Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Is There Life Out There Or Are We Just The Stars Of A Lonely Party

     First off I would like to apologize for a lack of updates recently, some personal issues came up and I have had a hard time keeping a regular schedule.
     Nonetheless I had to poke my head up when the blogosphere erupted over news from the Journal of Cosmology. According to the Journal, Dr. Richard Hoover of NASA has stated that there is a chance that a meteorite that he was looking at has fossilized alien life. Pretty cool eh?

Hello there neighbor?
     Still, there are problems with this and I will lay them down:

  1. There is always risk of contamination, according to the article it is not a solid chunk of meteor, its fractured, and on top of that it didn't fall in some desolate wasteland, like Antarctica, where there is little in the way of life to crawl in, it fell in Africa, which is teeming with life.
  2. There is a chance that it isn't even life at all, there is much in the universe that looks like life but really isn't. I have looked at rocks which look like it has tracks, but these were just results of wind or tides. While these have a high carbon content which is promising, carbon is not solely unique to the kingdom of life.
  3. SPACE IS BIG and life is small. If you took a sample of Earth right now, yes it would likely have something like a piece of pollen, but go back a couple hundred million years, which is the maximum extent that life in our Solar system has got if it were to exist, and your probability of finding something drops down to around zero.
  4. Its happened before. We are constantly looking for life and getting duped. See 3 for why
     Do I hope that this is actually life? I do, I really do, it would just about be the most important scientific discovery of my lifetime were it to happen, this is my Higgs boson. I am not on the other hand holding any expectations of these claims, there is just too low a chance and too large a contamination ability.
     It would be cool though eh?

May the stars shine brightly in your skies.
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4 comments:

  1. Jen SchneiderMarch 8, 2011 at 10:26 AM

    That life looks like spaghetti!

    Thanks for sharing this. Pls keep us posted as to what they find out.

    ReplyDelete
  2. GeologyJackMarch 8, 2011 at 12:14 PM

    I was going to read the whole report through sometime this evening and do a concise summary, its fairly interesting and appears to have a bit more validity that the one back in 96

    ReplyDelete
  3. Benito El JefeMarch 9, 2011 at 4:16 PM

    What do you think the odds are that this scientist is committing scientific misconduct? You think he might know it is Earth life and is claiming it isn't for fame? I hope not, but I always seem skeptical about things like this.

    ReplyDelete
  4. GeologyJackMarch 11, 2011 at 10:26 AM

    Admittedly I think it is fairly low, he has a very high position in space sciences

    ReplyDelete

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