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
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To Sparks:
You wrote: “Could the meteorite have come from Titian?”
I would love to see a meteorite created by the famed Italian painter!
However, I think you meant “Titan”, the moon of Saturn, known to
have an atmosphere of nitrogen, methane, and other constituents.
phlogiston says:
January 16, 2013 at 10:22 am
Some animal find themselves on the raft. They somehow survive a long journey to another continent – and include a male and female.
More likely just a pregnant or impregnated female.
dlgriscom says:
January 16, 2013 at 10:32 am
I agree. It has to be a meteorite from the Earth.
If it is a chondrite [as claimed] it cannot be from Earth, but it could have picked up some material ejected from Earth. It may be possible that Dr. W has been had in some way or has simply lost it.
I agree that it can’t be a true chondrite. But it could look like one. Anything ejected in the jetting phase at a speed greater than that of the impactor seems likely to condense into chaotic breccias. By contrast, my 27 kg granite boulder has to be interference-zone ejecta wherein the upward moving shock waves are partially canceled by tensile waves reflecting downward from the free surface, leading to pressure-gradient launching of relatively undamaged fragments at twice the particle velocity of the undisturbed shock waves (Melosh, p. 72)!
RE: David says:
January 16, 2013 at 6:25 am
First off, let’s be clear what we are discussing. We are talking about intelligent life capable of interstellar travel. Human beings are capable of interstellar travel, although presently it is too risky and way too expensive.
If there is another race also capable of interstellar travel, it is extremely unlikely that it is at the same stage of development as humanity. Millions of years is a short time period compared to the age of the galaxy. The galaxy is roughly 100,000 LY across, so Leif”s estimate of 300 MY to completely colonize the galaxy is probably overly conservative. 1/10th light speed should not be unlikely for humanity to eventually achieve, and the time it would take our descendants to colonize a new solar system (SS), then build and send out a new colony ship, is on the same order as the travel time to get to the next SS. I’d estimate the galaxy will be colonized by humans within 10 MY if not stopped by internal or external destruction. Once about ten SS have been colonized the race is fairly safe from anything but another more powerful race. The first race to get interstellar travel would most likely be strong enough to defend itself against a younger upstart, and if such a race existed the galaxy would already be filled with them.
If there were another race biologically capable of living on Earth, then Earth would have been colonized by them long ago, and we would not be here. The one way out of this is that there exists a race that rules the galaxy, prevents any other race from competing, and has preserved Earth as a zoo. If there is a race needing different living conditions, it’s possible that that race could have already colonized the galaxy and is ignoring us, but we would likely see some signs of that in unusual chemical abundances, electromagnetic signals, or unusual thermal signatures. If they have colonies everywhere, then there should be some close enough to detect.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 16, 2013 at 8:20 am
David says:
January 16, 2013 at 6:25 am
Life can perhaps evolve in many different forms, perhaps they find ours uninteresting. Perhaps they feel a moral directive not to interfere with a developing civilization, aka, “the prime directive”
If there are many out there, there will be a large spread in their ‘directives’. It only takes one to be interested. Which is the essence of Fermi’s paradox.
—————————————————————————————–
It sounds more like an assumption to me. One thing that always bothered me about the “Klingon” agresssive dominate and destroy mentality, is that the chances of such a society getting very deep into nature’s secrets and power is logically limited by the capacity for self destruction. The middle and dark age kingdoms, full of evil bastard dictator mentality, would fare very poorly with nuclear capacity, let alone with command of whatever force required for light speed plus travel. Today, we have the opportunity to observe Islamist as a throw back to such mentality, not that it is entirely lacking in one world goverment types, or in the robber barons of unrestrained capitolism. (IE, the evil bastard is the lower part of human nature and infects all systems, but must be overcome as we advance or if not brothers in peace, we will l be brothers in violent death) It appears to me quite a stretch to say that we should have been found by now by the one or hyper agressive species that is super advanced and super agresssive. It may welll be that there are other limitations to galatic travel more then a few thousand light years, and we are simply of little to know concern to a an advanced civilization thirty thousand light years away, that has thousands of closer rock like planets to explore.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=5&cad=rja&ved=0CFwQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.nationalgeographic.com%2Fnews%2Fbillions-of-earthlike-planets-found-in-milky-way%2F&ei=hQH3UMH_HMbtiQLZwYDgCQ&usg=AFQjCNGUR7R0R6WN8-qSWMpEvJB68b6ftg&sig2=xPx_27t0ojYZ3UFBKlz_0g
“Tens of billions of Earthlike worlds are strewn across the Milky Way, many of them circling stars very much like our own sun, astronomers said today.
