Alien Rain Over India

tintinaujapon writes "The Observer is reporting that scientists may have found the first evidence of panspermia, the idea promoted by Hoyle (among others) that life on earth was seeded from space, in samples of a strange rain which fell over India for two months in 2001. To quote the article: "There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers."" This is a continuation of a story two months back or so.

One big problem

[smooth wombat]

From the article:

But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense.

He didn't collect uncontaminated samples. He collected samples that had, apparently, collected in puddles. Depending on where those puddles were, ground, steel barrel, rooftop, squeezed from a soaked shirt, etc, they were not the same as putting out a clean jar and collecting the rain as it fell.

It would be nice if these samples had been collected in the correct manner then a more convincing argument could be made that what was found came from space and was not of terrestrial origins.

This is like people who have cancer, undergo treatment for a while then stop. Then they resort to prayer to cure them. If they're cured they claim it was the prayer that did the work. However, since they had already undergone treatment, we can't say for sure which helped the person. The results are contaminated by their original treatment.

Same thing in this instance.

Too bad the facts are so humdrum.

[Ancient_Hacker]

I *see*--- there's stuff that if his claims are true, would be the biggest news since I don't know when. But it's been sitting around for FIVE YEARS and not confirmed by anybody else. And apparently he hasnt given samples to other scientists. And it hasnt appeared on the front page of the NYT.

One might surmise that the stuff is something more placid, like common earth dust, pollen, bee-poop, grasshopper-poop, or any number of other things of-this-Earth.

A real scientist would have gone out of his way to compare the funny stuff to various earth items, in a good-faith effort to identify the stuff. Not just do batch analyses of the constituent elements. There's 1000's of things that might have that mix of elements and NOT be from off-planetary sources.

Re:Questions

[RetiredMidn]

1. How could a single meteor/comet cause _two months_ of red rain?

All in the same place? (More appropriately, only reported in one place?)

Come on, /. When I want to waste my time on crap like this, I turn to digg.

Occam's Razor

[maggard]

Wow - Hemos posted this & not ScuttleMonkey? Usually SM is the one who falls for the "I read it on the Intarweb so it must be true!" psuedo-science...

Look, that there's lots of stuff from off-planet in rain is well known and trivially documented; a couple of tons a day comes down. Heck, run a magnet over the gunk in a rainwater drain and a fair proportion of what gets pulled up will be extra-terrestrial in origin. This is one of those classic easy Science Fair projects.

There's even a popular theory of raindrop formation that requires these high altitude extra-terrestrial fines as the nucleus for starting droplet cascades.

However, 2 months of material entering the Earth's atmosphere over a limited geographical area - there's no mechanism that would permit this. The Earth rotates every 24 hours as it revolves around our Sun: What could be impacting our planet on a schedule that has it ingressing at distinct 24 hour intervals over 2 months/a series of 60, to a non-equatorial location?

Someone really needs to get this guy a globe, or better yet an orrery [wikipedia.org].

Sure it's possible that the rain contaminant isn't upwind mineralogical fines - sure it could be biological fines. Pollen is the obvious source, they had a huge bloom of something odd upwind that year. I know my house gets covered in yellow 'dust' every spring from all the nearby trees, red is just as possible.

But "it's alien life from ooouter spaaace!..." - no. Not saying that couldn't happen, hasn't happened, isn't happening, but this wouldn't be the pattern and there are too many much more prosaic explanations than these extraordinary claims.

Re:Or it could be

[eno2001]

Inefficiency is relative Earthman. I've met beings several eons old who have done this sort of thing before. To them, such a terraforming process would be similar to your informal time unit known as "fractions of a second". Do not fall into the trap of measuring the universe by your own perspective.

Re:According to the current New Scientist...

[shotfeel]

Its red, so of course its blood -the traces of iron found are bound to the hemoglobin (which carries oxygen) in the red blood cells.

It couldn't possibly be the rain was red because the traces of iron were simply iron oxide (AKA rust) which also turns water red.