Alien Rain Over India

tintinaujapon writes "The Observer is reporting that scientists may have found the first evidence of panspermia, the idea promoted by Hoyle (among others) that life on earth was seeded from space, in samples of a strange rain which fell over India for two months in 2001. To quote the article: "There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers."" This is a continuation of a story two months back or so.

Comments

Alien attacks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Run for cover!!!!!

Re:Alien attacks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, looks like the alien mods are on extraterestrial crack. Hey, ET, we know that english is your second language, but if they give you mod points you should at least look up the meanings of off topic and humor. Mmmkay?

Re:Alien attacks!

[pmancini]

Wasn't this the plot line behind "Bowfinger" with Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin? "Chubby Rain!"

I would....

[SnoopJeDi]

...welcome our new rain-bearing overlords.... But apparently they've been around for a while :/

Or it could be

[The_Mr_Flibble]

An Invasion force ?

Re:Or it could be

[TangoCharlie]

More likely to be some kind of alien biological weapon. Obviously, the aliens have
read HG Wells' War of the Worlds and are making sure we get wiped out first. Of course,
it's the Chickens they should be after. H5N1 is much bigger threat to alien life forms
than the common cold.

Re:Or it could be

[The_Mr_Flibble]

Biological weapon ?
What better biological weapon than one that breads and terraforms the planet to be hospitable for the invading army.
(I feel a tinfoil moment)
Think about it.
Mankind could be the agents of the aliens who require a rich c02 atmosphere.
Since the dawn of mankind he has been cutting down the forests/plantlife and causing pollution in the form of c02 and it's only getting worse.
Soon only the basic forms of planetlife will be able to survive on an inhospitable planet from our point of view.
But if your an alien race with a long term plan for this planet it was a brilliant plan.

Re:Or it could be

[Colourspace]

brilliant in its inefficiency!

Re:Or it could be

[xtracto]

But kind of interesting on principle. As we humans make something similar (in a smaller scale) trying to plant trees in the earth as they get CO_2 and and release O_2...

Of course, although the theory is good, in practice it is not working that good. On the other hand, we are being very good at improving this CO_2 emissions don't you think?

Re:Or it could be

[bri2000]

Another similar theory (which I found quite amusing - while hastening to add that I am quite aware it is basically BS, has no evidence to support it and is not very credible) is that an alien race with an extremely long time horizon looks for planets which are capable of sustaining life (for the sake of argument say planets on which water is in liquid form), seeds them with bacteria or RNA strands or whatever then sits back for a couple of hundred million years while an ecosystem evolves so there's plenty for them to eat and hydro-carbons to use (for plastics if not fuel) when they get here. Obviously there's a risk that intellegent life will evolve and use all these resources before they arrive but if they've seeded plenty of planets this shouldn't be too much of a set-back for them. They just eliminate the infestation, leave things to recover and go somewhere else for now.

Re:Or it could be

[eno2001]

Inefficiency is relative Earthman. I've met beings several eons old who have done this sort of thing before. To them, such a terraforming process would be similar to your informal time unit known as "fractions of a second". Do not fall into the trap of measuring the universe by your own perspective.

Re:Or it could be

[Colourspace]

If I hadn't lost my mod points on this thread taking part you'd probably have gotten an insightful... Ah well..

Re:Or it could be

[thc69]

What better biological weapon than one that breads and terraforms the planet to be hospitable for the invading army.

Indead, having a well-breaded planet is important; that way, you don't have to bring along food for the invading army.

Re:Or it could be

[Zulu]

Well, the problem with that is the Co2 levels are actually depleating. This is a contributing factor to large grasslands fulling in areas that used to be forests - grass doesn't need the Co2 density that more complex foliage does to grow.

Re:Or it could be

[Jeremi]

Indead, having a well-breaded planet is important; that way, you don't have to bring along food for the invading army

Once the planet is completely breaded, they deep-fry it in canola oil until it is a crispy golden brown, and then serve it with cocktail sauce. Yum!

Re:Or it could be

[Anonymous Coward]

More like Night of the Comet http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087799/

Re:Or it could be

[Anonymous Coward]

its hard to predict whom to eradicate millions of years before the fact :( as it happens, if they launched the meteor just 10 years sooner, they'd have to worry about mad cow desease. so they did it right - go for the root cause - no humans means no cows, no chicken, no

Re:Or it could be

[sven2000]

That would not be a very profitable investment waiting that long for so little resources, considering that humans can strip down the planet to the bone in only a few hundred years. One would suggest they have some basic knowledge about economics too.

Re:Or it could be

[cayenne8]

"More likely to be some kind of alien biological weapon."

I think a simpler explanation would be that...all those Indian's have been sweating. And the evaporating perspiration has carried parts of the red dots off their foreheads, and finally collected in the clouds enough, to precipitate down.

I suspect the same would happen to an area with a decade long motorcycle rally...all those tatoos melting into the air, tho when it came back down, wouldn't be red...much darker and meaner looking...

Re:Or it could be

[styrotech]

Were these the same mysterious alien beings that convinced the Golgafrinchians to get rid of the useless third of their population?

Very clever - they probably also planted the virulent telephone disease to get rid of any evidence they were involved.

Re:Or it could be

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I prefer mine beer-battered. Or even stir-fried for that matter.

Re:Or it could be

[Mr. Roadkill]

Organising a nice large lump of rock and ice or some interesting exotic matter to intersect with the planet in question every couple of hundred million years ought to keep the infestations down to the point where it's economically viable, without needing to leave a caretaker.

I'm just waiting for them to get really pissed when they find out that their last sanitizing attempt at Tunguska failed so dismally and we've squandered their resources.

Re:Or it could be

[sven2000]

I'm not convinced. NASA isn't trying to terraform the planet Mars by shooting dirty lumps of ice to it either.

Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[BadAnalogyGuy]

If you've read the book, you'd know that the movie version of 2001 uses Jupiter rather than Saturn as described in the book. The more I watch it, the more it makes sense that Jupiter is the correct planet and Saturn just doesn't quite fit. If you look at the space ship (the one with HAL and Dave), it looks like a single sperm and it's flying towards the giant egg Jupiter. We humans are performing panspermia right in our own solar system!

It's pretty fucking deep, and if you're on mushrooms, the hour long warp scene makes total sense.

But realistically, if we can pollinate other planets with our germs, then it seems more than likely that other planets could eject matter which eventually cross pollinates with us. The question is whether something like that could survive in the harsh radiation of space. There are obviously some bacteria that could make the trip, but how common are these extremophiles? Probably not as extreme as sending up a sperm ship to penetrate Jupiter's Big Red Dot and impregnate it with our space baby.

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[meringuoid]

The question is whether something like that could survive in the harsh radiation of space.

Apollo 12 landed near the Surveyor probe, which had landed a few years previously. The astronauts broke off a section and returned it to Earth. It was then found that bacteria had survived on Surveyor, on the Moon, in spore form - and once returned, came back to life and started replicating again.

I've also read lately (I believe it was in the current New Scientist) that an experiment on bacteria was sent up on Columbia. On being recovered, it turned out that the three cultures that were intended to be in there had all been killed off by the heat of reentry - but that a contaminant strain had survived and thrived inside the unbroken sealed container.

Bacteria are tough, and we can assume that anything leaving Earth is infested with them.

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[Anonymous Coward]

"if you're on mushrooms, the hour long warp scene makes total sense"

...and if you're not on mushrooms, it's only 5 minutes long!

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[Compulsion]

If this is what you're referring to, they were very small worms, not bacteria. I'm sure there was some bacteria in there, though.

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[m0nstr42]

On being recovered, it turned out that the three cultures that were intended to be in there had all been killed off by the heat of reentry - but that a contaminant strain had survived and thrived inside the unbroken sealed container.

That's an important point, though. In both of those cases, whatever lived was shielded during re-entry. A spore on an asteroid or other "natural" projectile would experience similar (worse, probably) extremes and it seems less and less likely they could survive "re-entry" (entry, rather?). Could a lone bacteria/spore/whatever that was just "floating" on its own through space survive entry into the atmosphere without being burned up?

My guess (IANA cosmologist) is that after a long journey through space it would have been accellerated to great speed by passing nearby massive objects, so despite not having much mass the friction would still be pretty intense.

