I am not mistaken, this is how the Chtorr gained a foot hold on the Earth.
Today's show is brought to you by the number 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0: 25
Now even the aliens are sending microbe jobs to India! Where does it end? Not at the atmosphere, apparently. Somewhere in space, some alien GE executive overlord has gotten his or her bonus for the year. Oh well, the quality will suck, quality assurance will suck, they'll miss their deadline for taking over the planet, and the project will fail.
I guess we're safe.
the andromeda strain
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Political language
hi, alien micro-organism comes ervery days by cometfragments so i think in such a way also the life on earth developed
best Regards
domain
Think about it, if it truly rained alien microbes then this is great news for humanity. For one it proves life exists elsewhere. Plus it provides a rather simple solution to how we came to exist on this planet, without involving The Big Angry Dude in the Sky. Finally since we are not all dead, and for that matter exist at all, it shows that whatever out there is and has been taken into account by our immune system. Thus making instellar travel if it happens just that much safer.
The /. editorial doesn't mention elemental composition of the particles. From TFA:
45.4% quartz (!) 49.5% carbonate calcium
Doesn't look like life or organic at all. Another case of wishful thinking.
The elemental analyses provided in the paper suggest a composition of of mostly carbohydrate with a smattering of something like a hydrocarbon. My guess is that they're some sort of pollen that had their DNA destroyed by ultraviolet light high in the atmosphere and then absorbed water and swelled. Nothing that couldn't have come from our own planet.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
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 asteroid being made of it.
Also why is this taking so long? India is a tech nation isn't it? In 4 years they should have been able to analyze this down the individual atoms.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
At this point, there is no particular reason to have a bias in favor of life evolving on this planet, in space, or on some other planet. Stubbornly clinging to the notion that life on earth must have evolved on earth is unscientific, as is equating panspermia with "aliens" or "intelligent designers".
A possible case of communist expansion. The region of Kerala in India has a state government which gained the distinction, in 1957, of being the first democratically elected communist government in the world. http://www.indax.com/kerala.html
It is quite clear to me that by todays definition of "life" these red microbes do not fall under that category.
Key Features of life:
1.)Water
2.)Carbon
3.)DNA
4.)RNA
The article states:
Strangely, a test for DNA using Ethidium Bromide dye fluorescence technique indicates absence of DNA in these cells.
DNA is neccessary for life according to todays definition. Now that definition might be off because that information is taken from a part of my brain that hasn't been used for quite some time. But I know for a fact that DNA is part of todays life definition, therefore until the definition is changed i'm convinced that aliens haven't rained down their child spores to take over the world.
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?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This could be the ultimate proof the ID camp has been looking for... God jerking off, spreading his seed, instilling life into the lifeless soil. The Beloved Gardener in the Heavenly Paradise Cometh unto us.
The prevalence of the red rain along the southwest coast of India is explained in the paper as being the trail of a meteor that happened to follow the coast. I explain it with this June- Sept precipitation map, which shows the coast receiving 150 cm of rain while areas immediately to the east get 30 cm. Red rain fell in areas where rain is likely to fall. No need to invoke a meteor for which there is little evidence.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
If this were related to panspermia, one would expect to find DNA or RNA and they didn't. But their experiments were pretty poor to begin with: it's easy to test for lipids, proteins, sugars, amino acids as well and they didn't.
This illustrates a problem with the way science is presently conducted.
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?
or Nibiru is supposed to spread a red dust with its passing: "When Nibiru passes between the Earth and the Sun, small red dust will rain down coloring drinking water reddish." There's info on it here and here although there are probably better sites out there. I haven't read about it in a long time, but it is interesting junk that Sitchin talked about that couldn't possibly be true, except we keep finding big stuff floating out there past the Kuiper belt. Who knows... Hmm, note to self-gather up tin foil for project with the kids tomorrow.
Both warp drives and aliens the same week. It should be clear that the alien bacteria detected the warp drive research and decided to make contact, unfortunately the all perished when their space ship blew up over India.
Now, we will never know what they wanted, and their friends will believe that we shot them down...
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
Thats my theory
Shouldn't a meteoroid with over 50 tons of mass be quite visible on entry into the earth's athmosphere (even through clouds)? Was a meteor recorded a short time before that time when the read rain fell in Kerala?
Red rain is pouring down Pouring down all over me
This space available.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Obviously it was the flying spaghetti monster blessing them with spaghetti sauce.