Earlier research suggested that rocky planets might be much more abundant around small stars than sunlike ones. (Also see “New ‘Super Earth’ Found at Right Distance for Life.”)
But a fresh analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler mission, which launched in 2009, suggests this is not the case, according to new research presented at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California.
“We found that the occurrence of small planets around large stars was underestimated,” said astronomer Francois Fressin, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts”.
The Kepler mission has now discovered 1,094 additional potential planets (many of which could very well be Earth-like), bringing the total number of planet candidates discovered to date to 2,326.
David says:
January 16, 2013 at 11:51 am
It sounds more like an assumption to me
It is, indeed, an assumption, namely that it is not reasonable to think that all alien civilizations think like us. In other words, there must be a very broad spectrum of motivations. If there are multitudes of alien civilizations it is likely that there would be some that are motivated to colonize the Galaxy, and it only takes one. If there are no others we’ll be the first to accomplice that in about 300 million years, if our civilization survives the next few centuries.
I have checked the Journal of Cosmology — which is edited by Carl H. Gibson and Chandra Wickramasinghe himself. The paper does not yet appear in the online (the only) journal yet. It is numbered correctly to be the next volume in order. There is no indication there whatever that this paper has been peer reviewed — as it is written by one of the journal editors.
The video shows what appear to be rice farmers picking up and handling the meteorite fragments in a rice paddy (the rice is still quite short, but the paddy doesn’t appear to be flooded, at least at the time of collection). Who knows what contamination has taken place in this reportedly porous sample, pre-soaked in a muddy rice paddy, collected by rice farmers and the Sri Lankan Health Minister.
I do not think we have a Eureka! moment here yet.
PS: I am a firm believer that there is, must be, life on other planets circling other stars — but have yet to see physical evidence of this yet here on Earth.
Assuming for the sake of discussion the suspected lifeform is in fact a diatom, it follows that the lifeform is virtually certain to have originated from the Earth and not from an extraterrestrial location. Diatoms are relatively modern organisms about 200 million years old give or take some. Their less sophisticated predeceessors were around at least 4,000 million years or longer before diatoms showed up on the scene. The likeliehood of parallel evolution between separate lifeforms on Earth and an extraterrestrial location to produce similar photosynthetic and pelagic lifeforms is virtually nil. If a diatom like organism arrives on Earth in a meteorite, it is pretty much a given that the diatom and rock were ejecta from a major impact on the Earth, which has subsequently been drawn by gravity back into the Earth’s atmosphere.
Leif Svalgaard says:
“If they were hostile, we wouldn’t be here, they would. That leaves another question: are we them? [but don’t know it]. Wickramasinghe may think so.”
If so, since we have proven to be “hostile”, then so are they, unless they perhaps out grew it, which would seem unlikely. So, we cannot be them or they would have eaten us by now or at least taken over, even if we are them. Ask the American Indian, or anyone else standing on a piece of land anywhere on our planet, where they got it.
Of the thousands of meteorites that have been catalogued and examined, is there one that has been accepted as earth-derived? An earthly origin for this specimen cannot be be reconciled with its description as a chondrite. At this point, the article appears to be the work of quacks. The allusion to red rain confirms the quackery, in my view.
dlgriscom says:
January 16, 2013 at 12:32 pm
I agree that it can’t be a true chondrite. But it could look like one. Anything ejected in the jetting phase at a speed greater than that of the impactor seems likely to condense into chaotic breccias
The chondrules are so characteristic and unique that no-one with even the smallest amount of expertise would to fooled by anything else.