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[Anonymous Coward]

In practice small objects don't tend to do reentry like larger objects. The differance is mainly in that they don't resist deceleration so much having a much larger surface area then mass, this leads to them gently floating down the atmosphere. If I remember correctly very fine dust enters the planet constantly, never burning up cause it just isn't heavy enough to suffer that fate.

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[Ucklak]

I think sea monkeys are pretty amazing. Why couldn't some life form like that just hitch a ride on/in a rock until it hits water?
Doesn't matter what planet, when the conditions are right, it'll hatch.

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[famebait]

But realistically, if we can pollinate other planets with our germs, then it seems more than likely that other planets could eject matter which eventually cross pollinates with us. The question is whether something like that could survive in the harsh radiation of space.

I am sure there are ways for the right spore or something else to survive space conditions for a long time, and I suppose it is theoretically possible that a lttle bit of it could hitch a ride on a rock, surviving the cataclysmmic impact that flung it into space. The ridiculous part here is the idea that this big rock would carry the tons and tons of living stuff, enough to color the rain in a region for months, apparently consisting of little else. How the hell did that thing get up in space?

My biggest gripe with teh panspermia is simpler though: who nees it? What is it for? It has this nasty but always unspoken premise that there is some other place where the environment made it easier for life to start than early earth was. What sort of place would that be? How would you optimise it? I'm not dismissing the possibility, but to me occams razor amkes the whole thing rather unatracctive for furteher study, at least until we know more about primitive biolygy.

It reminds me a bit of the IDers way of thinking: Because we don't understand exactly how that could happen, they throw out the extremely successful and promising but theory we have beacause it is not entirely complete, and in its place we put a more or less arbitrary idea which is fancyful and exhilerarting, but sadly has no evidence to support it, and if you examine it closer doesn't even try to offer any explenations. It mereley moves the whole problem firmly out of reach so we don't have to worry about the details.

OK, so switching from a biblical god to alien life forms does have the advantage of being unencumbered by troublesome antique traditions and moral codes, but it still seems like the same basic machanism at work, and its not very conductive to real insights about the natural world.

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[Muad'Dave]

I like Triops better. I'm growing some right now. I've got a webcam on them do I can watch them swim about. They grow fast - they can double in size in a day!

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[Ucklak]

Those look pretty cool. Thanks for the link.

I am being naively serious about that type of life form.
Our returning spacecraft only have heat sheilds on the gravity side to pretect the rest of the craft. I'm sure that some meteors hit ground. What is to stop some spore from hitching a ride on a meteor or even breaking off in the upper atmosphere where it can gently rain down?

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[alicenextdoor]

Paul Davies published a book on this a couple of years ago. He believes that Earth may well have been seeded with life from Mars, and we are the last surviving Martians. He's got a reasonable amount of data to support it, too.

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[Anonymous Coward]

(IANA cosmologist)
Beauty shool dropout, eh?

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably not as extreme as sending up a sperm ship to penetrate Jupiter's Big Red Dot and impregnate it with our space baby.

BadAnalogyGuy, you just lived up to your nick!

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that but they were super-powered bacteria because they had been exposed to cosmic rays and had gained the power cosmic!

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[m0nstr42]

(IANA cosmologist)
Beauty shool dropout, eh?
Yes. Sadly I've resigned myself to engineering. Everyone talks about dropping out of engineering to become a business major, but we never acknowledge the shameful few who decided to fall back on engineering because they couldn't handle the sophomore workload of Hair Style 320 and Eyeliner 413.

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[m0nstr42]

Nice. Do we have any idea where the dust originates? I'm curious how far it travels and how much chance it has to pick up a sizable velocity. The surface area thing is a really good point, though.

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if they're sea monkeys they'll just die quickly anyway.

They really never even get the chance to get their little civilization going.

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[sbaker]

Panspermia offers the possiblility that if we ever DID find a way to prove that live could not possibly have spontaneously arisen on the early earth - then there is a scientifically plausible way for some other set of initial conditions (or perhaps a much longer timescale) to provide the necessary kick-start.

However, as things look now, it seems that the conditions on early Earth were EXTREMELY good for spontaneous assembly of the necessary building block - which means that panspermia is out the door (by Occams razor) until someone can prove it actually happen (which would be tricky).

You can't easily prove panspermia - because even if you find some far distant rock whizzing around with Earth-like bacteria on it, you'll not be able to prove whether it was kicked off our planet in the first place via the same mechanism as the infamous Mars meteorite. If you find a rock with some non-Earthlike bugs on it (as is allegedly the case in the article) - it's hard to show that Earth life could have arisen from it.

This is interesting stuff though.

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[Cobralisk]

Ed's grand theory on life, the universe, and everything:

You are made out of the dust from a star that exploded a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. Many stars actually. Some of this dust happened to be in the right spot at the right time and gravitated into a big ball of dust collectively known as Earth. Another ball of dust became known as the Sun. These dustballs are related and share a similar or common origin. Some day this dust will be somewhere else, possibly someone else too. Have fun using it while you're here.

Very impressive

[endrue]

There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory.

Is that like a ship in a bottle?

What?!?!

[DarkNemesis618]

No secret government cover-up? I'm shocked.

Peter Gabriel an alien prophet? I think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reeeeed Raiiin is Falling Down
we gon' git it

According to the current New Scientist...

[meringuoid]

... this may actually be blood. The particles do look quite like red blood cells, and that would explain the lack of DNA found in them.

It's almost as outlandish as 'the meteor was full of alien bugs', though; what we seem to have with this hypothesis was 'the meteor burst in the middle of a flock of bats and liquidised them'...

No link, the website article is subscription-only. Sorry.

Re:According to the current New Scientist...

[LucidBeast]

It is blood and Han Solo got to them first. We can all take it easy now.

Re:According to the current New Scientist...

[miskatonic alumnus]

Charles Fort strikes again.

Re:According to the current New Scientist...

[Varun Soundararajan]

... this may actually be blood.

I know, i found it. Superman had shot them and the blood from the aliens reached the earth! Long live superman :)

Re:According to the current New Scientist...

[nizo]

I think the blood theory has been discounted (according to this article anyway.) This same article also mentions the particles seem to be "reproducing", even though they don't seem to contain DNA. There is also a link to the guy in India who has been studying the rain for several years now. Pictures of the little beasties are available at the second link.

Re:According to the current New Scientist...

[shotfeel]

Its red, so of course its blood -the traces of iron found are bound to the hemoglobin (which carries oxygen) in the red blood cells.

It couldn't possibly be the rain was red because the traces of iron were simply iron oxide (AKA rust) which also turns water red.

Re:According to the current New Scientist...

[Winkhorst]

Indeed. This is classic Forteana. Amazing how few people even recognize it as such. The man wrote four books in the early decades of the 20th Century about these occurrences and yet the scientific community cannot even grasp the context. Even Americans don't realise the day the British left at the end of the Revolutionary War, there was a black rain in New York.

See: Book of the Damned, Lo!, Wild Talents, and New Lands.

Re:According to the current New Scientist...

[TapeCutter]

It's summertime in Melbourne Australia, if I leave my car unprotected overnight the hot north winds cover it in a talcum-fine red/yellow dust. Particularly noticable when accompanied by a very light rain.

Alien rain? Riiiiiiight.

[Stephen H-B]

Good thing my tinfoil hat is waterproof. Let's see those alien rain bugs infest my brain now!

Re:Alien rain? Riiiiiiight.

[joeme1]

I hope you aren't relying on that tinfoil hat to keep your thoughts secure. In the March 2006 issue of Popular Science on page 80 there is a great article on research done with tinfoil hats and different radio frequencies. It seems that the tinfoil can actually amplify (by 20-30 dB) 1.2 and 2.6Ghz waves, two frequencies used by the government and some other applications. Just so ya know.

Re:Alien rain? Riiiiiiight.

[gstoddart]

Good thing my tinfoil hat is waterproof. Let's see those alien rain bugs infest my brain now!

So ... they land on your shoulders and swim up.

You're not nearly paranoid enough. When it's raining, stay indoors, or wear your hermetically sealed suit.

Sheesh! Amateurs!

Re:Alien rain? Riiiiiiight.

[angel'o'sphere]

EVE Online does not run on Macs ;D

Nor on Linux ....

Offtopic, yepp ...

angel'o'sphere

Re:Alien rain? Riiiiiiight.

