This looks to be a huge story, the first evidence of extraterrestrial life, if it holds up. I would remind readers that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence“. This needs to be confirmed by others in the science community before it can be taken seriously.
This is from a recent meteorite find in December 2012. A large fire ball was seen by a large number of people in Sri Lanka on December 29th 2012, during that episode a large meteorite disintegrated and fell to Earth in the village of Araganwila which is few miles away from the city of Polonnaruwa.
Look at what the electron microscope shows of a sample purported to be from the meteorite:
It looks convincing, and the paper says: “Contamination is excluded by the circumstance that the elemental abundances within the structures match closely with those of the surrounding matrix.“, but I remain skeptical of the claim.
At first I thought this was somebody mistaking a Tektite (Earthly origin ejecta from impact that makes it into space briefly) but this meteorite found in Sri Lanka does not appear to fit that category, being a chondrite. Further, this is a (supposedly) peer reviewed paper in the Journal of Cosmology, just published, but looking at the Journal of Cosmology, I have some doubts about its veracity.
I asked our resident solar expert Dr. Leif Svalgaard what he thought of it:
Credible? Yes and No. Several good scientists that I know personally have published in the Journal. There is also a good deal of junk. The kind of stuff that gets trotted out at WUWT by our resident [commenters] asking us to ‘open our minds’. So, there is both. It is difficult for a layman to sort the wheat from the abundant chaff.
Wickramasinghe is a credible scientist, student and long-time collaborator of Fred Hoyle. I assume you know Hoyle’s theory of continuous creation of matter at just the right rate to make the Universe expand as we observe it in order to keep the density constant. Hoyle coined the ‘derogatory’ [from his point of view] term The Big Bang. Hoyle’s greatest achievement was to co-author the epoch-making paper that explained in quantitative detail how all elements heavier than Lithium are formed in our universe [in supernovae explosions].
So, the jury is still out on the journal, though the scientist gets a +1.
According to the paper:
…the parent body of the Polonnaruwa meteorite would have had most of its interior porous volume filled with water, volatile organics and possibly viable living cells. A remarkable coincidence that should be noted is that within several days of the meteorite fall, an extensive region around the site of the fall experienced an episode of red rain. The red rain analysed at the MRI in Colombo has been shown to contain red biological cells that show viability as well as motility. Preliminary studies from EDX analysis show that these cells are similar to the cells found in the red rain of Kerala that fell in 2001, cells that have not yet been identified with any known terrestrial organism (Louis and Kumar, 2006; Gangappa et al, 2010). Abnormally high abundances of As and Ag in the Sri Lankan red rain cells have been provisionally reported, thus favouring a non-terrestrial habitat, possibly connected with a cometary/asteroidal body, the fragmentation of which led to the Polonnaruwa meteorite fall (Samaranayake and Wickramasinghe, 2012).
The paper is (h/t to Willis Eschenbach):
FOSSIL DIATOMS IN A NEW CARBONACEOUS METEORITE
N. C. Wickramasinghe*1, J. Wallis2, D.H. Wallis1 and Anil Samaranayake+3
1Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology, University of Buckingham, Buckingham, UK
2School of Mathematics, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
3Medical Research Institute, Colombo, Sri Lanka
ABSTRACT
We report the discovery for the first time of diatom frustules in a carbonaceous meteorite that fell in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka on 29 December 2012. Contamination is excluded by the circumstance that the elemental abundances within the structures match closely with those of the surrounding matrix. There is also evidence of structures morphologically similar to red rain cells that may have contributed to the episode of red rain that followed within days of the meteorite fall. The new data on “fossil” diatoms provide strong evidence to support the theory of cometary panspermia.
The full paper is here:
Source from the University of Buckingham website: http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Polonnaruwa-meteorite.pdf
Here is a news story on the paper, including an interview with Wickramasinghe
The tubular diatom shown in the appendix looks similar to earth bound species (eg Aulacoseira search google images). On the whole these extra terrestrials appear very earth like!
