'Alien Bugs' Discovered In Earth's Atmosphere

http://news.sky.com/story/1143906/alien-bugs-discovered-in-earths-atmosphere

by corford • 13 years ago

23 13 13 years ago

news.sky.com

moron4hire• 13 years ago

Hell of a lot of absolute declarations ya got thar, Professor Wainwright.

swamp40• 13 years ago

Well they certainly look cool, but a DNA analysis might be nice...

r721• 13 years ago

The findings are to be published in the Journal of Cosmology.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Journal_of_Cosmology

pharrington• 13 years ago

I think http://journalofcosmology.com/ itself is better at telling you how ridiculous the Journal of Cosmology is.

dan-g• 13 years ago

The amazing thing is that Wikipedia says it was founded in 2009. Yet their website looks like it's straight out of ... 1996?

eloff3• 13 years ago

Bullshit. Contamination (human error) seems far more likely than extra-terrestrial origins. The best comment from that page:

WHAT ARE THE MACROMOLECULAR COMPOSITION & THEIR GENETIC MATERIALS OF THE SUPPOSEDLY EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL MICRO-ORGANISMS?

Are the 'ET organism' genetic materials also based a polymer of nucleotides (like those on earth), whereby each nucleotide composed of one of the 4 nucleobase (with base adenine, thymine, guanine or cytosine), a 5-carbon sugar (either ribose or 2-deoxyribose) & one or more phosphate groups. DNA profiles are made up of various combinations of the 4 forms (polymers) of nucleotides.

For earth organisms (i.e. viruses, microorganisms, plants, animals), each codon (comprises of 3 nucleobase) code one of the specific 20 amino-acids (AA) of living organisms. A chain of codon in DNA would therefore specify UNIQUE AA chain – i.e. PROTEIN (like protein like enzymes, hormone, co-factors, etc), hence its unique form & function.

Although if Earth life originated from the same extra-terrestrial source, this wouldn't be able to rule out that scenario.

vixen99• 13 years ago

Is the opposite of a 'far more' likely possibility, 'bullshit'? A bit harsh unless you can offer a critique of their methods.

eloff3• 13 years ago

No, but I can still call bullshit like a poker player against someone claiming to have a royal flush. He might really have it, but I know the odds are heavily in my favor. This claim is made too strongly and too soon (maybe that's the fault of the media and not the scientists involved.) It is very hard to prevent contamination, something which has confounded the best and brightest at NASA time and again. I also know that when people say it's impossible for particles of that size to get up to that altitude, they are making a lot of assumptions about a very complex system. It's very likely that the correct explanation is human error, either in decontamination or in flawed assumptions.

JonSkeptic• 13 years ago

"Our conclusion then is that life is continually arriving to Earth from space, life is not restricted to this planet and it almost certainly did not originate here."
"If life does continue to arrive from space then we have to completely change our view of biology and evolution," Prof Wainwright added. "New textbooks will have to be written."

I think that really sums it up nicely.

justin_vanw• 13 years ago

Oh come on, what a lot of crap.

So our understanding of how tiny particles move in the upper atmosphere is so perfect that it's more likely we would find alien bugs than be wrong about how particles move up there?

I mean, we have a pretty good understanding of the millions of miles of vacuum separating us from any other world. It might be just a little harder for bug parts to escape the gravity well of another planet, travel through space, and then float around in our upper atmosphere than it would be for us to be slightly less than perfect in our understanding of how high the wind can blow little flakes of dust. In fact, assuming these aren't bugs that live in the vacuum of space, wouldn't they have had to pass through the upper atmosphere of wherever they came from before they could have then jumped to be floating around in space, so they could get here?

I will now mock this in the form of a Holmes mystery:

"So how did the Murder happen, Sherlock?"

"Clearly the butler could not have used the car, as we know it did not have enough gas to make it to where the body was found. We also know that no other person was near enough to the crime to have committed the foul act."

"But what could have happened my dear Holmes?"

"Aliens from Neptune murdered this man."

"You can imply the existence of aliens from a murder, fantastic... But Holmes, how could the aliens have moved the body?"

"Elementary my dear Watson, they stole the key from the butler and used the car."

"Astounding Holmes!"

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

Daniel_Newby• 13 years ago

What about the isotope ratios? Different locations tend to have different isotope ratios, which is the standard way of finding the originating body of a space object.

eloff3• 13 years ago

Apparently they plan to repeat the experiment in six months during another meteor shower and test for isotope ratios, so that will lay the issue to rest.

'Alien Bugs' Discovered In Earth's Atmosphere

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