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No, Life Has Not Been Found In a Meteorite
The Bad Astronomer writes "News is going around the web that a scientist in the UK has found life (in the form of microscopic diatoms) in a meteorite, and has even published a paper about it. However, there are a lot of reasons to strongly doubt the claim. While the diatoms appear to be real, they are certainly from Earth. The meteorite itself, on the other hand, does not appear to be real. Many of the basic scientific steps and claims made in the paper are very shaky. Also, the scientist making the claim, N. C. Wickramasinghe, has made many fringe claims like this in the past with little or no evidence (such as the flu and SARS being viruses from space). To top it off, the website that published the paper, the Journal of Cosmology, has an interesting history of publishing fringe claims unsupported by strong evidence. All in all, this claim of life in a space rock is at best highly doubtful, and in reality almost certainly not true."
Please, it's all I've still got left to believe in at this point!!!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
It's called the God particle, you insensitive clod!
You know, at the rate those questioning this discovery are going, they'll next demand peer review.
If I wanted to be questioned by a bunch of nobility appointed by the Queen, I'd live in England. Or maybe Wales.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's actually called the God-damned particle, you insensitive physicist!
John
Maybe the rock is alive, and you know, one with the universe? And maybe this world is only a dream (or nightmare) paid for by the people and being robbed by the corporate fat cats? We're really in the Matrix dude, and HSBC is in charge.
All in all, this claim of life in a space rock is at best highly doubtful, and in reality almost certainly not true.
But it's exciting, and isn't that what really matters?
No life has not been found in a meteorite!!! What's that? There's a comma? Shit.
I saw it on the internet.....
Evidence of biological processes was found in martian meteorite ALH 84001 in 1996. Many biologists have questioned the claim (making irrelevant statements like "[Earth] bacteria aren't that small"), but the features found can still not be explained by non-biological processes.
The pattern is similar to the response to the labeled-release experiment on Viking I in 1976: "It doesn't work like life on Earth, so it must not be life". My fellow scientists are often not as open-minded as they would like to believe.
I mean, it must be pretty slow if you have to put as one of your news articles that another source mistakenly broadcast something as news when it really wasn't.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I refute the claims by Wickramasinghe due to the fact that his name is an anagram for Kiwi Ashcan Germ.
Q.E.D.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Did you read the paper? Do you know who Wikramasinghe or even who Fred Hoyle is. Have you looked at their past publications? But I have. And I have been following that group's study of exobiology for over 25 years. I do not agree with many of their hypothesis, but it is unfortunate that someone like you who cannot read and comment on scientific publications thought it best to comment about the author's personality and more. Indeed you are an 'anonymous coward'.
The top had been unscrewed from the inside and it was empty by the time scientists found it.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Have gnu, will travel.
This sounds like the guy who was supporting Fred Hoyle's claims back in the day.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_ice_(aircraft)
There have been too many sloppy science news the last decades.
Please, recall when president Clinton was fooled into saying they had found a rock from Mars, on Earth!!! A few days ago, there was another rock from Mars, also found on Earth. The arguments why these terrestrial rocks were from Mars is sadly weak.
Another Clintonian Mars or even a Piltdown Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man) is what we all should dread.
Pushing the barrier between bad towards dishonest science is NOT good at all.
If we can once again ascertain that NO extraterrestrial life has been found, the better.
Seriously. The guy's name is N. C. Wickramasinghe!... which is fairly common Indian surname.
That was way funnier in my head. Is this the weed thread? Uh, hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Pff. Whatever.
Well, there's one thing that this supposedly shifty Indian has got on you: they put their name to what they wrote.
(Yes, I know I'm being a hypocrite.)
"Also, the scientist making the claim, N. C. Wickramasinghe, has made many fringe claims like this in the past with little or no evidence (such as the flu and SARS being viruses from space). To top it off, the website that published the paper, the Journal of Cosmology, has an interesting history of publishing fringe claims unsupported by strong evidence."