D. Cohen
He will have to look long and hard to find any, even though everyone knows jungles are full of large and often dangerous critters.
I am skeptical about this statement and therefore also of the analogy it purports to support. It reminds of the sort of poor quality arguments often run by BAU boosters.
In general, jungles tend to be rather depauperate in large critters of any kind, and therefore especially depauperate of dangerous critters (which tend to operate at a higher trophic level). The operating mechanism might be something like that in general the standing veg locks up the nutrients that the rainfall does not leach out. There are some exceptions.
If you want lots of large terrestrial critters you should probably head for savannahs and especially grasslands. Hiding in savannahs will save some large animals from predation, in grasslands big animals cannot hide very well at all. So they tend to grow big horns, get belligerent themselves, run as soon as they are born, grow very big, get very fast, or breed very fast in order to maintain their species’ existence.
Some disruptive foxing, by way of zebra stripes or giraffe camouflage does help but again, this tends to be the exception to the rule.
Rud Istvan says:
January 14, 2013 at 8:38 pm
For example, Svalgaard’s hopefully misquoted assertion about non-supernovae nucleosynthesis proceeding through lithium. All standard nuclear physics says it proceeds through iron
A different interpretation of your muddled statement might be that you think the heavy element beyond Lithium [or Boron] were also build during the first few minutes of the existence of the Universe. Well, they were not because matter cooled too rapidly for this to happen and the formation of Helium ate up the available neutrons: http://www.leif.org/research/Helium.pdf
Wickramasinghe collaborated with Hoyle in the eighties on a theory that influensa is caused by extraterrestrial organisms. IIRC they used the spatial distribution of outbreaks to prove that such a pattern can nit originate if the illness was transmitted by humans.
hardly an unbiased researcher, I would say.
Dan Brown wrote about it in 2001 in a book called “Deception Point”. Good yarn.
Likely that the meteorite originated from the Earth – see slides here: http://www.threeimpacts-twoevents.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/SIMULTANEOUS-IMPACTS-3JAN2013-WEBSITE.pdf
Perhaps the supposed Mars-originating meteor was a product of this event, too (impacting object remnant)?
The presentation uses new data (Google maps, satellite view) to update Earth history….. It is not yet peer-reviewed.
Interesting claims, material for endless speculation, is this the escape from CAGW ,from the UN, alien life forms rain down, we are doomed, doomed…must spend billions to go to space and stop it?
Or more false precision, the determination to see patterns against all odds?
I too have never heard of such a speedy response, from discovery to publishing.
Oh wait IPCC -AR approved cover papers are produced this fast.
D. Cohen;
Based on this model for what is going on there among the stars, I am not surprised that SETI and similar projects have found no other evidence of intelligent life. Any civilizations which have lasted a reasonable length of time astronomically speaking
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
While I’ve seen no evidence of alien life, this particular argument has never been persuasive to me. The idea (as I understand it) is that we’ve been broadcasting radio and other signals to space that travel at the speed of light and have since propagated to stars (and hence planets) may light years away. These signals should be detectable, and hence the opposite ought to be true. Intelligent species ought to have developed things like radio and TV and hence should also be broadcasting signals that WE can detect.
I don’t buy that argument. The vast bulk of our EM communications these days runs over wires or point to point devices. What percentage of TV’s these days have an aerial? We’ve only been “broadcasting” for a century or so, a century hence our broadcast signals may well be zero.
So suppose the aliens next door went through the exact same technology revolution but got there just 1% of the timeline since the Big Bang faster than we did. They’d have ceased broadcasting and possibly have gone extinct tens of millions of years before we came up with this idea that we should listen for them. A two or three hundred year timeline to listen for (and be listened to) in a galaxy billions of years old makes looking for a needle in a hay stack look like a promising endeavor.
Leif on the other hand makes a case that is hard to argue with.
Here on earth life lives on other life, and out there I suspect intelligent civilizations exploit others if they can — “eat” them if you will.