Many life-forms (grasses, radiolarians,molluscs for example) include large amounts of both silican and calcium carbonate in their skeletal and exoskeletal structures. I suggest you find out what chalk is actually made from - you might be surprised.
Pining for the fjords
Let the Chtorran War begin! Just when IS he coming out with that Goddamned book, already?!?!?
This is the best Democracy money can buy?!?!?
Raining Extraterrestrial Microbes in Kerala?
Meanwhile, Occam turned in his grave.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
>> This is a stupid paper.
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.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Damn! Even asteroids get more action with planets than I do!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The idea of Nibiru is pretty silly. There are three types of dis-info pattern which I tend to group ideas into;
1. Cult thinking. (Including Scientology and Heaven's Gate stuff.)
2. Religious dogmatic thinking. (Christianity and church based uniformity of thought. Similar to Cult thinking, in that it is false knowledge designed to control people, but accepted by the masses.)
3. Pulp Science Fiction, Mad Scientist thinking. --This would include things like the Hollow Earth theory, Nibiru, Cthulu, etc. Ideas which never quite spawned religious movements because they were just a bit too insane-sounding.
All three categories, however, seem to be constructed in the same way; you take a bit of truth and warp it so that it has a ring of authenticity which serves to mislead people and keep them bogged down. For instance, the Hollow Earth theory, I susect, might be based on a warped understanding of the extensive underground tunnels and bases which the U.S. has been digging, as well as similar structures constructed by past civilizations. Basically there are a lot of people living underground with a lot of technology, and even the most innocent of their activities are draped in deep secrecy.
Nibiru, similarly, seems to me a concept based on the idea of the alien reality combined with the Nemesis theory, (the Nemasis theory being that irregularities in the orbits of the planets are due to a brown dwarf companion star with an elliptical orbit and a period of some 300,000 years or so which upon its nearest passing knocks a cloud of matter from the Kuiper belt into a lower orbit. This cloud of rocks has an approximate 3600 year period which coincides with cyclical disasters appearing on Earth, and which generally peppers the inner planets with debris to catastrophic effect.)
-FL
Fred Hoyle was an astronomer in the UK who proposed the life from space idea and was widely ridiculed but received a lot of press. He was used to this because some year proir he determined how all of the heavier elements are formed in stars and was ridiculed until he was proved correct. One piece of utter brilliance doesn't mean you know everything - and his influenza from space theory was considered far more complicated than simple mutation so somewhat unlikely.
Prions (Mad Cow disease, scrapies, Chronic Wasting disease, etc) have no [DR]NA. Not exactly life, but they were discovered just 25 years ago. Who is to say that life could not exists with out [DR]NA?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
erm... I had absolutely NO problems at all with my firefox on Ubuntu 5.10...
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20051010 Firefox/1.0.7 (Ubuntu package 1.0.7)
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
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 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.
I agree the article is interesting, but a couple things stand out. Four years is enough time to get samples to more broad and credible scientific community. Also, if you read the "structure" the essentially seem to be some sort of "carbon bubbles" with some iron, silicon and oxgyen. IMHO, it would appear more likely these are some sort of space dust versus space life. They claim a "cellular" type membrane, but they appear to be devoid of internal cellular scructures. Also, sitting in a jar for 4 years seems to have done nothing in decay or "procreation" for the items.
Some strange, yet unknown geothermal (either Earth based or extra terrestrial based) process could have produced these and they simply were transplanted. Eitehr way, it does sound interesting and that more people should take a look at this, but I highly doubt this is an example of panspermia.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
Sorry, I got here late and I'm disappointed that no one has mentioned Chubby Rain!
Yep. On two occasions I've found them blocking the gateway IP for the UCopenhagen institute of physics - and I'm just one user. Something about bots scanning from our network. Not that I can really think of anyone who'd want to do that. The bot alarm is probably just oversensitive. Now of course you can get around that by using for instance de.arxiv.org instead, but the admin really should cut down on the paranoia.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
we have reports it happened in Chicago too.
http://www.nbc5.com/news/5884173/detail.html
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
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.
I recall Microsoft had a problem with their MS Office clipart site - design gallery live (DGL). You type in monkey, and it showed a black kid playing on a jungle-gym!
I hear ya. As long as I have get my grimy hands on advanced weaponry capable of damaging them, bring it on! Yeah, all you who said my computer games were a waste, what now, huh? Eat lead, bug-breath!