[Firehed]

Any word on how the considerably heavier lead hats hold up to those test freqencies? I'd rather not have some freak accident literally cook my brain becuase I was trying to protect "my" thoughts.

Re:Alien rain? Riiiiiiight.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you mean rainwater and grain alcohol is no longer a safe concoction? That must mean that our essence is no longer safe. Time for the bomb... YEE HAW!

fools?

[jevring]

Since when did 06/03 become 01/04?

Re:fools?

[DCstewieG]

You fell asleep in June and woke up in January too? I thought I was the only one.

Uh..

[Sirak]

So wait... There has been proof of alien existance for a couple of years now, and no one thought to bring this up?

That, or a bunch of birds were exploded by lightning, and the rain was red for another reason. Either way, I want to know, and I want to know now!

Brb, Sheffield.

  -Sirak

Re:Uh..

[Jesrad]

FTFA:
Critical to Louis's theory is the length of time the red rain fell on Kerala. Two months is too long for it to have been wind-borne dust, he says.

It can't possibly have been raining blood from birds or bats for two months either.

Re:Uh..

[redalien]

It couldn't have been blood from birds, as avian blood cells are nucleated. Mammalian blood, on the other hand, does not contain nucleated red blood cells, so would match this. The NS article does recognise that a meteor airburst in a flock of bats could have caused this, but there were 50 tonnes of cells released, and nobody has found a big ol' pile of wings yet.

Re:Uh..

[Blisshead]

but I like the exploding bird theory.

Re:Uh..

[AlienSlav]

Ok It's my fault you gringo humanoid. The mother ship is in fixed orbit over India and we have been patched into their communication satellite listening in on the chatter. On the day in question I pulled the violet lever and pushed the blue button this discharged the holding tanks. Sorry I'll be more careful next time it's push the yellow button and pull the chrome lever to flush then wash all appendages with disinfectant.
AlienSlave

Slow news day?

[Max Threshold]

This article adds what, exactly, to the previous article?

Re:Slow news day?

[krunchyfrog]

These days I first read Slashdot to see the most important news, then I spend the rest of the day refreshing Digg. That way I don't miss too much. Except for Ask Slashdots. Digg doesn't have a "Ask Digg".

Re:Slow news day?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Except for Ask Slashdots. Digg doesn't have a "Ask Digg".

Yet :o)

Re:Slow news day?

[yoyhed]

I've also seen a bunch of dumbass articles every time I've visited digg.. here's a prime example: RAINBOW SIX XBOX 360 SCREENSHOT OMG! That's the story. A screenshot of an Xbox 360 game.

This has the most "diggs" of anything on the main page, which is just damn sad. People come to Slashdot for the discussion; I have yet to find another tech website with a better intelligence to stupidity ratio.

And digg stories are frequently just taken from Slashdot as well, sometimes one site has a story before the other, but it's not like it's more than a day's difference.

One big problem

[smooth wombat]

From the article:

But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense.

He didn't collect uncontaminated samples. He collected samples that had, apparently, collected in puddles. Depending on where those puddles were, ground, steel barrel, rooftop, squeezed from a soaked shirt, etc, they were not the same as putting out a clean jar and collecting the rain as it fell.

It would be nice if these samples had been collected in the correct manner then a more convincing argument could be made that what was found came from space and was not of terrestrial origins.

This is like people who have cancer, undergo treatment for a while then stop. Then they resort to prayer to cure them. If they're cured they claim it was the prayer that did the work. However, since they had already undergone treatment, we can't say for sure which helped the person. The results are contaminated by their original treatment.

Same thing in this instance.

Re:One big problem

[Anonymous Coward]

You're making an assumption based on the wording of the article. Given that the rain occurred over the course of two months, it's also a reasonable assumption that the scientist left some containers out to collect it, and these were the "samples left over from the rains". That sentence just doesn't give enough information to know for sure.

Re:One big problem

[Scrameustache]

It would be nice if these samples had been collected in the correct manner

You see people, this is why I've set up a petition to fund an army of scientists which will be deployed at one-meter intervals to cover the entire earth! In case anything interresting ever happens, we'll have qualified people with the right equipment right there to take samples and measurments.

And they said I was being unrealistic... the FOOLS!

Re:One big problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who uses an example to discredit Christianity is the type of person who uses assumptions or misinformation rather than facts to make a point.

Re:One big problem

[Esion Modnar]

petition to fund an army of scientists which will be deployed at one-meter intervals to cover the entire earth!

I know you're joking, but consider this: the earth's surface area is approx. 500 million square kilometers, or over 500 trillion sq. meters. There are over 6 billion people.

Evenly spread at 1 person per sq. meter, we could only cover about 0.0012 percent of the surface area.

And I used to worry about the population explosion.

Re:One big problem

[flappinbooger]

"they were not the same as putting out a clean jar and collecting the rain as it fell." This is, of course, because there are no bacteria in the air?

Re:One big problem

[Jeremi]

Evenly spread at 1 person per sq. meter, we could only cover about 0.0012 percent of the surface area.

Your mistake is that you are assuming each person needs only 1 square meter of land to survive. I think you should look up the actual minimum footprint of land necessary to feed/clothe/house a person, then recalculate.

Re:One big problem

[Derek Pomery]

Laying aside the footprint of a 1st world, or 3rd world human (the two vary a lot) the actual land surface area is:
170,000,000,000,000 metres squared
not
500,000,000,000,000 metres squared.

And this is on the assumption that every square inch of land is habitable. Or even if it is habitable (Phoenix), suitable for sustainable farming.

Heck, one entire continent is completely uninhabitable with our current technology, it'd be easier to live in the ocean
as opposed to antarctica.

Re:One big problem

[grammar fascist]

This is like people who have cancer, undergo treatment for a while then stop. Then they resort to prayer to cure them. If they're cured they claim it was the prayer that did the work. However, since they had already undergone treatment, we can't say for sure which helped the person. The results are contaminated by their original treatment.

I'm sure that, with a little persuasion, you'd be able to get them to conduct the experiment properly.

Yep.

Re:One big problem

[Derek Pomery]

Agreed.
I hear this argument all the time from anti-birth control activists, so it annoys me.
Take the actual aproximate land area from my other comment.
Knock it down to 150,000,000,000,000 to allow for Antarctica (CIA world fact book + fact that 170 is tad on optimistic side and assumes amount of surface area stays same in next few hundred years [think Florida and Netherlands disappearing in a sea level rise]).

150,000 divided by current 6.6 billion gives us each a nice heft 22,727ish metres if we replaced the earth with nothing but humans and human farms. Or a square 150 metres on a side to support each of us. 100 metres on a side if we double the population.
'course, we could possibly start farming the oceans and kick the population up even higher. Might be easier than trying to make entire Earth's surface arable farmland.

Re:One big problem

[Esion Modnar]

the actual land surface area is: 170,000,000,000,000 metres squared

I never specified 500 million m^2 as land surface, just total surface area, land and sea. Also, I realize that some land is not habitable. I suppose I was responding to the hypothetical (and satirical) "if we put somebody on every square meter of the earth's surface" proposition.

It's just that I couldn't resist examining the idea as a mathematical exercise which ignores geographical realities and biological necessities.

BTW, I actually do think we have a population problem, but I was too lazy to place <sarcasm> tags.

Re:One big problem

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

However, since they had already undergone treatment, we can't say for sure which helped the person. The results are contaminated by their original treatment...Same thing in this instance. So you're saying that it's not clear whether the alien jiz would still have been here if India had not previously received cancer treatments?

Re:One big problem

[ArghBlarg]

A newer paper shows that they've determined a metabolism and life-cycle for these things.

That's right, they grow and reproduce:

http://arxiv.org/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0312/0312639. pdf

Even if the original samples had Earth organisms in them, it's pretty amazing that they found something (whether it's Earth-made or not) that grows and reproduces at 300 deg. C boiling oil.

Read it, really. I'd like to hear from someone what else this could be, other than a really remarkable life form of some kind, alien or otherwise.

Questions

[LS]

1. How could a single meteor/comet cause _two months_ of red rain?
2. Why the crys of "bullshit" from other researchers? There is a piece of evidence, not just a claim. It seems easy to figure out what's going on by analyzing the contents of that bottle.

