Post by Ryan Maue
You may have seen the breathless coverage on Fox News of the alien life discovery from NASA’s Dr. Hoover — in some fancy meteorite. The “exclusive” nature of the discovery was hailed as evidence that we are not alone. Last week, we discovered that tangentially with the self-professed origination of Charlie Sheen from Mars. Anyhow, Adrian Chen at Gawker has found that this research is hardly new, and simply an update or recycling of claims made since 2004 by Dr. Hoover:
So, we’re calling bull$h%t on Richard Hoover’s discovery, and Fox News’ ‘exclusive’. Maybe Hoover really has found life (probably not). But it’s not news, and it’s far, far from certain.
However, in his zeal to dismiss Fox News as a propaganda outlet for NASA, or engaging in tabloid journalism, I guess Chen missed Andrew Revkin’s piece over at the NY Times:
The buzz is building over a paper by Richard Hoover, an award-winning astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, concluding that filaments and other features found in the interior of three specimens of a rare class of meteorite appear to be fossils of a life form strongly resembling cyanobacteria.
While this so-called discovery may be entirely correct, perhaps Hoover should have called up the Union of Concerned Scientists instead of Fox News in order to peddle his wares. Revkin publishes first then promises to follow up later:
Rudy Schild, the journal’s editor in chief, said in a note accompanying the paper that reactions to the research, “both pro and con,” will be published on the journal’s Web site between March 7 and 10. I’ll check back in then of course, and I’m reaching out to Hoover and others working in this field now.
Is this a legitimate press release by a scientist with a profound new discovery or another example of “science by press release”? We report, you decide — or you follow up on your own, as in the case of the Ole Gray Lady. Alternatively, just use Google and find a very similar press release from 2004:
Evidence for Indigenous Microfossils in a Carbonaceous Meteorite
Also, don’t forget the discovery and undiscovery of new planets in our galaxy (October 12, 2010). Supposed new planet 20-light years away has been undiscovered
D. Patterson,
Exactly. How fast do chunks of meteors travel through inter stellar space? 30,000 mph? The universe likely isn’t old enough for us to see chunks material coming from distant solar systems. If the organics in these meteorites is legit, then we should start thinking about how they were produced within our own solar system.
First the good doctor should prove that the meteorite was not “local”. pg
Matter from other distant solar systems can transit through interstellar space to our own Solar System in very little geological time. Even traveling at velocities little more than Earth’s escape velocity, a rock can travel to the nearest other solar system about 4.5 light years (LY) away, Alpha Centauri, in only about 100,000 years. It could travel about 45LY or half way across a major star cluster of tens of thousands of solar systems in only one million years. It could travel about half the diameter of our Milky Way spiral galaxy, about 50,000LY in about one billion years, or less than one fourth the age of the Earth. Ejecta from the formation of the Sun about ten billion years ago could now be one fourth of the way to the nearby Andromeda Galaxy some two million light years from here. Getting outside the local cluster/s of galaxies in the hundred million light year range would, however, require some extraordinary velocities.
Any living thing that wants to hitch a ride through space needs extraordinary abilities — resistance to dessication, radiation, extreme heat, extreme cold — and the ability to revive and propagate after those. While it doesn’t seem impossible for something like an alga (is there such a thing as one alga?) to achieve this, riding for example on a comet and reviving briefly as the comet nears the sun and thaws, it would surely be impossible for anything more… Oh, hang on…
“In September 2007, tardigrades were taken into low Earth orbit on the FOTON-M3 mission and for 10 days were exposed to the vacuum of space. After they were returned to Earth, it was discovered that many of them survived and laid eggs that hatched normally.” Wikipedia
Temps near absolute zero, greater than boiling point, dessication for decades, radiation a thousand times higher than humans can take, what’s not to like?
Next time you see a comet chaser bringing back samples, the correct question is always ‘any news of the tardigrades?’
JF
Life?
It was not supposed to exist in the deepest reaches of the oceans next to volcanic vents without sunlight to sustain it, that was the consensus and the consensus was dead wrong.
Life was not suppose to exist miles beneath the surface feeding on rocks and living where no life was supposed to exist, that was the consensus and the consensus was wrong.
Life was not supposed to exist in nuclear reactors or survive in the vacuum of space or in the boiling hot pools of Yellowstone. Life it was claimed could not survive without sunlight and yet life thrives without it.
What we do know for a cold certain fact is that science has been dead wrong about life a great many times, it has blundered and made false assumptions by the bucket load and the treasured consensus has been shattered and blown apart time after time.
Life finds a way, life is hard to kill and it will be found to live and thrive in places we thought impossible.
I am not going to base this on any argument for or against CAGW, what I base this on is experience. I used to be pro for the argument of AGW, now I am not. I ask that that you Scientists please also listen to us lay people.
Please listen to the words.
Us Glasgow boys said it way back when music meant something. We watched the destruction of our communities and saw complete Police control. We were the most poor people in the whole of the UK and a band stood up, and said no to all this crap, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85gdY5grqCg please listen to the words.
We all knew back then what was coming, more of our income robbed and more of our liberties.
