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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 The authors' last two papers on the subject were unpublished: this published paper is more cautious.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!
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.
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
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.
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?
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!"
Since you're quoting the linked article, you may as well copy the whole paragraph evenif it hurts some feelings:
"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 and 70's were carried out by a state government which gained the distinction, in 1957, of being the first democratically elected communist government in the world. Kerala's industrial sector is almost non-existent, however, potential investors from outside being reluctant to engage a highly politicized labour force."
Huh-oohhh, communism that *does* work? Funny how things go when there's no embargo impeding on people's will.
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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.
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.
RAmen.
Touched By His Noodley Appendage.