LS

Re:Questions

[Mr. Underbridge]

2. Why the crys of "bullshit" from other researchers? There is a piece of evidence, not just a claim. It seems easy to figure out what's going on by analyzing the contents of that bottle.

That begs the question: Are the contents of the bottle guaranteed to be sterile, uncontaminated by their trip from space (theoretically) to the bottle? From reports of the collection methods, chances are slim.

Thus, bullshit I cry.

Re:Questions

[RetiredMidn]

1. How could a single meteor/comet cause _two months_ of red rain?

All in the same place? (More appropriately, only reported in one place?)

Come on, /. When I want to waste my time on crap like this, I turn to digg.

Re:Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

"That begs the question" ... No it doesn't. That does not mean what you think it means.

Re:Questions

[idontgno]

So now we know the truth.

"Anonymous Coward" is a pseudonym for Inigo Montoya.

Re:Questions

[MarkusQ]

That begs the question: Are the contents of the bottle guaranteed to be sterile, uncontaminated by their trip from space (theoretically) to the bottle? From reports of the collection methods, chances are slim.

"That begs the question" ... No it doesn't. That does not mean what you think it means.

Actually, I beg to differ. He's using it correctly (or at least, it can be read that way). Begging the question is assuming what you are claiming to prove; in this case, they are assuming that the bio-goo in the bottle is from space (and not a contaminant) and using it as evidence that there is bio-goo in space. That, in a nutshell, is question begging.

--MarkusQ

Re:Questions

[Mr. Underbridge]

"That begs the question" ... No it doesn't. That does not mean what you think it means

In this case, yes it most certainly does. Take a logic class.

Re:Questions

[Kelson]

While we're at it, what makes them think that "only a meteorite" could have triggered a sonic boom in the area?

Not that meteorites are uncommon, it's just that I tend to see red flags anytime someone pops up with "X is the only explanation for Y" rather than "X appears to explain Y."

Re:Questions

[LS]

As the "they" you are referring to, I do NOT assume that this is from space. I simply stated that it should be tested before calling it bullshit. In fact, my first question implies the opposite - if it rained this way for 2 months, how could it have anything to do with an object from space?

I understand your description of "begging the question", but I don't think the original author's intent was of this meaning.

LS

Alien?

[jav1231]

We know this because we've discovered everything on Earth already. We ran this through our big database of shit on Earth thingy and it came up negative.

Re:Alien?

[Fitzroy_Doll]

Where can I get access to this database?

First Fortean post

[bj8rn]

Maybe it's time to re-read the works of one Charles Hoy Fort?

Re:First Fortean post

[ithrax]

Thanks, I was thinking the same thing. "Blood rains" aren't new. I think the idea is new that they the rains are the Birth of our world and not a sign of the End of it. Origin of the Species = Rain of Toads?

Re:First Fortean post

[Winkhorst]

Nor was Fort the last to take notice of these phenomena. See, for example, The Sourcebook Project http://www.science-frontiers.com/sourcebk.htm .

Sounds impressive

[Centurix]

But I keep 'vials' of amber fluid in my fridge that came down from the sky on a plane. Truly a gift from the Carlton United Brewery gods.

Re:Sounds impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Vickie Bitter? For the love of all that's holy, don't say Foster's.

Re:Sounds impressive

[Centurix]

You're safe mate, Crownies only!

Replay

[Kangburra]

In case you missed the first article about this, they had a similar powder in Chicago, pictures too

http://www.nbc5.com/news/5884173/detail.html

Re:Replay

[Anonymous Coward]

Solved.

http://www.nbc5.com/news/5985470/detail.html

Re:Replay

[suntac]

Ok, cool and all...... I have read the article and the article state that the results of the lab tests should be there in a week.... as this article is from January 6, 2006 the results should be there.... anybody knows a what the outcome is?

Regards,
Johan Louwers.

Re:Replay

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only DUST.

http://www.nbc5.com/news/5985470/detail.html

Re:In Soviet

[oliverthered]

Common, at least try to try.
In Soviet Russia aliens reign over you!

pointer to x-files episode

[sig226]

X-files already covered this in an episode about the
chupacabra (goat sucker), except it was yellow rain.

Re:pointer to x-files episode

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean golden shower?

In India because

[Liveandletlive]

the aliens are sending their initial representatives to access possibility of outsourcing to India. Way to go!!

similarly

[grumpyjack]

And also, on the same mission, before take-off someone who was preparing the craft for launch sneezed on the camera. When the craft returned the bacteria from the sneeze was found to be alive and well having survived the voyage.

Re:similarly

[grumpyjack]

Linky linky... http://wps.prenhall.com/esm_audesirk_bloe_7/0,8753 ,1310852-,00.html/

The locals describe differently..

[Sattwic]

According to local dailies here, the color of that rain in Kerala ranged from 'red' to 'burgundy' or 'brown'. Initially, it was blamed on polluting industrial units, but then, hordes of scientists started to descend on the areas which received the rain.

Re:The locals describe differently..

[Anonymous Coward]

Had the red rain been over NASA, Everyone would have responded differently....

spaceship dump -- same as "blue ice"

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been traced to the waste dump system on a type 1 centari saucer. It was from their dump system, much like the blue ice dumped by modern jets.

Bullshit.

[TangoCharlie]

My favourite quote from the article is

Not everyone is convinced by the idea, of course. Indeed most researchers think it is highly dubious. One scientist who posted a message on Louis's website described it as 'bullshit'.

The slashdot posting would almost have you believe that Aliens had actually landed. Sheesh!

Re:Bullshit.

[Rashdot]

No, it can't be bullshit because I've got loads of that already and it's dark brown.

Ancient Semitic religions

[Flying pig]

Apparently believe that the rain is the Sky father-god inseminating the mother Earth. If so, this is just another example of religious fundamentalists with agenda trying to distort science. Hang on a moment...

Re:Ancient Semitic religions

[ArcherB]

Well, the Bible does speak of rain and rivers running red with blood. Now we've seen it happen. Start looking for a plague of toads next and be ready with the sheep's blood.

My problem with it:

[ArcherB]

From TFA:
Critical to Louis's theory is the length of time the red rain fell on Kerala. Two months is too long for it to have been wind-borne dust, he says.

So two months is not too long for commet dust to hang around and and fall in rain? If the commet were that damn big, why only in India?

Re:My problem with it:

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. If two months is "too long for it to have been wind-borne dust", it is even less likely to have been from a single high-altitude comet event. It doesn't make any sense. High altitude winds should have dispersed the material over a much wider area, and tremendously diluted it. I mean, ash plumes from volcanoes spread over whole continents in just a few days, and are globally distributed (at least along a latitudinal band) in the time span they are talking about.

It is far more likely that this stuff was picked up multiple times (i.e. in separate events) from some local ground source due to suitable weather conditions that persisted for a month or two in the region. Maybe the wind was blowing fungal spores off the adjacent inland plateaus?

Peter Gabriel is an alien

[bjb]

Hmm.. after seeing images of the guy during his "makeup years" (1972-early 80's), this now make sense:

Peter Gabriel -- "Red Rain"
Red rain is coming down
Red rain, Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me

I am standing up at the water's edge in my dream
I cannot make a single sound as you scream
It can't be that cold, the ground is still warm to touch
This place is so quiet, sensing that storm

Red rain is coming down
Red rain, Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me

Well I've seen them buried in a sheltered place in this town
They tell you that this rain can sting, and look down
The aliens have created life for us
Hay ay ay no pain, Seeing no red at all, see no rain

Red rain is coming down
Red rain, Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me

Red rain-
There sprouts a human, o'er there a puppy
To return again and again
Just let the red rain splash you
Let the rain fall on your skin
It's like fertilizer, oh yeah
To create a new child

Red rain is coming down
Red rain, Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me
And I can't watch it yet
No eye formed yet
It's so hard to lay down in all of this
Red rain is coming down
Red rain is pouring down
Red rain is coming down all over me
I see it, Red rain is coming down
Red rain is pouring down
Red rain is coming down all over me
I'm bathing in it, Red rain coming down
Red rain is coming down
Red rain is coming down all over me
I'm begging you, Red rain coming down
Red rain coming down
Red rain coming down
Red rain coming down
Over me in the red red sea, Over me, Over me, Red rain

(apologies to Mr. Gabriel)

Re:Peter Gabriel is an alien

[Doc Ruby]

Gabriel has said he was thinking about nuclear fallout after a nuclear holocaust. Hopefully aliens raping our seas isn't worse.