Instead of arguing about the Science involved, cannot we look at the cost to every person that this climate change fiasco has incurred?
The cost alone would turn most people off Anthony. I am fraikin sick of all the new so called green laws that come from a Euro Government, who we did not elect, and yet they dictate to us what we must do in our country, what taxes we must pay for renewable energy and then we have to apply to “them” to please, please allow us to drop the tax rate for those that live in our highlands and islands!!!!
Autologous design.
Any life form that happened to have a segment of DNA or similar genetic material that trimmed, say, 99% of the unhelpful possible mutations would have a huge evolutionary adavantage. The accumulation of such “meta-mutations” would constitute a de facto policy book and user manual for responding to external survival pressures. Far more efficient than the classical uniformitarian random point mutation scheme.
I suspect that much of the 95% “silent” DNA we carry around consists of just such a policy manual. As a side note, bacteria act as each others’ “library”, swapping winning bits of code as they go.
Mods: pls. fix typo “advantage”, not “adavantage”. Thx.
Dave Worley: “The odds of life existing on other worlds are surely good.”
Those odds surely depend on how you think such life came about. Ever try calculating the odds of life originating from abiotic material?
D. Patterson, ZZZ, good points.
Fred Souder, interesting to consider the speed — I hadn’t thought of that aspect before. Off the back of the envelope, I’d have to say there has been plenty of time for material to cross interstellar space, but I’ll have to sit down run actual numbers. Other aspects to consider are likelihood of escape from the solar gravity well and trajectory across interstellar space. In other words, an object from another system that is close enough to reach us in the relevant timeframe would not only have to escape that system, but also have the right trajectory across almost unimaginable distances to eventually get captured by our gravity well. Again, doesn’t mean it isn’t possible, but once you start considering all the necessary parameters, it does start looking like awfully long odds, unless of course the object belongs to our solar system in the first place . . .
About ten years from now, we know aproximately million planets in nearby space. Are those all lifeless. Most stars have planet system, but without life? I’m convinced there is life, we just dont know yet. To day we know 531 planets, while reseach methods are new. http://exoplanet.eu/
“Science through press release” via Fox News?
Woot!
Reciprocity in the MSM at last!
Ha Ha! Greater odds against than metorites carrying cyanobacteria, if you ask me…
Brad says:
March 5, 2011 at 5:38 pm
“…Here is the paper, and here are the pics. This is certainly legit science – in the end it could be right or wrong but it certainly not by CoasttoCoastAM quality folks, instead real scientists..”
There is no real science. The University of East Anglia proved that.
If you look carefully the meteorite “fossils” look nothing like the real fossils. The real fossils are segmented individual cells.
This is another cynical press release to distract from the latest NASA f*@kup.
E.M.Smith says:
March 5, 2011 at 7:59 pm
Reminds me of something….
Oh, yes, Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming!
While I like the idea that life is a universe wide phenomenon I’m afraid that this paper, like the previous similar ones, gets us no closer to the truth.
Too much conjecture with too few facts to be able to say what has really been found in these carboniferous meteorites. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and, as this is sadly lacking in this paper, it is time to move on…
The Journal of Cosmology is extremely dubious. You pay $35, nominate 5 referees and wait. If your paper is accepted you pay another $150. The acceptance rate is 20-50% so they aren’t too choosy about what is published. It seems little more than a money making operation masquerading as a serious journal.
I noticed a paper by Andrew Glikson a notorious warmist amongst their offerings.
Though a part of me would like to believe this Fox story I remain sceptical. Climate science has made me that way. ;O)
I just popped over to the NASA sponsored astrobio.net to see if I could see anything on this story and I could not find it on their front news page 2nd March 2001. But guess what I found as the second story down? A global warming story about mass extinctions. What the heck does global warming have to do with astrobiology? NASA needs to get its priorities right.
From the Fox News story:
“In what he calls “a very simple process,” Dr. Hoover fractured the meteorite stones under a sterile environment before examining the freshly broken surface with the standard tools of the scientist…”
“He found the fossilized remains of micro-organisms not so different from ordinary ones found underfoot — here on earth, that is.”
Just wondering, if one cracks open a non-sedimentary rock which was created here on earth, would it contain fossilized (sp?) microbes as well? Gee, even sedimentary rock…would the rock forming process (intense pressure) allow the cell structure of such fragile structures to be maintained? Does the fossilizing process work down to the cellular level?
Jeff
Don’t pour cold water over this. :O) Indeed, the same point was made about the Mars fossils a few years back.
I had called it the ‘Budget Bug’ back then, and it still has the same DNA
Brad says, “I think you are actually arguing the opposite,”
Don’t be so obviously presumptous, telling others what they think. You clearly don’t have that right here or anywhere.
Your lame links “Is Darwin the New Jesus” is an example of science?
[snip, and because of your poor writing, either a typo or a sloppy thought, I can’t even figure out if the third line above should be snipped as well. Either way, be polite. I have spoken. ~ ctm]
I like the idea of panspermia…..i`m just not convinced this is evidence for it.
Snowflakes look as if they were created by spirograph.
Fractals look natural.
