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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.
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.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
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?
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.