opinions by Ryan Maue
While we breathlessly await the publication of “critical reviews” from the soon to be defunct Journal of Cosmology, experts from a variety of fields are crawling over each other to denounce the claims of Dr. Hoover, who claimed to found definitive proof of alien life from extraterrestrial meteorites (Meteorite Alien Life). It would be an interesting exercise to compare the immediate broad-spectrum skepticism of this study to, let’s say, the Nature flood papers or the contrived Union of Concerned Scientists snowjob conference call. But, one could describe the reception of pro-global warming literature, whether peer-reviewed or not, as quite partisan in nature. So what has triggered this inherent skepticism of Dr. Hoover’s research, which is grandiose and ground-breaking, or something?
As mentioned in the Gawker blog post by Adrien Chen yesterday, Fox News apparently had the “exclusive” first crack at breaking Hoover’s research paper. You can set your watch by this — whenever Fox News is mentioned in the first few sentences of an article or blog posting, expect biased and vitriolic language to follow — even in this new era of civility. Dr. PZ Myers, a University of Minnesota biologist, accurately and more than adequately disassembles the claims of Dr. Hoover with humor and wit. I’ll snip and encourage you to read his own blog.
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.
In this instance, the gratuitous reference to Fox News in the first sentence immediately soils the otherwise readable post. Obviously, Dr. Myers does not have the ability to separate the hard news and opinion shows on Fox News, since there is little evidence of how this NASA discovery exclusive is evidence of any bias. It simply detracts from a very good article, and turns off readers who do not watch MSNBC or wrap their dead fish with the NY Times editorial pages.
He brings up near the end a very cogent argument on how science matriculates, and ideas are vetted:
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.
I agree completely. And, whenever the Union of Concerned Scientists or World Wildlife Fund marches to the podium with some obvious politically tinged research, I’ll expect the same level of skepticism from both sides of the proverbial aisle. The hair trigger response to a “Fox News exclusive” has brought out the armchair experts, who have unloaded a salvo of rhetorical firepower at the listing Journal of Cosmology. Unfortunately, in their zeal to score a partisan political point, most neglected to see the rest of the media reported the same exclusive story. This is called “science by press release”, and it has to stop.
/sarc alert
Good grief! How did the discussion get so angry?
It’s going to be a tough sell to expect people to believe there are exobacterial fossils in any meteors, certainly by SEM. And for sure, you can’t expect life to develop inside one, or inside a comet. Temperature wrong, and a lot of other things.
And don’t expect exobiology to have DNA or amino acids exactly like ours. For one thing, the stereochemistry could be reversed even if the stomic arrangement were the same. What drives terrestrial biology has depended deeply on the local abundance of elements and physical conditions. Some species have arisen that substitute elements occasionally as necessary to expand into a new niche.
I might buy the idea of life being blasted off of Mars, freezing, and then falling onto Earth. But that seems to require too many low probability events to be satisfactory, and besides, life had to originate somewhere first.
Chemical evolution leading to biological evolution is a much more satisfying explanation, and there is even hidden evidence for it in the genetic code. Chemically related amino acids use related codons. The process is driven by a principle called the hypercycle in which cooperativity results in more efficient use of available energy to outcompete other “species”. Order is generated spontaneously in the local system, while disorder is created in the universe, so there is no violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
The concept of the hypercycle is independent of the particular chemistry involved, however it requires an energy-consuming process of replication of the components of the system that may cooperate or compete, and an opportunity for change that leads to new opportunities selected by replication efficiency gains. Translated, it explains a general process whereby life can originate spontaneously under conditions where certain prerequisite conditions are met. They need not be Earth-like.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
If you want to get a headache, read this:
http://www.physik.uzh.ch/groups/aegerter/teaching/Biophys/eigen.pdf
Or instead, go to the library and get:
Sci Am. 1981 Apr;244(4):88-92, 96, et passim.
(The Scientific Amercian version is much easier to digest, but I can’t find a link).
the Nature flood papers or the contrived Union of Concerned Scientists snowjob conference call
Nature should be feeling shame and embarrassment for treating these new stories about record cold and snow at lower latitudes being caused by global warming with so much importance. Global warming ‘science’ had never predicted these things would happen. All the ‘predictions’ that global warming would cause that, or the so called scientific explanations of why it was caused by global warming, came after the fact and were rushed into the public before the process of proper peer review could take place. That is not how science is supposed to work. But since it was done that way it makes it clear that motivations other than true scientific research were in play.
