Alien life found?


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http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20039658-501465.html

In what's sure to rekindle the debate over the question of life beyond Earth, a scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center says he has fossil evidence of bacterial life inside of a rare class of meteorites .

Writing in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology, Richard B. Hoover argues that an examination of a collection of 9 meteorites - called CI1 carbonaceous meteorites - contain "indigenous fossils" of bacterial life.

"The complex filaments found embedded in the CI1 carbonaceous meteorites represent the remains of indigenous microfossils of cyanobacteria, " according to Hoover. That matter-of-fact sentence also underscores the shout-out-loud implication that the detection of fossils of cyanobacteria in the CI1 meteorites raises the possibility of life on comets. And Hoover does not shy away from offering that very conclusion.

Skeptics will doubtless weigh in soon with questions. Still, Hoover's proposition may have stirred more controversy several years ago. More recently, though, some scientists have suggested that meteors and comets slamming into the Earth brought with them the very integuments of life, including water and a host of complex organic chemicals. If he's right, Hoover may have evidence to support that theory. He argues that the complex filaments he found embedded in the meteors are micro-fossils of extraterrestrial life forms that existed on the meteorites a long time ago prior to the meteorites' entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

"This finding has direct implications to the distribution of life in the Cosmos and the possibility of microbial life on in liquid water regimes of cometary nuclei as the travel within the orbit of Mars and in icy moons with liquid water oceans such as Europa and Enceladus," he writes.

another source...

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/03/05/exclusive-nasa-scientists-claims-evidence-alien-life-meteorite/

We are not alone in the universe -- and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought.

That's the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology.

Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA?s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites -- only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth.

Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites, the remains of living organisms from their parent bodies -- comets, moons and other astral bodies. By extension, the findings suggest we are not alone in the universe, he said.

?I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,? Hoover told FoxNews.com. ?This field of study has just barely been touched -- because quite frankly, a great many scientist would say that this is impossible.?

The man himself

http://spie.org/x17397.xml

His paper

http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html

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I think I'm more shocked about Foxnews covering something that could put the 'god put us here on earth' debate in the shade than the actual possibility of aliens.

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I think I'm more shocked about Foxnews covering something that could put the 'god put us here on earth' debate in the shade than the actual possibility of aliens.

You're not aware that the National Geographic and National Geographic Wild channels are Fox Cable Group channels?

Also, contrary to obvious presumption Fox News carries quite a few science stories. Most of them are very good or straight feeds from AP etc, while others are eyerollers - but no more than some of the drek I've seen on CNN or the newspaper sites.

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so, what will be considered confirmation that this is a preserved lifeform of extra-terrestrial origin? and sure, panspermia is quite a likely possibility. why wouldn't it be? common sense.

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ok how are they so sure that it want contaminated by earth's own life? the article doesn't indicate any :/ does the supposedly ET life have RNA?

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ok found it.

More specifically, Hoover claims to have discovered traces of filaments and remnants of algae-like organisms called cyanobacteria. Another find was similar to a bacterium called Titanospirillum velox. They were very Earth-like and unremarkable save for one important difference: They lacked nitrogen.

This caveat is important, as the lack of nitrogen indicates the samples are "the remains of extraterrestrial life forms that grew on the parent bodies of the meteorites when liquid water was present, long before the meteorites entered the Earth's atmosphere," he said.

http://gizmodo.com/#!5777799/did-dr-richard-b-hoover-just-discover-alien-life

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I think I'm more shocked about Foxnews covering something that could put the 'god put us here on earth' debate in the shade than the actual possibility of aliens.

When Rupert finds out he will have this removed. Him owning the daily is also the reason I will recommend to anyone not to subscribe to that app.

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Like I said before, I'm very skeptical, but, personally, I do believe that we are starting to discover the first signs of extraterestrial life. Much analysis needs to be done, but this isn't the first time we have found fossilized microbes in a meteorite. Anyone here old enough to remember Bill Clinton annoucing the discoveries of ALH 84001? Unfortunately even that is still debated today.