Jim G says:
January 16, 2013 at 1:10 pm
So, we cannot be them
How do we know? Now, the point is that if they can be here, they will be everywhere [as we’ll be in 300 million years] and we should see more signs of them. But we don’t.
Not a diatom, its a sunken hull from a very tiny boat.
Problem is; finding the tiny passengers to determine if they came in peace.
Does everyone remember the days in the past when there were pictures of flying saucers and the like? These were grainy and of poor quality. Believers in aliens would say there is no proof because cameras were not available to document these visits.
What I think is interesting is what has not happened.
There are millions of cameras out there. Yet, there are no pictures of flying saucers!
Pictures of cute nephews, dogs, wonderful dishes at quaint restaurants in the neighborhood, sunrises, sunsets, self portraits, girl and boy friends, beaches, forests, ….
But no flying saucers!
Proof positive there is no such thing.
Why would anyone travel light years to come here in the first place? There’s plenty of raw materials along the way. You name it, water, alcohol, gold, silver, diamonds, etc. is available in abundance. No need to plunder the Earth.
It would make perfect sense to send messages, but, so far, no messages.
If they do arrive, I hope they start with Washington. It would be nice to deal with less noise from there.
Maybe we could give them the national debt.
And . . .
– – – – – – – –
Jim G & Leif,
I am enjoying you discussion. Thanks.
I think we know only one thing wrt other intelligent life in the universe.
What we know is that because human beings exist we know natural processes are capable of combining to establish viable intelligent life of some form (which may be nothing like human beings). That is all we know.
A Corollary of that single thing we know is: nature’s capability to establish other viable intelligent life does not imply that it has or will.
Now for only a few if the many things that are just presumed out of nothing:
a) presumption of picking a estimate when an intelligent life (including ours) would have capability of either exploration focused travel or colonization focused travel on the intergalactic scale or the intragalactic scale.
b) presumption of the duration of travel of some presumed capability to go intergalactic or intragalactic. It could take longer than the duration of human beings existence to date
c) presumption of the age of an intelligent life’s existence
Ad nauseum presumption.
It is
turtlespresumptions all the way down. : )This is fun.
John
Peter Hannan says:
January 16, 2013 at 1:23 am
I agree strongly with your comments concerning Karl Popper and the scientific method and its corruption in politically motivated non-science. Mike Hulme’s 2007 Guardian article is clearly a “smoking gun” in this regard.
Its curious that Popper built on the work of another Hulme in his scientific rejection of induction. The Hulme in question argued against induction but in the context of a rejection of the scientific method. However Popper turned around Hulme’s work on induction to formulate principles that, conversely, strengthen and safeguard and more correctly define the true scientific method – see The Problem of Induction.
Karl Popper: “I hold with Hume that there simply is no such logical entity as an inductive inference; or, that all so-called inductive inferences are logically invalid – and even inductively invalid, to put it more sharply. We have many examples of deductively valid inferences, and even some partial criteria of deductive validity; but no example of an inductively valid inference exists.
I agree its probably from Earth.
The professors could have faked it. Wont be the first time nor the last.
Or it was ejected from teh earth, or teh metor got comtamianted, or, who knows.
But if IS from space, its a great finding.
It strongly suggests life is quite common out there.
But the most remarkable thing, its very similar to life on earth.
How did that happen?
Say they found a car . It had 3 deuces and a 4 speed and a 389. Just like my uncles GTO
I’d figure this. Thy were both designed by Pontiac.
What would you figure?
.
John Whitman says:
January 16, 2013 at 5:42 pm
What we know is that because human beings exist we know natural processes are capable of combining to establish viable intelligent life of some form (which may be nothing like human beings). That is all we know.
No, we know a very important fact: there is no sign of other intelligent life either on earth on in the sky.
a) presumption of picking a estimate when an intelligent life (including ours) would have capability of either exploration focused travel or colonization focused travel on the intergalactic scale or the intragalactic scale.