Nature also treats Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) poorly.
These issues lead me to think Nature’s modus operandi is not purely science but selling magazines.
@ur momisugly Wucash: Concerning UFO’s I would agree. My personal take is that there is substantial evidence for them in significant numbers. The best reference book is at this site since these interviews are with military persons that have more experience around aircraft and how they appear than the average observer:
http://www.ufohastings.com/index.html
Another good site by a nuclear physicist:
http://www.stantonfriedman.com/index.php?ptp=articles&fdt=2006.11.10
http://www.stantonfriedman.com/
Of course if it were commonly accepted that they have been or are routinely present then we wouldn’t need SETI, and the public pucker factor would also greatly intensify. As for actual contact, I can just imagine having one sitting next to us in the office and since much of humanity has trouble getting along even with their own, I imagine that he would come to an unhealthy end in a relatively short time.
Although I have never seen anything that I could identify as an alien operated vehicle, I did see one of the green fireballs in the 1960’s; weather was clear/early evening, ball was about 2′ in diameter @ur momisugly about 100 feet away, the same intense green as a stop light with a “flaming” surface, then trailed a few red sparks and went out as a light bulb being turned off :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fireballs
Personally I would guess a plasma ball of some kind probably from singlet oxygen (upper atmosphere) since this is one of the few gases capable of generating that color.
They were apparently fairly common over nuclear test sites.
I have also been fortunate to observe artificially generated ball lighting resulting from a power line short caused by insulator failure in high winds. That plasma ball was ~1-2′ in dia., almost too bright to look at directly and appeared to have weight as it had a parabolic path for a distance of some 300′. This instance would tend to confirm at least one theory that oxidizing metal ions, in this case from the wires, are the energy feed for the ball.
Robert of Ottawa says:
March 6, 2011 at 4:41 pm
Now shut up and enjoy Brasil’s Carnival.
I wish I was there. A girl I know in Brazil promised such wonderful things to me if I’d just visit her during Carnaval.
but, we digress
“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.”
Oops. Doesn’t that leave out every journal that has ever published an AGW paper?
BFL,
SETI is a waste of time and money not because of UFO phenomena, but because it is increasingly clear that high power radio transmissions are a transient phenomena of late industrial age technologies and are not going to be in general use for much longer in human history. For this reason, any other civilization that follows a similar development path will only transmit similar radio signals for 100-200 years before transitioning to low power transmissions, closed data networks, and highly encrypted radio signals generally indistinguishable from background noise.
Thus, unless the other civilization is at an almost identical level of development (considered impossible) and unless the transmissions of another civilization reach our solar system at the same time we are listening for them, then SETI will never detect anything. This doesnt mean that intelligent civilizations arent out there, just that they are either less developed than us, or are more developed than us, so we simply are incapable of communicating with them.
“I might buy the idea of life being blasted off of Mars, freezing, and then falling onto Earth.”
For a while Mars may have been able to play Greece to Earths Rome. Mars may have been more ‘habitable’ than the Earth, especially had Earth had a massive collision that remelted it and threw up enough matter into orbit to make an over sized moon.
Life evolving on Mars, transferred to Earth, and then Mars dying is possible. Unlikely, but possible.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
March 6, 2011 at 5:51 pm
“I wish I was there. A girl I know in Brazil promised such wonderful things to me if I’d just visit her during Carnaval.
but, we digress”
Woah, there! Now you’ve taken this topic somewhere worth going you can’t just walk away! This community stands ready to give you some immediate, post scientific peer review provided you adequately develop your treatise. 😉
Mike Lorrey,
We had just better hope the Borg isn’t within twenty or thirty light years. They’ll consider us a pushover: click
…and certifiably crazy.