Thor Heyerdahl (of Kon Tiki fame) disputed the ability of the coconut to have spread across the Pacific by floating. He believed that people took them with them on their voyages.
Coconuts on Cocos Island
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/thor/cocos-island.php
I have no idea whether or not Heyerdahl was right about coconuts but even if he was that does not prove that life forms could have arrived on Earth from Space. One of the strongest proponents of that idea was the Fred Hoyle, one of the greatest astrophysicists of the 20th century. He died 10 years ago but his former colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe has continued work in this field at the Cardiff Center for Astrobiology.
http://www.astrobiology.cf.ac.uk/
Fred Hoyle had a very original mind, rather like Richard Feynman, and was quite prepared to go against consensus views in astrophysics, biology, and also climatology. In fact I am surprised that his views on the greenhouse effect have not, as far as I know, been quoted on this blog.
F. Hoyle, ‘The great greenhouse controversy’, Energy and Environment 7:4 (1996), 349-356.
“Given the choice, I imagine nobody would opt for a world without any greenhouse, that is a world with a mean temperature of about 259K. And probably few would opt for an ice-age world with a mean temperature of 275K to 280K. To this point, the greenhouse is seen as good. Further still, a clear majority continues to see the greenhouse as good up to the present-day mean of about 290K. But, at the next 1.5K a drastic change of opinion sets in: the greenhouse suddenly becomes the sworn enemy of environmental groups, world-wide, to the extent that they rush off to Rio and elsewhere and make a great deal of noise about it. I find it difficult to understand why. If I am told that computer calculations show immensely deleterious consequences would ensue, then I have a good laugh about it. In private, of course, since I am always careful to be polite in public.”
The above passage by Hoyle was quoted in the paper below which is available on the Internet.
First Things First: Development and Global Warming by Michael Warby, Peter Hartley and Kenneth Medlcock
http://www.bakerinstitute.org/publications/first-things-first-development-and-global-warming
D. Patterson,
Actually, it is far less likely that other planets, like Mars, have been colonized by life from Earth, simply because of the different escape velocities required. Escape velocity from Earth is much higher, and given gravitational losses, the amount of energy required to reach that velocity is also much higher, than escaping from Mars’ gravity well.
Therefore, to reach escape velocity from Earth, will require an impact from a much faster object on a much more elliptical or even open hyperbolic trajectory around the Sun, i.e. objects will have to come from the Oort Cloud or outside the solar system, or else be perturbed by Jupiter or Saturn into a retrograde orbit around the sun, to impact Earth at a sufficiently high velocity, while it is far easier for an object to be blasted into space from Mars, and there are far more objects going fast enough to accomplish it.
Dave Worley says:
March 5, 2011 at 8:36 pm
Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel addressed that in the 1970’s and came up with an hypothesis called “Directed Panspermia”.
http://www.astrobio.net/index.php?option=com_retrospection&task=detail&id=1107
Rob Sheldon, a friend of mine who is an astrophysicist colleague of Roy Spencer and John Christy at UAH, in collaboration with Dr. Hoover (the author who just published this new meteorite microbe article) the came up with something I found quite a bit more intriguing a few years ago:
Cosmological Evolution: Spatial Relativity and the Speed of Life
Robert B. Sheldon (a) and Richard B. Hoover (b)
(a)USRA/NSSTC, 320 Sparkman Dr., Huntsville, AL, USA;
(b)NASA/MSFC/NSSTC, 320 Sparkman Dr., Huntsville, AL, USA
http://www.rbsp.info/rbs/RbS/PDF/spie08.pdf
Keep in mind Christy, Spencer, Sheldon, and Hoover are colleagues and NASA insiders who know more than we do (I have it on good authority that NASA doesn’t share all its exo-biology data). They’re all CAGW skeptics too.
Spencer and Hoover’s hypothesis is basically that DNA-based life originated in a cometary cloud around some far more ancient star (long dead now) elsewhere in the galaxy. The chemical environment works out especially for comets that periodically get near enough the parent star to heat up and stir the chemical cauldron. This provides a LOT more time for chemical evolution to take place which is one of the greatest difficulties for abiogenesis in our solar system as it appears prokaryotes appeared on the earth very quickly after it cooled down early in the solar system’s history. Sheldon/Hoover go on to say that first the chemical precursors then life itself spreads from star to star when two stars get within 1-2 light years of each other. At that approach the cometary clouds at the far gravitational fringes of the stars will mingle, mix, and perturb each other causing comets from both stars to rain down upon the inner planets periodically seeding them with life.
It’s a beautiful hypothesis and unlike just about any other origin theory there’s a fair amount of evidence in support of it. Amino acids have been found in both comets and certain classes of meteorites (carbonaceous chondrites) which are believed to be de-iced, de-gassed remnants of what were once comets. Of course there’s a huge gigantic leap going from amino acids to prokaryotes but in this hypothesis that process had many billion years and potentially millions of solar systems in which to get going in a stepping-stone process. This is at least several orders of magnitude more time and opportunity for chemical evolution than was available for abiogenesis on the earth alone in the silly lightning bolts in pre-biotic soup hypothesis popularized by Miller/Urey in the 1950’s.