Pure Ad Hominem attack. No content here. Invalid content is invalid innately regardless of source, similarly valid content is valid regardless of source. It doesn't matter if the guy stands by the subway station carrying a sign that says magical leprechauns whisper in his ear it has no impact on the validity of his statements. Unless of course you are considering the validity of his testimony as evidence but if you consider the testimony of anyone as evidence you have other problems in your critical analysis.
"While the diatoms appear to be real, they are certainly from Earth. The meteorite itself, on the other hand, does not appear to be real. Many of the basic scientific steps and claims made in the paper are very shaky."
That may or may not be true. One would actually have to read the article to determine if there is substance provided for these assertions and who is going to do that?
No question those are diatoms. More specifically, most are pennate ones (Order Pennales), although there is a picture of a filamentous Centrales diatom in the appendix. But why the hell they would base the in-situ interpretation on an elemental analysis rather than identifying the species present and seeing if "coincidentally" they happened to be the same species as ones found in the local freshwater lakes and streams is a bit of a mystery.
The paper isn't exactly rigorous. For one thing they say diatoms date back to the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary. No, they date back to the Jurassic Period -- considerably earlier. Furthermore they attribute them to marine environments. No, they are found in marine and freshwater environments. They are also commonly observed as thin crusts on rocks in moist environments (i.e. it doesn't have to be standing or flowing water, just wet). "Hydrated silicon dioxide polymer"? Well, I suppose. But most people who actually work on them call it opaline silica (which is indeed the same thing, it's just weird terminology to use). I don't know what they mean by "fossilized". Diatoms don't have to "fossilize" in the sense of any mineralization or alteration being necessary. They're already opaline silica. All that has to happen for them to preserve for the long term is not dissolve away, and silica is already pretty low solubility, essentially glass. Diatoms are generally quite durable structures.
Not much of a peer review, that's for sure. It's pretty obvious this is almost certainly modern contamination. They don't provide a speck of useful information showing that it's not. A bunch of EDX chemical analyses merely confirm the composition. So what? It would have been a lot more useful to make a petrographic thin section and figure out the relationship of the diatoms to the mineral grains in the rock.
This is an extraordinary claim, but the case is extraordinarily weak.
So the Wildfire alert has been cancelled then.
The person who coined the "God particle" meme was an insensitive journal publisher. On the other hand, the nickname was kind of supported by a Nobel-winning insensitive physicist named Leon Lederman, apparently...
Wickramasinghe - Sinhalese (from Sri Lanka)
Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Wickramasinghe
He dosen't seem like a hack scientist by a long shot. But I've got to admit that his views on evolution are rather unconventional.
They do what they do best, i.e. bullshitting and trying to look legitimate
Bigot, heal thyself.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
He's Sri Lankan.
I believe you need to go back and reread that particular fable. The Boy who Cried Wolf eventually was ignored by everyone else -- and then, when a real wolf came along, they ignored his warning.
The story is, of course, a warning against habitual lying for attention. But it can also be viewed as a cautionary tale against the easy ad-hominem dismissal.
Stop wasting your mental effort trying to "believe" in things. Learn to find and understand evidence and either challenge it's validity (in which case, present contrasting evidence) or accept it's veracity.
If you do not enjoy the idea of your inevitable death and permanent cessation of existence, then feel free to contribute to an alternative reality either by getting involved in aging/ longeivity research. Or find a counter-example of a lifeform that doesn't individually age and die, and we'll study it's differences to us. Or take an end trip around the whole question by learning how to duplicate "consciousness" (whatever that means) into computer hardware and software (or even wetware) so that the inevitable senescence of the human body no-longer means the end of the consciousness (whatever that means) that lives in those several kilogrammes of watery fat.
Enjoy, and have a nice(-r) day!
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Wickramasinghe was a perfectly respectable (junior) scientist until the mid-late 1970s, when he hooked up with the (senior and fully respectable) Fred Hoyle. The two seem to have then got into a mutually-reinforcing cycle of agreeing with each others theories and not worrying about other people's opinions. In short, they became kooks.
They're kooks. Hoyle is dead now, long gone, but Wickramasinghe is still around.
Unlike most kooks, he does know what he needs to do to perform useful, respectable work - but he doesn't do it. No ad homenium necessary - he does that to himself by publishing this sort of incredibly sloppy work.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"