A planet with life has an atmosphere that is not in chemical equilibrium with the surface. The spectrum of such a planet gives it away. If there were many intelligent civilizations in the Galaxy they would discover us by our atmospheric spectrum and be here to eat us already. It is not about us discovering them [although we are presently looking for planets with atmospheres out of equilibrium], but about them discovering us. We are the food blundering about in the jungle [or in the Arctic – polar bears consider us food].
I was thinking more of how useful the existence of relatively weak interstellar civilizations would be to stronger ones. I believe Fermi originally postulated self-replicating robots moving from star to star using the raw material of the stars’ planetary systems to build more of themselves, and calculated how long it would be before these robots filled up the galaxy. It was a very short period of time compared to the age of the galaxy, so we look around, don’t see these robots, and have strong evidence that no other intelligence exists in our galaxy.
OK, this type of reasoning already makes an implicit exponential growth assumption that I object to. Suppose Fermi’s robots existed, and some developed random mistakes in their programming so that they concentrated on finding not raw materials on planets, comets and asteroids but rather raw materials by consuming the original type of robots, where the useful elements and substances have already been gathered and concentrated. (That is, I just assume these robots are not perfect and sometimes make mistakes, just like all other forms of life, when reproducing themselves.) Their numbers would increase at the expense of the originals, until the originals learned to hide from them — and now we are back at the predator-prey analogy and an expected overall balance in the numbers of robots. So, Fermi’s self-replicating robots do not fill up the galaxy unless they replicate perfectly — a less than plausible hypothesis.
The relevance to us here on earth? I can imagine extra-terrestrial intelligence showing up in our solar system, dropping a few asteroids on us to get our attention, and then sending down demands that we build stuff for them. This is one civilization exploiting another, and could easily diminish our wealth enough to curtail our expansion to other stars. If we say no to this, better be able to defend against those asteroids! Hence, it is not really wise for us to be blasting out EM signals showing we exist as a technological civilization because this hypothetical intelligence is interested not in planets where plain old life exists but rather in planets where technological civilizations exist. Planets with life obviously incapable of building stuff for them are as useless to their “business plan” as lifeless planets.
I realize this is tending to hijack this thread, which is concentrating on the possibility of plain old extraterrestrial life, but I did want to set out my objection to Fermi’s basic reasoning — and also explain why I wish we were more cautious about advertising our technological abilities.
Leif Svalgaard says:
…Which may provoke Fermi’s question “Where is everybody”.
Aren’t they busy abducting and anally probing Americans on an industrial scale?
So…….we’ve got diatoms in a carbonaceous chondrite. !! Yeah, right.
The oldest known diatoms on this planet are of Lower Cretaceous age [around 140 million years ago].
If panspermia is proposed we are suggesting that diatoms evolved somewhere else and colonised earth. So where did they come from? Mercury…..too hot, no water to speak of and no oxygen. Venus…too hot, clouds of acid, not a nice spot either.
Mars…indications of water, possibly former seas so a faint possibility. Elsewhere in the solar system….no chance. No water, too cold etc. Outside the solar system? We are getting too Star Trek, Red Dwarf here for serious consideration.
If the diatoms originated from Mars their fossils would be found in sedimentary rocks, diatomaceous “earths” – a bit like powdery limestone but siliceous [you might find some in your toothpaste] – but would have somehow to be incorporated in to a meteor/meteorite.
So how did they get into a meteorite? A possibility is that a meteor collided with a patch of diatom- bearing sediments on Mars, ricocheted back into space and continued on its merry way until it collided with earth in December.
Or that a meteor collided with a patch of diatomaceous sediment on Earth, ricocheted back into space and re-collided [more permanently] with Earth at a later date [December].
Or possibly bits and pieces of diatom bearing rocks bounced to and fro between Earth and Mars through history as result of various collisions. This is vaguely possibly but we have yet to spot Martian diatoms. Now that would really be significant.