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
The red rain continued to appear sporadically for about two months, though most of it fell in the first 10 days, Louis and Kumar wrote.
From a meteor?? I don't think so.
you all may not know this, but Kerala has Rich Red Soil to begin with, this may be the source of the red rain look it up for yourself
Cycle C: This is the spore forming life cycle of these microbes. Prolonged growth at high temperature with lack of nutrients appears to be the reason for spore formation. In this cycle, some of the grown cells can be found to show a pair formation tendency (stage 3 of cycle C) as a first step towards the formation of spores (Fig. 4d). Two or three or rarely even more cells linger around each other closely for some time and they finally get fused together and form a common thin outer mucus layer around them (stage 4 of cycle C). Later this thin mucus layer becomes very thick and hard (stage 5 of cycle C) and the compound cell becomes a spore with color change from white to yellowish and finally red (stage 6 of cycle C). The red spore cells show different shapes like spherical, ellipsoidal and slightly elongated shapes with septum like formation at the center and also some have a triangular shape. The elongated shapes are due to the fusion of two cells of equal or unequal sizes and the triangular shapes are due to the fusion of three cells. The original red rain cells that caused the red rain phenomenon in Kerala also exhibit these characteristic shapes. This spore state appears to be a resting phase of these organisms. The thick outer layer of the spores disintegrates and releases the enclosed original cells only when nutrients and growth conditions are persistently available.
The EtBr treatment only states on the presence of double stranded DNA. It intercholates in the base stacks, meaning, aside from poor lysis, if DNase activity (contamination from the user/innate DNase activity usually sequestered away from the nucleus) was present and broke down the DNA into individual bases during the procedure, then their crude scan would be useless. Nevermind the possibility the poor little microbes might be dead and mostly broken down due to being in the cold/oxygenated/hypotonic environment of the clouds for however long... None of the usual answers might be forthcoming using their rudimentary techniques, nor some of the "normal" molecular biology techniques if the microbes are dead.
Given that this stuff literally falls from the sky (they should have enough to do some more brute-force assays), I would be curious as to what could be done to determine protein sequence/structure (potentially more stable than DNA, definitely more stable than RNA). Precipitate off some outer membrane proteins and send them off for Edman degredation and trypsin analysis. See if it matches anything (or comes close enough to assign a phylogenic probability to it).
I've also completely ignored the possibility of astrological origin, which could mean standard DNA and protein approaches might not work, since they might not use DNA to code for amino-acid based proteins. Panspermia's not impossible, but I think the more likely mundane scenario involves something propelling the dust/microbes into the atmosphere (natural occurance, like a tornado, could do the trick) and those microbes raining down.
I'm 31 years old and it's been three years.
...
After breaking up with the girl of my dreams after a six year relationship, I decided to spend some time alone. Just last month, I decided it's time to start dating again. Now if I would only leave the house
"GOT 'YA SUCKERS!"
Courtesy of Wikipedia:
A conventional definition [of life]
In biology, a life form has traditionally been considered to be a member of a population whose members can exhibit all the following phenomena at least once during their existence:
1. Growth, full development, maturity
2. Metabolism, consuming, transforming and storing energy/mass; growing by absorbing and reorganizing mass; excreting waste
3. Motion, either moving itself, or having internal motion
4. Reproduction, the ability of individuals to create entities that are similar to, but separate from, themselves
5. Response to stimuli - the ability to measure properties of its surrounding environment, and act upon certain conditions. This property is also called homeostasis.
6. Cells, a basic unit of reproduction
As you'll note, each conventional characteristic of life is procedural or structural in nature; there is nothing discretely chemical. Therefore, neither water, nor DNA, nor RNA is necessary to constitute life. Your definition is incomplete.
Also, please be careful to cite your information. You seem to have created your own definition of life, but then referred to it as some sort of universal knowledge without any citation as proof.
Did you see the pool? They flipped the bitch!
Um, it's obviously spaghetti sauce bestowed upon us by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, spread into a fine paste by the vastness of space, and given motion by His Noodly Appendage.
This story has been up two and a half days, and I'm the first one to mention Fort? You all suck!
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
The article claims that about 50.000kg fell down. Now that is a heck of a turkey even by US standards. (How 50.000kg becomes 55tons is anyones guess)
So what you mean to say is, "You can't stop. The roc can't stop the rock?"
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").