Re:Peter Gabriel is an alien

[HawkinsD]

The White Stripes also sing about the Red Rain, on their recent Get Behind Me Satan album. But I don't think it's the same idea.

John Tesh, on the other hand, has a rather alien-sounding track called "Red Rain" on his 1997 horror-show entitled (shudder) Sax All Night.

Forgive me..

[roadhog95]

But, wasnt there an episode of Star Trek TNG that deciphered this for us some 10 odd years ago?

Re:Forgive me..

[odourpreventer]

My first thought when reading the summary went to Michael Crichton's "The Andromeda Strain", where a toxic virus inhabiting the upper layers of our atmosphere happens to drop to the surface (or something like that. It's been a while since I read it).

Am I going to get a "-1, Nitwit" rating now that I've mentioned Michael Crichton?

Too bad the facts are so humdrum.

[Ancient_Hacker]

I *see*--- there's stuff that if his claims are true, would be the biggest news since I don't know when. But it's been sitting around for FIVE YEARS and not confirmed by anybody else. And apparently he hasnt given samples to other scientists. And it hasnt appeared on the front page of the NYT.

One might surmise that the stuff is something more placid, like common earth dust, pollen, bee-poop, grasshopper-poop, or any number of other things of-this-Earth.

A real scientist would have gone out of his way to compare the funny stuff to various earth items, in a good-faith effort to identify the stuff. Not just do batch analyses of the constituent elements. There's 1000's of things that might have that mix of elements and NOT be from off-planetary sources.

Re:Too bad the facts are so humdrum.

[TallMatthew]

I *see*--- there's stuff that if his claims are true, would be the biggest news since I don't know when. But it's been sitting around for FIVE YEARS and not confirmed by anybody else. And apparently he hasnt given samples to other scientists. And it hasnt appeared on the front page of the NYT.

"Life on Earth Spawned from Extraterrestials" just doesn't seem like it would fit on the Times front page next to "Parliamentry Procedures Revisited in Istanbul" and "US Farmers Denounce Cutbacks in Fed Agricultural Subsidies." Unless aliens end up on reality television no one's going to believe they exist.

This guy's theory is no more or less plausible than any other explanation I've ever heard for how a rock, some water and a collection of other elements ended up creating Chevy Chase, Portabello mushrooms and that green crap that grows under my toenails if I don't cut them often enough.

Re:Too bad the facts are so humdrum.

[LordKazan]

Your post seems to imply that you have an issue with abiogenesis and evolution.

Re:Too bad the facts are so humdrum.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless aliens end up on reality television no one's going to believe they exist.

Wait, you're saying those things were human?!

Re:Too bad the facts are so humdrum.

[Becquerel]

The story has got the front page of the NewScientist this week (no doubt where the origional interest started), a publication i trust far more than and newspaper. In that article the scientist makes the (previously unpublished) claim that:

...[if noone can prove what it is] someone will have to verify the observation that Louis [the scientist] made whicheven he finds astonishing: that the cells replicate. In earlier unpublished papers, Louis says he cultured the red rain cells in unconventional nutrients, such as cedar wood oil, and showed that these DNA devoid mcrobes divide happily at a temperature of 300oC. Louis admits he left these claims out of his latest paper because he thought they would be considered "too exaordinary"(NewScientist 4th March 2006)

Non DNA based replication would seem like pretty good evidence for alien life.... if you believe him.

His latest paper to be published in the respectable Astrophysics and Space Science Can be found here. Dr Godfrey Louis website, with a pic of the particles and mirrors to this paper and links to other papers, here

Re:Too bad the facts are so humdrum.

[Ancient_Hacker]

>published in "Astrophysics and Space Science"

Astrophysicists and space scientists don't necessarily know boo about life forms on Earth. I'd be more impressed if he got it published in "Microbiology".

Just doing a quick google image search turns up several microphotographs of pollen grains that look very similar to the pics in the paper.

Re:Too bad the facts are so humdrum.

[barakn]

An elemental analyis (two, actually) of the red rain cells found that along with Carbon, Oxygen, and Hydrogen there were significant amounts of Nitrogen, Silicon, Iron, and a few other metals. Somehow these microbes were able to grow on cedar oil (containing mostly C, H, and a little O). Did they transmute the lighter elements into heavier elements? Does the biochemistry of these red rain microbes only involve C, O, and H? I find this hard to believe.

Re:Too bad the facts are so humdrum.

[SEE]

And it hasnt appeared on the front page of the NYT.

Okay, help me out here. Is that an argument for or against its credibility?

Chubby rain?

[Slashdolt]

Someone had to say it...

Re:Chubby rain?

[AmazingRuss]

Dammit! You beat me to it.

Blood Storm

[LS]

It appears that something similar occurred over Florida mid-December.

Here's the article

LS

Chalk one up

[Bazzalisk]

Chalk one up for Charles Forte.

Alien Rain

[ellijacket]

Alien Rain Alien Rain I only want to see you analyzing the Alien Rain. I don't want to be your weekend contaminant..... I only want to be a quack I'd have to be an idiot to believe this crap but I only want to see you dancing in the ALIEN RAIN!

I concur witht the findings

[bermudatriangleoflov]

I had the benefit of travelling to India for business for 2 weeks in the monsoon season. One does not need a scientific background to confirm that alien rain does indeed fall in India....excrement rain, trash rain, and curry rain have also been found.

E.T. drove by and pissed out the window.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though there is no proof, I know that that's what happened. He clearly had kidney stones though. They scratched his urethra, which explains the blood.

So this is the sky-goddess, Nut .....

[Anonymous Coward]

MENSTRUATING?

http://ancienthistory.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite .htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=ancienthistory&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fww w.ancientegypt.co.uk%2Fgods%2Fexplore%2Fnut.html

Huh? Insightful?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is like people who have cancer, undergo treatment for a while then stop. Then they resort to prayer to cure them. If they're cured they claim it was the prayer that did the work.

---

Pissing off the religious right at every opportunity and proud of it

Stupid mods can't even recognize a self-professed troll when they see one.

New Scientist article

[woodlouse_man]

Read this in New Scientist over the weekend. Link here (but you need to be a subscriber)

http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/mg1892541 1.100

Very interesting article, with several possible explanations.

The most plausible, to my mind, is the mammalian red blood cells. They seem to be the right shape, and have no DNA (like the particles).

As they said in the NS article, the question really remains is - if they are mamallian red blood cells, how did the clouds get seeded with them int he first place?

Re:New Scientist article

[Anonymous Coward]

Supersonic jet collided with a flock of bats?

Re:New Scientist article

[SnarfQuest]

if they are mamallian red blood cells, how did the clouds get seeded with them int he first place?

When they triggered the improbability drive, a houseplant was converted into a whale...

Re:New Scientist article

[dahin]

Read this in New Scientist over the weekend. Link here (but you need to be a subscriber)
http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/mg1892541 1.100
Very interesting article, with several possible explanations.

If you're not a subscriber, you can read the full text as the last article on this page:

http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/friendly/signs _20060302_friendly.html

It is indeed very interesting.

Re:New Scientist article

[bcmm]

Two other points made in the NS article:
50 TONS of mammal RBCs? That's a lot of blood. I don't know the proportion of RBC in blood by weight, but it works out as a lot of blood.
More importantly, red blood cells would swell by osmosis and burst in rain water, probably before reaching the ground.

And then there were the "unofficial" claims he didn't want to publish yet, such as the claim that they can divide, and the claims about conditions under which they can divide (300C in ceder oil? WTF?).

Alternative Explanations?

[Lord_Dweomer]

Can anybody here suggest some plausible alternatative explanations? Is it at all possible that minerals or "organic soup" or something was reabsorbed enmasse into the atmosphere and rained down? I mean....I am DEFINITELY not religious...but this is a little creepy (read:cool) even for me. Raining blood? Isn't that one of the signs of the apocolypse or something?

Re:Alternative Explanations?

[bmalia]

Can anybody here suggest some plausible alternatative explanations?

a) bullshit
b) bullshit
c) bullshit
d) all of the above

Re:Alternative Explanations?

