It never seems to fail.
One scientist gets all excited, announces that he’s discovered Alien life, then has his claims quickly squashed. This is what seems to have happened again to NASA scientist Richard Hoover, who had his paper titled “Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites” published in the Journal of Cosmology Friday.
Hoover claims to have found a meteorite containing molecular fossils that lack Nitrogen. An element required for life on Earth. Basically the killing two birds with one space stone. Proving not only the existence of extra-terrestrial life in one form or another, but also the theory of Panspermia.
According to a report in The Guardian, the remains lack nitrogen, necessary for life on Earth, which led Hoover to his conclusions. As Hoover explains in the journal, the filaments “found embedded in freshly fractured interior surfaces of [certain meteorites] are interpreted as the fossilized remains of prokaryotic microorganisms that grew in liquid regimes on the parent body of the meteorites before they entered the Earth’s atmosphere.”
If Hoover’s claims are true, his findings will support a theory called “panspermia.” Panspermia suggests that space rocks spread life to different planets. The theory doesn’t necessarily explain how all of life began — as a recent Scientific American piece states, “panspermia theories merely push the problem of life’s origin into outer space.”
But that still doesn’t seem to be good enough. Never matter the fact that his findings have been put through the reviewing gauntlet by 100+ independent scientists in the same field, there always seem to be haters out there. And it pisses me off.
…before anyone gets too excited, a little history lesson is in order. Back in 1996, TIME’s cover trumpeted the astonishing words ”Life on Mars.” A NASA scientist claimed he’d found evidence that ancient bacteria had once lived inside a Martian rock that had been picked up in Antarctica (the rock had been blasted from Mars’ surface by an asteroid impact long ago and fallen to earth as a meteorite). Newspapers, magazines and TV broadcasts were all over the story, because while alien visitations are a staple of the UFO crowd, this discovery had a pedigree. Not only was the scientist on NASA’s payroll, it was NASA itself that made the announcement at a major press conference. The paper, meanwhile, had been published in Science, one of the world’s top scientific journals, which gave it even more apparent gravitas.
Before long, though, the whole thing went away, as other astronomers took a good look at the evidence and pronounced it completely unconvincing.
(Read more)
You just had to bring up the Mars rock, didn’t you Time.com? Low blow dude, low blow. My inner child just can’t take anymore disappointment people!
Why can’t we just accept the fact that even if it’s proven that Hoover’s findings are in-fact wrong (which is looking not likely as each day passes and it’s reviewed again and again) that it doesn’t matter? There are aliens somewhere out there! Period.
The only thing that we should be waiting for, isn’t to find out if we’re all alone in the Universe or not, but to just finally get the official announcement of the inevitable fact that there is life elsewhere! And most likely…a lot of it. The cosmos is just too big, and too amazing for there not to be other life forms beyond our comprehension. A fact seemingly brought home each week as terrestrial scientists continually keep coming out with one amazing thing … after another.
Come to think of it, we can probably just throw the whole Drake equation into the bin and replace it with the certainty of finding of extra-terrestrial life being just as inevitable as the craziness that is Charlie Sheen being auto-tuned on YouTube. It’s just going to happen people, and everyone just needs to get used to it!
So…to sum up…
Duh. Aliens!
UPDATE: And yet another Charlie Sheen remix…
