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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.
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
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
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; }
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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