[Electric Eye]

Yeah, it's called massive POLLUTION. Having been to India, there is a permanent layer of dark brown haze that blankets the country at roughly 5,000 feet or so. In fact, most of SE Asia is covered by this perma-smog. While this certainly would be interesting to have alien babies dropped in India, my guess it's just the result of pollution.

Re:Alternative Explanations?

[Cat_Byte]

Isn't that one of the signs of the apocolypse or something?

No but I do find it interesting it was mentioned to have happened before. The closest thing in the apocolypse is a bright star falling and contaminating 1/3 (or was it 2/3) of the worlds water supply. Keep in mind, the end of days aren't like Hollywood portrays them. After the worst passes there is 1,000 years of peace (which would obviously mean lots and lots of dead people). The world doesn't just explode. It's the end of an age.

As for alternative explanations, I tend to categorize this along with acid rain.

Re:Alternative Explanations?

[Anonymous Coward]

Western religion throws up its hands and says "God did this" and "it's the end times for sure." On the other hand, science studies the phenomena and tries to understand it.

Which approach do you want to take? Personally, I prefer the latter. It has less of an "ugha buga stick our heads in the sand" factor to it.

Re:Alternative Explanations?

[Lord_Dweomer]

Why don't you try rereading my post. I have already placed my stake firmly on the side of science, which is why I was looking for some scientific explanations on this other than the highly unlikely "raining alien goo" theory.

Maybe God did it

[elrous0]

If I've learned nothing else from the study of intelligent design; it's that, when in doubt, shrug your shoulders and say "Maybe my sky-god did it."

-Eric

Re:Maybe God did it

[Anonymous Coward]

Now all you have to do is prove the existence of God and your onto a winner.

It may take you a while, since I don't thin anyone has ever 'proved' a negative to be true.

Re:Maybe God did it

[Monkelectric]

Mod this man up! Man that was funny/tragically true :)

Re:Maybe God did it

[Anonymous Coward]

If I've learned nothing else from the study of intelligent design; it's that, when in doubt, shrug your shoulders and say "Maybe my sky-god did it."

What you're actually witnessing is the rain over India evolving before our very eyes.

Re:Maybe God did it

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Here's an easy one: there are no even primes greater than two.

Re:Maybe God did it

[ma11achy]

Nah, it's just the Flying Spaghetti Monster having a laugh....

Rain != Rein

[se7en11]

Aww man... I totally misread this story title...

Occam's Razor

[maggard]

Wow - Hemos posted this & not ScuttleMonkey? Usually SM is the one who falls for the "I read it on the Intarweb so it must be true!" psuedo-science...

Look, that there's lots of stuff from off-planet in rain is well known and trivially documented; a couple of tons a day comes down. Heck, run a magnet over the gunk in a rainwater drain and a fair proportion of what gets pulled up will be extra-terrestrial in origin. This is one of those classic easy Science Fair projects.

There's even a popular theory of raindrop formation that requires these high altitude extra-terrestrial fines as the nucleus for starting droplet cascades.

However, 2 months of material entering the Earth's atmosphere over a limited geographical area - there's no mechanism that would permit this. The Earth rotates every 24 hours as it revolves around our Sun: What could be impacting our planet on a schedule that has it ingressing at distinct 24 hour intervals over 2 months/a series of 60, to a non-equatorial location?

Someone really needs to get this guy a globe, or better yet an orrery.

Sure it's possible that the rain contaminant isn't upwind mineralogical fines - sure it could be biological fines. Pollen is the obvious source, they had a huge bloom of something odd upwind that year. I know my house gets covered in yellow 'dust' every spring from all the nearby trees, red is just as possible.

But "it's alien life from ooouter spaaace!..." - no. Not saying that couldn't happen, hasn't happened, isn't happening, but this wouldn't be the pattern and there are too many much more prosaic explanations than these extraordinary claims.

The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting?

[Go_Ask_Alex]

The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting? Don't talk about my family that way!

And don't worry about the "alien invasion" either, we always try to find hosts who wouldn't resist or twitch too much over being in an overtly symbiotic relationship. Your current parasites really haven't been doing much for you, we'll change that. We offer change: we provide the brains, you provide the body, and everyone will be happy in the end. Hell, Alex here is getting laid more since he can now talk NPR with the BoHo chicks, and I'm starting to really get into earth women; sweet! Network gaming sure wasn't doing it for Al here, your life will improve too.

The invasion will begin shortly... once the current season of America's Next Top Model is over. I'm really liking Al's Lazy Boy gaming chair too.

Link to Louis' original paper

[Oxygen99]

No link to the New Scientist, but here's the paper written to support the original hypothesis:

link

Red Rain. I think not

[MajorDick]

Jesus has a bladder infection thats all......

The cloudiness would prove this hypothesis....

Test for blood if its positive, its the blood of CHRIST !!!!

Then we can clone about 100 of him an REALLY piss off the religoous right,

Or Better YET !!!!, Use it for STEM CELL RESEARCH !

Re:Red Rain. I think not

[DCstewieG]

Then we can clone about 100 of him an REALLY piss off the religoous right

...which would be ironic if that was how the second-coming was meant to be

Re:Red Rain. I think not

[MajorDick]

My unlcle is writing a book with that EXACT plot....

Albiet the army is involved.....

Thats where my idea came from , but how do they then explain the 93 coming :)

Aliens

[Anonymous Coward]

"They're in everyone's eggs"

CGI video.

[CCFreak2K]

For some reason, this makes me think of that one CGI sequence with the seeds that fall on a planet, grow and shoot more seeds out into space. Anyone know the name?

Re:CGI video.

[Balanced]

If you're thinking of the one from one of the Mind's Eye collections, I believe it's entitled "Panspermia". There's something to be said for informative titles, I suppose.

Re:CGI video.

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a series of shorts on a local kids station based out of Paris, Ontario, called Short Circuitz. They featured CGI videos and music usually about a minute long. Most of the sequences can be found on "The Mind's Eye" or "Beyond the Mind's Eye" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167046/) I think the one you're talking about is called "Seeds"... Good luck

Possible Strange Earthlife More the Point

[Rob Carr]

New Scientist has a more extensive article titled Alien rain over India. The possible causes for 50 tons of the red gunk range from panspermia to sand to high flying bats killed by an exploding meteor. Somehow, I think panspermia is more likely than the bats, although that's not saying much.

More interesting is the idea that "alien" life might originate on Earth. Modern techniques involve culturing and DNA analysis that assume standard DNA in an organism: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. Viruses can have RNA, but they're not considered alive (that's another argument for another day).

There are other nucleic acids and other nucleic acid pairs. There might even be molecules that could polymerize and act as hereditary subunits. Such life wouldn't have to come from space. Standard theory taught that several kinds of life might have come from the prebiotic soup, but only one survived.

We now know that's not exactly true. There are a few organisms that don't use the exact standard DNA code. The mitochondria in your cells are a perfect example, although they're no longer free-living independent organisms.

What else is out there? The possibility that there is a parallel and intertwined ecosystem is becoming a hot topic in biology.

Rains of frogs, seaweed, sand, and other things aren't uncommon. A rain of non-standard bacteria isn't beyond possibility. Of course, neither is a government experiment on deploying biological weapons, although 50 tons is a lot, whether English or Metric. A foul-up in the biochemistry or some weird damage to the DNA is still more likely. But wouldn't it be fun if it turned out to be Earthlife that's alien?

Aliens?!?!?!

[03flhrci]

Ready the plasma gun!!!

No it must be..

[Lazy Reader]

Spaghetti Sauce. Proves existence of noodly appendages once and for all.

Obligatory

[cciRRus]

All your tandoori chicken are belong to us.

humm

[digitallysick]

wouldnt "alien rain" never make it here due to the atmosphere? wouldnt it burn up before it ever made it to the point where it could become rain?

Here's my explaination. Nobel prize please.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. pollution
2. existing earth microbes
3. existing earth microbes eating pollution
4. curry powder factory exploded

UMM

[Captian Obias]

Didn't Tiberium come to earth in a similar way?

I don't know about panspermia...

[Frangible]

Step 1: Scoop crap out of mud puddle
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Declare the origin of life as alien

Allllllrighty then.

more likely, junk science

[rubycodez]

I'm amazed at the junk science out of india that gets quoted in mainstream news sources: solar panels that produce more electrical power per unit area than the sun shines on earth, motors 150% more efficient than existing ones, etc. So some red/brown rain fell (not an unusual event on this planet, actually), and some folks collected gunk out of street gutters and puddles, and they're saying it contains organic compounds. No shit! or more likely, much shit, and piss too (if you've been to average Indian city you know what I'm saying!

