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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.
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
Common sense is not so common
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.
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.
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.
No link to the New Scientist, but here's the paper written to support the original hypothesis:
link
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
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.
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!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
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
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.
of course, biting monkeys is not to everyone's taste - Konrad Lorenz
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.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.