Rosie Redfield has a good critique of this paper here: http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2011/03/is-this-claim-of-bacteria-in-meteorite.html
Now wait a minute, I thought that NASA was the arbiter in all matters in science and engineering. James Hansen is the climate authority, no questions asked. NASA is diagnosing Toyotas for acceleration problems, despite the fact that they do not design cars. Now an astrobiologist declares that he had found evidence for life on other worlds. So by the above examples we should just accept it without skepticism right? Is this any more far fetched than CO2 being the primary driver of climate for the globe? I think not, given the data presented so far. So where next for this discovery? Maybe they could use those supercomputers to model the evolution of this fossil into James Hanson and circle would be complete.
IMO (but Os are like axxxholes – everybody’s got one), the chances of extra-terrrestrial life are close to 100% (See 1. below), but the chances of contact/detection of any sort are vanishingly small (2, 3 and 4).
1. Why should this planet be so special ?
2. Well established DNA-based organisms here will feed off any poor organic fragment unfortunate enough to arrive.
3. SETI is bound to fail because of excessive distances and times and because the chances of coincidental windows of opportunity, here and there, must be V small, particularly because, IMO (ditto), evolution’s experiment with intelligance seems to be a failure.
4. Do not fossilized/resident organisms riding on arriving detritus, even if only from Mars etc., let alone from outside the solar system or elsewhere inside or outside our galaxy, get too well irradiated/fried to make them far from ideal specimens for realistic detection?
Accordingly, Dr Hoover’s work seems to betray someone with nothing better to do and some sort of supervisory failure by NASA. Not the sort of thing that should be allowed in the present economic climate.
Smokey: “We had just better hope the Borg isn’t within twenty or thirty light years. They’ll consider us a pushover…and certifiably crazy.”
If there has been actual alien contact with major government leaders, my take would be that based upon our historical treatment of our own kind, we would have been advised that we are herewith confined to the local solar system and any attempt to extend our reach would result in dire consequences.
There is a red haired alien is the US to have talks with Barry at the moment, the way she talks is a dead give away as no one on this planet from any nation talks with her accent or total disregard for the truth.
Never understood some peoples absolute insistence that life on earth rained down from comets, or meteors from Mars, etc. Why is it so difficult to believe that life managed to come to be on a planet that had perfect conditions for it (even when the atmosphere was very different)? My take on life supposedly found in rocks in the Antarctic (if it exists), is they were ejecta from a previous impact on the earth, that made it out to space for a while, then finally fell back to the surface.
Science by Press Release gets armchair review scalding.
Fish fry.
In Australia, Science Reporters for the government’s (very pro-CAGW) ABC Radio have run with this story. I heard one describe it as perhaps the most important scientific discovery of the year.
This is classic. Independents rank Fox News as the least trust-worthy of mainstream news networks. The notion that some supposed categorical distinction between Fox’s News and its opinion shows somehow inoculates against charges that Fox News promotes false information is ridiculous.
[ryanm: when the rest of the media is in-the-tank liberal for Obama, it naturally sounds like heresy when Fox News attempts to provide both sides of an issue. moderates and independents simply can’t make up their minds about anything]
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/dec10/Misinformation_Dec10_rpt.pdf
Hoser said
“And don’t expect exobiology to have DNA or amino acids exactly like ours. For one thing, the stereochemistry could be reversed even if the stomic arrangement were the same. What drives terrestrial biology has depended deeply on the local abundance of elements and physical conditions. Some species have arisen that substitute elements occasionally as necessary to expand into a new niche.”
You’ve just described a perfect example of whats known as the ” Anthropomorphic Problem.”
If there is alien life or bacteria out there, the odds are that it won’t be anything similar to life on Earth. Humans can be unimaginative, and when we think of aliens, we almost always go to some bipedal creature, two eyes, a mouth, etc.
Yet the odds are of that happening almost nothing. We obviously wouldnt know anything the enviroment it came from, how it evolved, etc. and chances are, would be nothing like us whatsoever.
It might be in gas form, so we couldnt breathe it in. It probably wont be symmetrical by any means. ( A trapezoid shaped alien…interesting.)
We would almost certainly not be able to communicate with it, as it would obviously not speak a word like anything on Earth. ( Or even speak at all) It might communicate through signs, or high pitched noises, maybe even something undetectable to the human ear.
This one one problem researchers involved in the UFO field have tried to figure out for years, and probably wont be solved until we experience an actual encounter with extraterrestrial life.