Re:more likely, junk science

[Frangible]

That's why peer review is so important in science. It's not a perfect process either, but it's a good way of validating these claims. The incentive is there for people to take things to the media, however true, and get attention and funding, and I think that's what has happened in this case. The fact is proof if alien life falling to earth would be ground breaking and a journal like Nature would love to carry a verifiable story of it, but this isn't it.

Gerrold was right!

[Anonymous Coward]

The chtorr are invading!

The rain is from the space plane

[Lost Penguin]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11691989/

Another skeptical expert referred to the boron-based "fuel breakthrough."
"Boron-based fuels were the white hope of the 1950s because they have about 140 percent the energy/weight ratio of kerosene," the expert advised MSNBC.com by e-mail. "The B-70 and F-108 were designed to use them, and production plants were built. But when they actually tested the stuff, it turned out to produce combustion products that were liquid and destroyed the engines. Also, borane compounds are so poisonous they have been considered
as CW [chemical weapon] agents! The whole program collapsed, and B-70 went back to kerosene."

Well I for one

[GlenInDallas]

welcome our new rainy overlords. No one said it yet?

Why did it only fall on India?

[Barlo_Mung_42]

For two months? If it were coming from space wouldn't it fall in a ring around the globe as the earth rotates?

Re:Why did it only fall on India?

[Mr. Bad Example]

Because even the aliens are outsourcing everything to India.

Re:Why did it only fall on India?

[Winkhorst]

Charles Fort documents cases that returned to the same city after several years. This clearly has nothing to do with our normal concept of space (or of time).

Re:Sorry but...

[jdeluise]

Yes, but were the posts as insightful? Here's a post that got a digg with their new commenting system on this very same story...

DUGG because it's a cool story, and it's super fun to say Red Rain. Very cool article!

....not sure there is anything more to say....but remember, Slashdot is about more than the article!

Quote from Clint to the Aliens:

[RayHs]

"Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining."

Two months

[wiredlogic]

It it "came from space" over the course of two months then we would expect this substance to have rained down all around the globe at that lattitude.

The more likely explanation is that it is some industrial airborn effluent generated in the region that was kept hushed for some reason.

well technically, "duh"

[/dev/trash]

All life can pretty much be traced back to the Big Bang.

Not an answer to "Where did life come from?"

[dan the person]

Q: Where did life on Earth come from?
A: Life came from outer space.
Q: Where did life in outer space come from?

likewise
Q: Where did life on Earth come from?
A: God created life on Earth.
Q: Where did God come from?

Re:Not an answer to "Where did life come from?"

[XxtraLarGe]

likewise
A: God created life on Earth.
Q: Where did God come from?

This is like asking "What happened 1 second before the start of time".

If you think about it, neither existence ("Where did matter/energy come from?") nor non-existence make any sense. Can anybody truly imagine the universe as being completely void of matter and/or energy? I cannot reconcile either one of these positions, but I know that we do exist.

So to answer your question, God didn't come from anywhere. God is Alpha and Omega, meaning God has always existed, and will always exist. There, I've outed myself as a Christian, I can feel the karma burning already.

Re:Not an answer to "Where did life come from?"

[311Stylee]

Q: Where did life on Earth come from?
A: Life came from outer space.
Q: Where did life in outer space come from?

likewise
Q: Where did life on Earth come from?
A: God created life on Earth.
Q: Where did God come from?

The panspermia theory is intriging and genius for the same reason that the works of Copernicus/Galileo were. Yes, life might have begun on Earth, but it might also have begun someplace else. To assume that it began here is "earth-centric", just like the early christians were "earth-centric" in assuming that the Earth was the center of the universe.

Who cares where life originated? The important part is that it DID originate! Panspermia is just knocks us a rung lower on the "we are the center of everything" ladder.

red rain

[drwho]

First, thanks for quoting Peter Gabriel - that song was the first that came to my mind when I read (red) this story.

Second, my first guess is industrial pollution. India isn't very good at such things as industrial hygene (part of the reason why they can underprice Europe & N. America). But this, supposedly, has been disproved. I'd look again.

Unlike many people however. I think that panspermia is possible, perhaps even ikely. But that doesn't mean it happens a lot, and it doesn't mean I believe that panspermia happened with the Kerla Event. It's had to tell, because there doesn't seem to be any case of a known untainted sample. Still, there's a LOT of this Red Rain which has been collected, so perhaps by finding what is common to all these sample, and different than what's normally in Kerla rain, we can figure out what this stuff really is.

What puzzled me is that the rain fell over a number of months, was strong in its concentration (not just a little pink) and fell only in a limited area (Kerala's not even the largest state in India). If there was an upper atmosphere dispersal (exploding meteor), it may take some time for the debris to settle to earth. However, winds would tend to disperse it. The fact that it was concentrated would seem to point to a low-atmosphere dispersal (exploding meteor or something else). The only thing that account for both of these is multiple events in the low atmosphere. Such a thing doesn't often happen for meteors.

My personal believe is that this was a man-made event. If it is not an artifact of pollution, then in may be some sort of attempt at either weather control, biological transformation, or psychological manipulation. Weather control: you can seed rain with dust (though CO2 snow works better), but why use something so exotic? Biological transformation - kill crops, kill weeds, or fertilize crops. Or possibly kill pests, or animals. Psychological manipulation - damn, I am sure that many people would feel that red rain might be some sign of impending apocalpyse.

Or it could have been some practical jokers.

Re:red rain

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't there a major siesmic event in the area recently? Could that have opened a vent and released some kind of mineral dust heretofor undiscovered? Iron light - less filling but tastes great!

RBCs

[strangeintp]

Shaky science at best... After navigating to the PDF of the actual article, I was a little astounded at first too, until I noticed that they looked very much like red blood cells. Mammalian red blood cells do not have nuclei (i.e., no significant amount of DNA). AND... you would expect red blood cells to indicate quantities of iron. The authors need to do more definitive tests than just for DNA before I start latching on to the ET explanation. There have been well-documented cases of storms sucking up large quantities of matter (organic or otherwise, living or dead) and depositing it again somewhere else. Are there places in India that "bury" their dead by just shipping them off downriver or into the ocean? That seems to ring familiar, but I may be thinking of Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age". Or was there some event that occurred around June/July 2001 that killed off large numbers of mammals (to include humans)?

Re:Sorry but...

[thetaco82]

I read about this on digg days ago. Sorry, but it's true.

Yeah? What's your point? This happened five years ago...

Well of course

[iminplaya]

life was sseded from space. The planet...the solar system...the galaxy was seeded from space. Everything in the universe, including us, is just condensed gas and dust.

Peter Gabriel is vindicated!

[showmeyourscripts!]

Peter Gabriel prophecied this in his son _Red Rain_ from the album "So". Maybe He's in on it with the greys. Join the Church of Peter Gabriel and announce your allegiance to our coming extra-terrestrial overlords before it's too late!!!!

related story

[solferino]

related story

SCIENTISTS examining the first dust samples collected from a comet have found complex carbon molecules, supporting the theory that ingredients for life on Earth originated in space.

Re:In Soviet

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't promise I'll try to try, but I'll try to try to try.

Re:Sorry but...

[DCstewieG]

I read about this weeks ago on DamnInteresting.com

Sorry, but it's true

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=405

Re:In Soviet

[oliverthered]

Why not try to try to try to try some more?

Algae Bloom?

[redphive]

I have seen very very dark red algae blooms (red tide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_tide) in waters off of the British Columbia Coast. I am guessing that this isn't something that is limited to just the pacific north west.

Considering this is only happening in one area over a short period of time, I am willing to guess that what is actually falling is an algae bloom. Suppose for a minute that a funnel cloud, or water spout had pulled water containing a deep red algae bloom into the atmosphere, and was suspended for some time until the water was brought down as percipitation.

I believe the prime time for algae blooms is in the summer, and correct me if I am wrong Monsoon season is also summer... isn't this a more plausible explanation?

We have heard of stories of small fish or frogs being dropped in rain fall, it would make sense that this could happen with smaller creatures.

Re:Algae Bloom?

