Alien fossil in meteorite

chin_grin

Bambi wrote: »

Who the f**k brought god into the space wurums thread? :mad:

Protestants. :pac:

Wibbs

Wibbs wrote: »

Actually it kinda does require your belief. Or at least faith in those who fully understand the concept and maths of the big bang to translate it into something understandable to the rest of us. Even there it has a fair few holes in it(dark matter/energy, inflation). As a theory better than us all fluting about on the back of a giant turtle, yep it's defo a far better idea

Yes but at least in this case you can study the maths for yourself if you want to dedicate the time to it. It's out there for anybody to prove to themselves.

professore

ScienceNerd wrote: »

Here's the website for the Journal of Cosmology

Not the most impressive...

On the contrary, they haven't spent fortunes on some Morketing types to knock up a flash bang site.

professore

Sonics2k wrote: »

I'm still genuinely amazed people truly believe Earth is the only planet with life forms on it.

No I don't really think U.F.O.'s have come here, but I do believe there is more than just Earth with sentient life forms.

Belief is not a scientific concept. There could be life elsewhere other than Earth, but no-one has to date produced strong enough evidence to support it.

Cú Giobach

bluewolf wrote: »

big bang = actual scientific theory. Anyone who is tempted to reply "only a theory", gtfo and look up what "scientific theory" means, because you don't know. Gravity is also "only a theory".
Please also remember that scientific theories do not ever get "proven"..

Gravity is a fact. The explanation how gravity works (ie what it is) is the scientific theory of gravity.
The big bang theory only explains the result of the big bang not the "bang" itself, that we don't know, can't explain and are not sure even happened (yet?).

<sorry , pedanticism over>

Riddle101

Oh, Great another religous thread. Hadn't seen one of them in a while:mad:

Tar.Aldarion

There are people on the christianity forum, at least one creationist type person, that said they wouldn't believe in god if there was ever life found outside earth. Worms done gothcha :pac:

Cú Giobach

Cú Giobach wrote: »

Gravity is a fact. The explanation how gravity works (ie what it is) is the scientific theory of gravity.
The big bang theory only explains the result of the big bang not the "bang" itself, that we don't know, can't explain and are not sure even happened (yet?).

Yeah, gravity is a fact and a theory. I just wanted to emphasise that scientific theory doesn't mean "this idea I had once" and that they don't get "proven".

I haven't read up on it in a while but last I knew they had it down to the few few microseconds and before that there's a singularity.

<sorry , pedanticism over>

Pedantry

Rabble Rabble

Apparantly this was debunked. The site it is on is a crank site as it happens.

ScumLord

Wibbs wrote: »

I'd agree with that. The thing is not matter what we may posit, we're basing it all on an example of one. Just one. This planet. Life might be widespread, but equally it may be one of the very rarest events in the evolution of the universe. Intelligent and technological life? It may only occur once in the lifetime of a galaxy/universe.

Although looking at the history of earth once life gets a foot hold at all it's near impossible to erase. Life has survived complete and total ice cover of the planet which I found incredible.

Humans where a complete fluke though, right animal in the right place at the right time. Even with the expanse of space we're talking about a rare occurrence on top of a few flukes to come up with an intelligent species like us. I do think intelligence seems to be a sought after trait with life so maybe it is inevitable.

RichieC

Wibbs wrote: »

Actually it kinda does require your belief. Or at least faith in those who fully understand the concept and maths of the big bang to translate it into something understandable to the rest of us. Even there it has a fair few holes in it(dark matter/energy, inflation). As a theory better than us all fluting about on the back of a giant turtle, yep it's defo a far better idea

I meant that guy specifically, and the rest of the anti science Christ types that have infected our species.

Pompey Magnus

Respected biologist PZ Myers gives his thoughts on the claim:

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.

Link

kierank01

Reminds me of this X-Files episode

Cú Giobach

bluewolf wrote: »

Yeah, gravity is a fact and a theory. I just wanted to emphasise that scientific theory doesn't mean "this idea I had once" and that they don't get "proven"
I haven't read up on it in a while but last I knew they had it down to the few few microseconds and before that there's a singularity.
Pedantry

Yea, Have had many a similar discussion usually regarding The Therory of Evolution.
What I mean about The Big Bang is, we indeed do have it right down to nanoseconds after it started, but the moment of initiation is still beyond us.

Also pedanticism.

ScumLord

Cú Giobach wrote: »

Yea, Have had many a similar discussion usually regarding The Therory of Evolution.
What I mean about The Big Bang is, we indeed do have it right down to nanoseconds after it started, but the moment of initiation is still beyond us.

Also pedanticism.

I'm still unconvinced about the big bang, I don't think we've seen enough of the universe to know anything and listening to anyone explain it makes it sound even more unlikely. I just have to trust the people that have studied it and know what they're talking about. Still sounds ridiculous.

Cú Giobach

ScumLord wrote: »

I'm still unconvinced about the big bang, I don't think we've seen enough of the universe to know anything and listening to anyone explain it makes it sound even more unlikely. I just have to trust the people that have studied it and know what they're talking about. Still sounds ridiculous.

Practically everything that happens on a quantum level seems ridiculous from our macroscopic viewpoint, but it doesn't mean these things don't happen.

ScumLord

ScumLord wrote: »

I'm still unconvinced about the big bang, I don't think we've seen enough of the universe to know anything and listening to anyone explain it makes it sound even more unlikely. I just have to trust the people that have studied it and know what they're talking about. Still sounds ridiculous.

So learn the maths & physics and study it yourself if you aren't convinced

"I don't know anything about it so I don't think anyone else can either" is a tad weak

ScumLord

bluewolf wrote: »

So learn the maths & physics and study it yourself if you aren't convinced

"I don't know anything about it so I don't think anyone else can either" is a tad weak

That's not what I said Mr jump to conclusions. I said I trust the scientists that came up with it but it's completely beyond me. Any explanations I've heard regarding "dark" matter needs an explanation that includes "dark" energy and leads to "dark" flow. It's full of little things that depend on theories that are "dark".

I bow down to their superior intellect it just wouldn't surprise me at all if tomorrow they turned around and said everything we thought we knew was wrong.

squod

Pompey Magnus wrote: »

Respected biologist PZ Myers gives his thoughts on the claim:



Link

I don't think he's thought this one through.

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?

Meteorites generally come from somewhere, like the lunar meteorites we find on earth that came from the moon millions of years ago. So the rocks with fossils in them were probably ejected from a planet. I don't think the ''scientist'' is suggesting the fossilized creatures evolved/grew up in space.

BTW we're still finding traces of water in ejected debris from the moon. The moon is of course in the vacuum of space.

tallaghtmick

but dont you people believe in god:pac:........they see me trollin they hatin

Cú Giobach

tallaghtmick wrote: »

but dont you people believe in god:pac:........they see me trollin they hatin

Which one? :pac:

Celly Smunt

i'm still not overly convinced that life must have water to support it,who's to say that life on another planet isn't supported by c02 for example,just because it can't live here doesn't mean it can't thrive elsewhere in the universe

spider guardian

if the link in the OP was even remotely true you'd think there'd be a bigger fuss in the media. or could our lizard overlords be suppressing the truth?

tallaghtmick

Cú Giobach wrote: »

Which one? :pac:

touche:pac: clearly i was talking about jebus