So unfortunately we will probably never suffer an Attack of the 50 Woman. 🙂
Folks, take a million random rocks on Earth. Earth, the planet we know is chuck full of bacteria. You will likely NOT find a single bacterial fossil. Yet, NASA claims to have found two fossil bacteria bearing rocks in a decade from like 8 rocks. This is mathematical lunacy and therefore immediately makes me suspect of the motive like the need for maintain funding with a Republican Congress looking to find targets for cutting spending.
Go “random” fossil hunting if you don’t believe — you will rapidly see how insane this claim is. There are times I fossil hunt from my car 🙂 because I can identify which rocks are fossil bearing and which are not — because random is exactly how not to find any fossil of any sort. The Martian rocks which made it to Earth were not pre-identified and selected. So you all are welcome to come with me on our random fossil hunt, were we plug in some random GPS coordinates and see if the first 8 rocks we pick up show evidence of bacterial fossils. LOL!!! Could I be wrong, perhaps — about a 0.000001% chance of being wrong.
Most rocks are not fossil bearing of any kind – 99.99999% are not. Most don’t contain the right grain size, the right mineralization, or anything right to make a bacterial fossil — even when they are fossil bearing. Bacterial fossils are very rare on Earth according to the papers I’ve read — I’ve never found or recognized any fossil bacteria and I have looked at lots of rocks under microscopes — I have a research quality microscope in my home. Studying the grains in a rock is often a good way of seeing if you are getting closer or further from your intended target. Yes, lots of people find clam shells, bits of this and that … but we are talking about Bacteria. NASA’s “bacteria” are much smaller than what we find on Earth.
I don’t believe their claim based on statistics alone, even assuming every planet in our solar system was/is full of bacteria. Do I wish it were true? – yes, of course. If they had evaluated 1 million rocks and identified 1 or 2 that were particularly interesting, then I would look twice at the evidence. However, I don’t believe that NASA won the astro-biological lottery twice in their first 8 rocks.
Robert Morris says:
March 6, 2011 at 6:38 pm
Woah, there! Now you’ve taken this topic somewhere worth going you can’t just walk away! This community stands ready to give you some immediate, post scientific peer review provided you adequately develop your treatise.
I know it should be submitted for peer review . But it’s proprietary and can’t be shared on this blog. Trust though it’s better than we thought.
;o)
Hoser: “Chemical evolution leading to biological evolution is a much more satisfying explanation, and there is even hidden evidence for it in the genetic code.”
Say what?! I think you’d better look into that a bit more carefully. Even the relatively pro-abiogenesis Wikipedia article you cite notes the following about the 1970’s hypercycle idea: “However, these reactions are limited to self-excisions (in which a longer RNA molecule becomes shorter), and much rarer small additions that are incapable of coding for any useful protein. The hypercycle theory is further degraded since the hypothetical RNA would require the existence of complex biochemicals such as nucleotides which are not formed under the conditions proposed by the Miller–Urey experiment.”
They hypercycle idea is pretty much a non-starter in terms of abiogenesis.
————-
Smokey, BFL: LOL!
Dave Springer:
‘dummy’, hilariously adjoined to finger-wagging about civility. And ‘mauron’ – two consecutive posts.
Strange how offensive these two mild insults appear. Must be the contrast with the surroundings.
Hope it doesn’t catch on.
Smokey,
The human race is evolving into its own form of borganism. We dont need some alien invaders to do it to us, this is the natural course of evolution of any technological species.
What you all consider “sci-fi” today is just a quaint picaroonish form of literature that is nothing but a western cowboy novel set in space. The human society of 2050, in the depths of the technological singularity, will be stranger than can be imagined. The human society of 2100 will be incomprehensible to the common primitives inhabiting today’s place in space and time.
all it takes…is to drop human arrogance,,,to understand the universe is full of life,,,based on the same basic principles and building-blocks…Only a few years ago,,,we thought earth was the only planet that contained water,,,now we know different…
If “intelligent “life like ours occurs in nature in this timeframe….it is no more then logical to assume there is “intelligent “life in another time-frame…way before or after us….
So it is logical to find life….under our level of evolution…and life way above it.