[311Stylee]

Your idea seems quite plausible, especially since the area of India where this was happening is right next to the ocean. However, if they were of algal origin, the particles would almost certainly contain DNA, which they mentioned was not found. What they really need to do is send some of the particles to a proteomics lab. Knowing the structure of any proteins found in the particles would allow us to compare the protein sequence to known DNA terrestrial sequences. This information would give a clear indication of terrestrial (or other) origin.

Re:Algae Bloom?

[redphive]

I don't recall where I found the information previously that lead me to post about algae, but I believe there are some algae species that do not have DNA and are more RNA based... or something like that... I started working off of the following:
Red Tide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_tide
Red Algae http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_algae
Dinoflagellates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinoflagellate

Any ways, seems much more plausible than ALIEN ATTACKERS FROM ALIEN WORLDS ;)

Similar to the brown snow in Colorado?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would also argue this is a local phenomenon. See USA Today Story on Colorado's brown snow.

Appearance of the liquid

[LucianoTsiros]

The liquid was examined by a somewhat strange machine, it's report says the liquid is "Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea"

Panspermia?

[serginho]

Ugh. Gross.

Or maybe this is intelligent design after all, sprinkling your seed all over one planet.

Algae?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if a storm (typhoon/huricane, something with a twister) picked up algae from the ocean's surface and dumped it over the vilages. Some algae are red when they bloom and float, rather unseemly, on the water's surface...?

s/k

I read both the articles, have this to point out

[vboulytchev]

Guys, I have forwarded these links to several friends. One actually an old coleague (sp) in Pakistan... His view was total disbelief and denial... just like my buddy here whos a devoted christian.... Have fun bringing those people on board..... and you know some people still think "theres no global warming" :) lol

Re:In Soviet

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, another attempt gives it YOU!

I bet L. Ron Hubbard Groupies applaud!

[aukxsona]

OMG! Scientology wins and Jesus takes a back seat!

Biological Warfare Test?

[garyr_h]

I was thinking this could be more of a 'test' the military did to see how terrorists/enemy states could attack their country... a red powder floating down similar to anthrax but visible and non-toxic would give them an ideal of what would happen...

How come only in one spot?

[tobycat]

If the red rain has an extraterrestrial origin, how can one explain that it only landed in India over a two month period. I'm no astronomer or physicist but that just doesn't seem right to me. How could something that was in orbit consistently fall down on the Earth in exactly the same region for a two month period. You've clearly go all sorts of variables in play that would make that outcome unlikely: the velocity & trajectory of the extraterrestrial mass, gravitational influence of the Earth and moon, weather, etc.

The cries of the nonbelievers are making good use of Achems Razor: "the simplest answer tends to be the correct answer". In this case, terrestrial causes would seem to fit that bill.

Why couldn't life start on earth?

[GISGEOLOGYGEEK]

What really annoys me about believers in panspermia is that the promoters won't admit that they are simply complicating the puzzle of how life originated on earth.

Why couldn't life start on earth ... The fact that we are here is pretty strong evidence.

Do these people have any idea just how huge space is and how unlikely it is that material from another established planetary system with life could have come to earth intact?

It's as rediculous as the Intelligent Design dumbasses ... dont understand how something happened, so lets transplant the problem somewhere else.

Tell me panspermia freaks ... how did life originate on the unknown distant worlds that supposedly seeded Earth?

You aren't the they I was refering to

[MarkusQ]

As the "they" you are referring to, I do NOT assume that this is from space. I simply stated that it should be tested before calling it bullshit. In fact, my first question implies the opposite - if it rained this way for 2 months, how could it have anything to do with an object from space?

I understand your description of "begging the question", but I don't think the original author's intent was of this meaning.

Uh, no, you weren't the "they" I was referring to. If I meant you I'd've written "he" or "LS" or "the grandparent. And while I don't claim to understand the original author's intent (nor even to know who you mean by that) I do claim to be an authority on who I was referring to by "they."

I suspect that either 1) we are reading things differently (which, given that English grammar permits a great deal of ambiguity, is not surprising). or 2) one or both of us are drunk and studying for philosophy finals, these being the two main causes for this sort of discussion. Since I neither of us are attempting to force the other to look at a Venn diagram that will make everything clear, I suspect the former is the case.

--MarkusQ

Re:You aren't the they I was refering to

[LS]

Respectfully, I think you are drunk. To quote you directly, you say "He's using it correctly". The only "He" you could be referring to is the person that replied to my post. If you believe that "He's" using it correctly, then you believe that I am begging the question. Sorry - this is as close to a Venn diagram as you're going to see.

LS

Ancient story, it happened years ago

[LesFerg]

see http://www.rense.com/general69/microbe.htm

The Chtorr are here :(

[Danathar]

Oh well....I guess we're bound to end up chirping like birds and growing fur all over.

http://www.chtorr.com/

I for one...

[stigmato]

welcome our extremophile overlords!

There is another explination

[Anonymous Coward]

The Bible describes several times in Revelation about God pouring blood down on the earth. While this is not yet in the proportions that are mentioned, don't be surprised if this happens again elsewhere. 50 tons if not exactly a small amount of biological matter. If it were bats - that is a lot of bat blood and where is the rest of the bats and the dna. If it were a meteor, where is the dust fragments? or was the entire thing made up of organic matter?
It was predicted, and now we are seeing it - draw yur own conclusions.

Original was 25 minutes long...

[RedBear]

"if you're on mushrooms, the hour long warp scene makes total sense" ...and if you're not on mushrooms, it's only 5 minutes long!

Haha, funny, but actually the original that was shown in theaters was 25 minutes long if I'm remembering correctly. Apparently it was a big hit with the LSD/marijuana crowd at the time. I can't imagine watching 25 minutes of that stuff without drugs.

Specs?

[zopf]

Has he run IR/NMR spectroscopy on the sample? Has he done GC/MS analysis? Combustion analysis? Does anyone have links to these results?

Holy Charles Fort !

[Evil Pete]

If you've never read any of Fort I'd recommend it. He was actually a skeptical person but loved to tease the reader by suggesting multiple wild contradictory ideas each with supporting evidence (note particularly "The Book of the Damned"). His attitude was that researchers are often led too much by theory and prejudice and not enough by evidence, so he liked to dismantle scientific prejudices. Clever guy. However, back to the topic. Fort scoured various newspaper and journal reports and often found reports of falls not just of 'blood' but 'rotting meat'. The reports are not new. Whether they are actually blood etc is another matter. But the correct approach should be: gather the evidence properly and test it ... not jump to wild-assed conclusions one way or the other.

Dragonriders Mount Up !

[WoodieR]

Thread is falling ...

The gap in your logic:

[MarkusQ]

Here's the gap in your logic; you write:

If you believe that "He's" using it correctly, then you believe that I am begging the question.

But this is a non sequitur; he made a statement about another statement ("that begs the question"), not about a person. I responded to his post (not yours). The question begging statement may have occurred in your post, but was derived from the article*. The "they" I was referring to were the originators of this particular example of faulty reasoning, not the people (such as yourself) who incidentally quoted, alluded to, or derived things from it.

--MarkusQ

* To see this quite clearly, consider the fact that without the circular reasoning there would be nothing newsworthy about the story. Lots of people have bio-goo in jars (take my fridge for example) but you don't see stories about them making /.'s front page. Yet. Likewise, lots of people have stuff that has clearly fallen from space. The only reason that this story made the front page was that they assumed that the stuff in their jar fell from space and thus was proof that stuff like that falls from space.

Re:The gap in your logic:

[LS]

OK, I was really tired. You may have been drunk, but it did not seem to affect your logic skills.

LS

Surely...

[barnzi]

...that should read "Aliens Reign over India."

What I find really depressing

[Flying pig]

I have an extensive education in theology. I think I have a reasonable understanding of the mythologies of the Near East. I know something of the evolution of Judaism. I know Church history reasonably well. I make a harmless posting about a parallel between Near Eastern mythologies and an event being studied by scientists, and the paradoxical light it sheds on things like Intelligent Design - without mocking ID. And I get modded flamebait. Who are the mods nowadays, and when can the DOD develop the bunker buster to zap them in their parents' basements?

rain washing bacteria off ufo's

[ldcroberts]

I guess a UFO could be hovering in the sky, covered in bacteria from it's own planet, and get rained on.