Still, I think we're in for a big shock, as I believe life is more abundant in this universe than we believe. It might not be Mr. Spock or the Klingons, but I do believe we will soon find an abundance of microbial life as we start to really explore our solar system and beyond.

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Like I said before, I'm very skeptical, but, personally, I do believe that we are starting to discover the first signs of extraterestrial life. Much analysis needs to be done, but this isn't the first time we have found fossilized microbes in a meteorite. Anyone here old enough to remember Bill Clinton annoucing the discoveries of ALH 84001? Unfortunately even that is still debated today.

Still, I think we're in for a big shock, as I believe life is more abundant in this universe than we believe. It might not be Mr. Spock or the Klingons, but I do believe we will soon find an abundance of microbial life as we start to really explore our solar system and beyond.

This.

I think it's becoming more so of common sense that life exists outside our world. If you don't believe so than you're crazy. I mean they only found proof of water on Mars, which pretty much means life can form there. :p Though I haven't done enough research to support a lot of arguing, I just believe there is life, and it seems most people believe in it too, just the older folk (the religious fanatics) seem to argue the most.

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I'll just leave this here:

Did scientists discover bacteria in meteorites?

No.

No, no, no. No no no no no no no no.

No, no.

No.

Fox News broke the story, which ought to make one immediately suspicious ? it's not an organization noted for scientific acumen. But even worse, the paper claiming the discovery of bacteria fossils in carbonaceous chondrites was published in ? the Journal of Cosmology. I've mentioned Cosmology before ? it isn't a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth. It doesn't exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s, and publishes lots of empty noise with no substantial editorial restraint. For a while, it seemed to be entirely the domain of a crackpot named Rhawn Joseph who called himself the emeritus professor of something mysteriously called the Brain Research Laboratory, based in the general neighborhood of Northern California (seriously, that was the address: "Northern California"), and self-published all of his pseudo-scientific "publications" on this web site.

It is not an auspicious beginning. Finding credible evidence of extraterrestrial microbes is the kind of thing you'd expect to see published in Science or Nature, but the fact that it found a home on a fringe website that pretends to be a legitimate science journal ought to set off alarms right there.

But could it be that by some clumsy accident of the author, a fabulously insightful, meticulously researched paper could have fallen into the hands of single-minded lunatics who rushed it into 'print'? Sure. And David Icke might someday publish the working plans for a perpetual motion machine in his lizardoid-infested newsletter. We've actually got to look at the claims and not dismiss them because of their location.

So let's look at the paper, Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites: Implications to Life on Comets, Europa, and Enceladus. I think that link will work; I'm not certain, because the "Journal of Cosmology" seems to randomly redirect links to its site to whatever article the editors think is hot right now, and while the article title is given a link on the page, it's to an Amazon page that's flogging a $94 book by the author. Who needs a DOI when you've got a book to sell?

Reading the text, my impression is one of excessive padding. It's a dump of miscellaneous facts about carbonaceous chondrites, not well-honed arguments edited to promote concision or cogency. The figures are annoying; when you skim through them, several will jump out at you as very provocative and looking an awful lot like real bacteria, but then without exception they all turn out to be photos of terrestrial organisms thrown in for reference. The extraterrestrial 'bacteria' all look like random mineral squiggles and bumps on a field full of random squiggles and bumps, and apparently, the authors thought some particular squiggle looked sort of like some photo of a bug. This isn't science, it's pareidolia. They might as well be analyzing Martian satellite photos for pictures that sorta kinda look like artifacts.

The data consists almost entirely of SEM photos of odd globules and filaments on the complex surfaces of crumbled up meteorites, with interspersed SEMs of miscellaneous real bacteria taken from various sources ? they seem to be proud of having analyzed flakes of mummy skin and hair from frozen mammoths, but I couldn't see the point at all ? do they have cause to think the substrate of a chondrite might have some correspondence to a Siberian Pleistocene mammoth guard hair? I'd be more impressed if they'd surveyed the population of weird little lumps in their rocks and found the kind of consistent morphology in a subset that you'd find in a population of bacteria. Instead, it's a wild collection of one-offs.

