So, apparently NASA is saying that they've found the fossil evidence of alien life in a meteorite.
You can read the article here.
So, upon realizing what I was reading, my immediate reaction was a sort of weird, physical thing where my body went cold and I felt sort of nauseous. You get this, right? I mean, these findings don't just suggest, but they are fairly significant evidence - there is something else out there. Even single-celled warbly things are something. Our planet is completely covered in single-celled warbly things, so it makes sense that there are chunks of Earth flying through space with bits of amoeba and flagellates embedded somewhere in the rock.
Now, of course you sort of have to believe in fossils to buy the evidence, and given the current state of things, it seems more likely that someone will cut this guy's funding and/ or burn down his home and office rather than suggest that fossil evidence means anything, but I tend to be completely amazed that scientists (the people who spent their lives dedicated to figuring this stuff out, and not you - the person who saw this thing once on the Discovery Channel), are going to go ahead and put their names in with this review.
Completely amazing.
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4 comments:
Yeah, or maybe...
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/did_scientists_discover_bacter.php
Sorry to be a downer...
Bwah ha ha ha!
Oh, man. That is too funny. I was wondering why the news wasn't basically totally freaking the heck out.
You know, I'm going to get on a soapbox for a minute-
While this site does look a little loopy - I actually work for an office that is trying to pull faculty into 2002 and encourage them to quit thinking that a journal must be in print to be a "real" journal. I almost dismissed THIS guy because his beef was that these guys don't have a "print" journal, which, to my ears, makes hims ound like an old crank who can't work his email.
Oh yeah, I don't want to claim that print has any primacy when it comes to information, but a breakthrough of this magnitude would be all over the place.
I'm still hopeful, though!
Sorry to jump on the downer boat, but here's a report on the view from NASA:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-scientists-skeptical-meteorite-alien-life.html
However, I did just want to voice support for the online publication point - that alone is certainly no reason to discredit a journal! (And it's the future.)
Not being a cosmologist or hearing of the journal before, the real warning sign for me was the optimism and assent from no-names once the supposed "commentaries" started appearing:
http://journalofcosmology.com/Life101.html
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