We actually had that capability 40 years ago when we launched the Voyagers who are now leaving the solar system. Expanding on that to include life-support, etc, is just engineering.
b) It could take longer than the duration of human beings existence to date, and
c) presumption of the age of an intelligent life’s existence
None of this matters, when a [autonomous] probe is launched it could arrive, build, and launch similar probes, etc, without requiring the original civilization to continue existence.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 16, 2013 at 2:21 pm
“If they were hostile, we wouldn’t be here, they would. That leaves another question: are we them? [but don’t know it]. Wickramasinghe may think so.”
Jim G says:
January 16, 2013 at 1:10 pm
So, we cannot be them
How do we know? Now, the point is that if they can be here, they will be everywhere [as we’ll be in 300 million years] and we should see more signs of them. But we don’t.
We share 98-99% of chimpanzee DNA, and 60% of the DNA of fruit flies. We are not a xenobiotic on earth – if we were it would be obvious genetically, and its not.
Given our limited technological capabilitiees, resources, and time, it should be no surprise that extraterrestrial civilizations in this and other galaxies have not yet been detected. Radio transmissions are generally difficult to detect at present beyond a distance of one light year, which is less than a fourth of the distance just to thee nearest Centauri star system. Any attempts to inter-communicate by radio transmissions over distances of 100 to 100,000 light years require future technologies involving difficult to imagine levels of power. Also, the transmissions would need to be narrowly focusedd and thereby miss most other targets in the Milky Way Galaxy unless specifically targeted.
.
Prior to the Second World War flight tests of the Vought XF5U Flying Flapjack disc shaped aircraft, UFO in the United States and elsewhere around the world were more commonly described as huge cigar shaped flying objects, rather than flying saucers. Kinda funny how the aliens changed model styles about that time.
I would figure that I was on the wrong thread.
Re mpainter’s query about any evidence for origin earthly [earthian?] of meteorites……there’s plenty and the little beasties are called tektites. There’s hundreds of thousands of them. A low trajectory meteorite impact throws material up through the atmosphere which melts on re-entry.They are all glass.
Wikipedia gives a good summary…..http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektite
Meteorites derived from Mars.There’s some evidence for them and even, some suggest, possible evidence of biochemicals. That’s extremely equivocal though.
See Wikipedia again..http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite
Carbonaceous chondrites are a different matter. They are probably derived from the asteroid belt and represent bits and pieces of the solids that aggregated to form the solar system.
And Wikipedia yet again…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonaceous_chondrite
Diatoms have no right to be wandering around in this sort of material.
Diatoms in Prof. Wickramasinghe’s meteorite came from the mud in which it landed.
Life else where in the solar system, galaxy or universe ? A totally different question. Most likely somewhere but we have no evidence for it. Our first encounter with extra-terrestrial life is unlikely to be with creatures identical to those currently living in muddy ponds on our planet at the moment.
D. Patterson says:
January 16, 2013 at 7:28 pm
Given our limited technological capabilities, resources, and time, it should be no surprise that extraterrestrial civilizations in this and other galaxies have not yet been detected.
It is not about us detecting them via radio [which they may not use anymore], but about them detecting and visiting us.
“If they were hostile, we wouldn’t be here, they would. That leaves another question: are we them? [but don’t know it]. Wickramasinghe may think so.”
Conjecture and science fiction are fun because they give license for grand ideas. I remember that Arthur C Clarke’s notions were rather large. In 2001 A Space Odyssey mankind has achieved the stage of development where a spacecraft is able to reach Saturn’s largest moon, Iapetus. There, the astronaut becomes God and He returns to earth to save humankind from total destruction, sort of like Michael Mann.
GregK says: January 16, 2013 at 7:48 pm
Re mpainter’s query about any evidence for origin earthly [earthian?] of meteorites……there’s plenty and the little beasties are called tektites. There’s hundreds of thousands of them. A low trajectory meteorite impact throws material up through the atmosphere which melts on re-entry. They are all glass.
==================================
But in fact, tektites are not meteorites. They are formed from melt that is ejected from the point of impact when a cosmic body strikes the earth. This view is adhered to by a vast majority of those who study these things. A handful of individuals believe that tektites derive from the moon.
As you pointed out, tektites are glass, and no meteorite is glass. To call a tektite a meteorite is simply incorrect terminology.