There is one other kind of datum in the article: they also analyzed the mineral content of the 'bacteria', and report detailed breakdowns of the constitution of the blobs: there's lots of carbon, magnesium, silicon, and sulfur in there, and virtually no nitrogen. The profiles don't look anything like what you'd expect from organic life on Earth, but then, these are supposedly fossilized specimens from chondrites that congealed out of the gases of the solar nebula billions of years ago. Why would you expect any kind of correspondence?

The extraterrestrial 'bacteria' photos are a pain to browse through, as well, because they are published at a range of different magnifications, and even when they are directly comparing an SEM of one to an SEM of a real bacterium, they can't be bothered to put them at the same scale. Peering at them and mentally tweaking the size, though, one surprising result is that all of their boojums are relatively huge ? these would be big critters, more similar in size to eukaryotic cells than E. coli. And all of them preserved so well, not crushed into a smear of carbon, not ruptured and evaporated away, all just sitting there, posing, like a few billion years in a vacuum was a day in the park. Who knew that milling about in a comet for the lifetime of a solar system was such a great preservative?

I'm looking forward to the publication next year of the discovery of an extraterrestrial rabbit in a meteor. While they're at it, they might as well throw in a bigfoot print on the surface and chupacabra coprolite from space. All will be about as convincing as this story.

While they're at it, maybe they should try publishing it in a journal with some reputation for rigorous peer review and expectation that the data will meet certain minimal standards of evidence and professionalism.

Otherwise, this work is garbage. I'm surprised anyone is granting it any credibility at all.

Source: Scienceblogs.com

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interesting point as always from guru...this thing was found on Earth, so chances are we're seeing very old microbes from Earth. there's no way to tell. only way will be to find life on other worlds in-situ, and yes, i've been using that word too often lately. problem is, to find life on other bodies we have to go there first. but yes, it's quite logical to assume there's ample life in the universe, including some more evolved than us, unless by some odd fluke we happen to be the first technological species to evolve. that thought alone makes me want to lose all will to survive.

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First off, Fox News did NOT break the story - it went viral as soon as Mr. Hoover released it.

Second: Mr. Hoover is in a load of trouble. He violated NASA policy by not going through channels or file the required paperwork before releasing the paper. Not only that, but he has represented himself as having a PhD for some time but he doesn't have one.

NASA Watch story....

And....

NASA is a scientific and technical agency committed to a culture of openness with the media and public. While we value the free exchange of ideas, data, and information as part of scientific and technical inquiry, NASA cannot stand behind or support a scientific claim unless it has been peer-reviewed or thoroughly examined by other qualified experts. This paper was submitted in 2007 to the International Journal of Astrobiology. However, the peer review process was not completed for that submission. NASA also was unaware of the recent submission of the paper to the Journal of Cosmology or of the paper's subsequent publication. Additional questions should be directed to the author of the paper.

Dr. Paul Hertz, chief scientist of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington

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Big deal. Show me a giant wormlike creature bursting out of someone's chest and then I'll be surprised. Until then, I could just sneeze into a tissue and you'd find the same kind of crap floating around. ;)

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I think that our greatest chances of finding any evidence at all of extraterrestrial life, it'll be from one of our space probes visiting Mars, Europa, etc. Not a meteorite found on Earth.

If that happens, that is pretty much proof positive right there, as terrestrial contamination can be all but ruled out. Even if it piggy backed on our probes, I think scientists would be able to determine that it did, although I think that would defeat the purpose of seeking out alien life. I would imagine probes are kept in sterile environments.

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they do their best to keep them uncontaminated but you never know. it has been pointed out that by the time we send people to Mars we may encounter organisms that have thrived there having arrived on one of the probes. will make terraforming easier...

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Any fossilized bacteria on a meterorite will almost certainly be alien, but the problem in assigning that status to filaments like this guy did is that such structures can form inorganically, and many look just like bacteria.

What we do know for a fact is that the precursor organic compounds necessary for life do exist in carbonaceous meteorites and comets. It's even probable that amino acids form in space. That's just one short hop from proteins.

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well, i think most people in this thread will agree that life on other worlds and even in open space is more than just a possibility.

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