I notice that none of the authors appear to be micro-palaeontologists or diatomists [believe it]. However they have managed to identify one of the diatoms as being similar to Sellaphora blackfordensis. Similar? Give us a break ! Roaming around the solar system in a comet rather than swimming around in a puddle in Edinburgh?
From http://tolweb.org/Sellaphora_blackfordensis
“Sellaphora blackfordensis was described formally by D.G. Mann & S. Droop in Mann et al. (2004), after having been referred to previously in several papers as phenodeme 3 (Mann 1984) or the ‘rectangular’ deme of the morphospecies S. pupula sensu lato (e.g. Mann 1999, Mann et al. 1999). Sellaphora blackfordensis is named after the small urban pool (Blackford Pond) in Edinburgh where it was first found. It seems to be common in the epipelon of muds that are rich in organic matter, in eutrophic lakes and ditches”.
Occam’s Razor could do a bit of slashing here. If I was a betting man I’d be betting on contamination.
The sample in the photo looks like a porous sedimentary rock – not a chondrite. Maybe they got their samples mixed up in the lab… (It happens.)
The factors that would create an intelligent race are not always occurring everywhere. The vastness, age, and inconsistency of incubators for life in our universe all falsify Fermi.
Cool that Dr. Svalgaard believes the human race will be successful, as I do.
The building up of heaver element does not proceed through lithium, but explains elements heavier than lithium [should have been Boron to be exactly right – but no matter].
Uh Leif
Iron 56 is the last element that is produced by fusion reactions in stars. Fusion of iron consumes energy. The other poster was correct that elements up to an including iron are created by the stellar fusion process. It is only elements heavier than iron that are made in a supernova.
I hate to use Wikipedia but there are many other sources as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution
Here is essentially the same discussion from Harvard
http://chandra.harvard.edu/edu/formal/stellar_ev/story/index10.html
You may be thinking of low mass stars.
As for this meteorite, there seems to be some confusion in the description. It is called a chondrite (presumably an ordinary chondrite) yet the description is of a carbonaceous chondrite. I have actually held a piece of the Tagish Lake carbonaceous chondrite and it looks and feels like dirt. An ordinary chondrite is much like a rock.
Jeremy says:
January 14, 2013 at 7:32 pm
Why should DNA be ubiquitous? And even if it is, why would the genetic code be identical? Certainly, if elemental abundances are different, you won’t have DNA as we know it. A shortage of P will eliminate DNA, but won’t necessarily eliminate life.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 14, 2013 at 7:39 pm
DNA may very well spread throughout the galaxy if we make it past the next few hundred years. However, it won’t be human DNA. It is far more likely our machines will colonize the universe, but we won’t, unless we hybridize with them. If we survive, we will be the Borg. While we might digest alien technology, it is very unlikely we will be able to digest alien life any more than we can digest styrofoam.
Since human DNA is actually unlikely to spread far, what DNA might? Microbial. Most exciting would be the potential interactions of species originating on different planets. The potential of symbiosis occuring between organisms having radically different biochemistries is practically unlimited, and very exiciting to think about. Unfortunately, we wouldn’t see the results for several hundred million years. I guess I’m not planning to be around that long.
Yes, I think we are the Old Ones. Or will be. If we survive.
While I disagree with Carl Sagan, who thought that a civilization developed enough to cross interstellar distances would, by the same token, be “civilized” enough in our sense of the word, and would not be bent upon destroying us, I don’t see, how and why such a civilization would necessarily regard us as “food”. As a resource for exploitation, maybe. But as “food”? Only a person with a very closed mind, indeed, would think that interstellar travelers’ ambitions would likely be on the level of polar bears’.
Regarding the Fermi’s question (“Where are they?”), the best answer, in my opinion, was given by Stanislav Lem, the famous Polish philosopher and author of such famous SF books about possible problems of the first contact and of the space exploration as “The Invincible,” “Solaris,””Return from the Stars,” “Eden,” and “Fiasco.”
