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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.
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.
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?
I meta-moderate because I care.
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.
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.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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
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.
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.
Task Mangler
Common, at least try to try.
In Soviet Russia aliens reign over you!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
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.
return 0; }
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.
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?
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
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.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o