Lem pointed out that life not necessarily develops into something resembling a technological civilization, and even in those relatively rare cases when it does, such civilizations are separated not only by vast distances in space that, probably, make any invasion not worth the trouble, but also by vast distances in time — that is, “time windows” in which civilizations become sophisticated enough to fly to other stars but don’t yet destroy themselves or develop into something not interested in such endeavors, are so widely distributed in time that it would be extremely unlikely for two civilizations of this type to be close to each other both in space and in time.
The guy sounds like a cranck, which is probably why he is publishing in a crancky magazine.
How do I know? This Kerala story has been turned over and over and of course we know very well what happened. The cited Louis and Kumar scientists are the only ones who think the red cells could be extraterrestial, which is obviously what the author wants to suggest in relation to the rain fall in the present case by way of parallel (while mthe rest of the scientific world has established the opposite).
Of course there is a parallel, namely that the cells are perfectly natural, as in the Kerala case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_rain_in_Kerala
It is not difficult to know these things I can find within 10s on Wiki, on top of having known this for ever simply by reading the daily news paper. So we can already see where this is going…
I agree that this story is a bit ‘sketchy’ and Jim B giving it 2 out of 10 doesn’t sound far off to me. But come on people, to suggest that this story be deleted from the blog when it’s no worse than much of what Michel Mann has published is being a bit harsh.
I forgot to add: This sort of Kerala rain was not the first in India and not the last; and it comes in different colours, too, and happens elsewhere on earth. So suggesting that it could be extraterestial is suggesting that extraterestial cells rain on earth ALL THE TIME! – Which is does not, of course.
Do read the Wiki I linked above.
As more than one person basically said the last time this kind of topic/subject came up, “what goes up, must come down” …
D. Cohen says:
January 14, 2013 at 10:04 pm
Hence, it is not really wise for us to be blasting out EM signals showing we exist as a technological civilization because this hypothetical intelligence is interested not in planets where plain old life exists but rather in planets where technological civilizations exist
EM doesn’t matter, our atmosphere gives us away. And you are making the unwarranted assumption that the goals of all alien civilizations are the same. This would be highly unlikely. Some would be interested in our planet, others in us, and perhaps even more wouldn’t give a damn.
Carbonacious say’s it all really, if carbon is manufactured by natural processes and we have moons around other planets swimming in methane, not only is our oil and gas supplies a natural product of the Earth, but life in the universe is most probably teeming. It would be the rule rather than the exception. The elemental tables are a universal constant and so it will be found is DNA as here on earth we have had some weird and wonderful creatures, eventually it will be found that DNA has steps much like the tables for the elements and when we eventually come across alien life forms, there will be similarities that can be recognised. There is but one set of maxims for the entire universe, it has been a disappointment in my life time that the physical sciences have not progressed an IOTA and our progress into the modern world has been achieved by experimental engineers. Climate science has been only the latest failing of science to progress.
Take all things with a pinch of salt but do not throw out the baby with the bath water as our scientists have done.
denniswingo says:
January 14, 2013 at 10:26 pm
Iron 56 is the last element that is produced by fusion reactions in stars. Fusion of iron consumes energy. The other poster was correct that elements up to an including iron are created by the stellar fusion process. It is only elements heavier than iron that are made in a supernova.
Some confusion here. Elements from Carbon and up to Iron are made during the evolution of a massive star that when iron is made explodes as a supernova. During the explosion half of the elements heavier than iron are made by the so-called r-process. In the last few thousand years of the life of a massive star [asymptotic giant branch], the other half is made by the s-process.
Why should it be extraterrestrial? We know that meteors found on Earth have been ejected from Mars, the Moon and possibly Mercury by large impacts. It is perfectly possible (indeed likely) that a rock ejected into solar orbit by a large impact on Earth would eventually re-impact on Earth. However, contamination is even more likely. Diatoms are often found far from water dispersed by wind.
Howling, howling bunk. Pathetically deluded. A sorrier exhibition even than Fleischmann and Pons stampeding to ruin their own reputation.
Remember the investigation on the tachyonic neutrino at CERN? That’s how it’s done.