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.

Or it could be

[The_Mr_Flibble]

An Invasion force ?

According to the current New Scientist...

[meringuoid]

... this may actually be blood. The particles do look quite like red blood cells, and that would explain the lack of DNA found in them.

It's almost as outlandish as 'the meteor was full of alien bugs', though; what we seem to have with this hypothesis was 'the meteor burst in the middle of a flock of bats and liquidised them'...

No link, the website article is subscription-only. Sorry.

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[meringuoid]

The question is whether something like that could survive in the harsh radiation of space.

Apollo 12 landed near the Surveyor probe, which had landed a few years previously. The astronauts broke off a section and returned it to Earth. It was then found that bacteria had survived on Surveyor, on the Moon, in spore form - and once returned, came back to life and started replicating again.

I've also read lately (I believe it was in the current New Scientist) that an experiment on bacteria was sent up on Columbia. On being recovered, it turned out that the three cultures that were intended to be in there had all been killed off by the heat of reentry - but that a contaminant strain had survived and thrived inside the unbroken sealed container.

Bacteria are tough, and we can assume that anything leaving Earth is infested with them.

Questions

[LS]

1. How could a single meteor/comet cause _two months_ of red rain?
2. Why the crys of "bullshit" from other researchers? There is a piece of evidence, not just a claim. It seems easy to figure out what's going on by analyzing the contents of that bottle.

LS

Re:According to the current New Scientist...

[miskatonic alumnus]

Charles Fort strikes again.

Bullshit.

[TangoCharlie]

My favourite quote from the article is

Not everyone is convinced by the idea, of course. Indeed most researchers think it is highly dubious. One scientist who posted a message on Louis's website described it as 'bullshit'.

The slashdot posting would almost have you believe that Aliens had actually landed. Sheesh!

Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001

[m0nstr42]

On being recovered, it turned out that the three cultures that were intended to be in there had all been killed off by the heat of reentry - but that a contaminant strain had survived and thrived inside the unbroken sealed container.

That's an important point, though. In both of those cases, whatever lived was shielded during re-entry. A spore on an asteroid or other "natural" projectile would experience similar (worse, probably) extremes and it seems less and less likely they could survive "re-entry" (entry, rather?). Could a lone bacteria/spore/whatever that was just "floating" on its own through space survive entry into the atmosphere without being burned up?

My guess (IANA cosmologist) is that after a long journey through space it would have been accellerated to great speed by passing nearby massive objects, so despite not having much mass the friction would still be pretty intense.

Peter Gabriel is an alien

[bjb]

Hmm.. after seeing images of the guy during his "makeup years" (1972-early 80's), this now make sense:

Peter Gabriel -- "Red Rain"
Red rain is coming down
Red rain, Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me

I am standing up at the water's edge in my dream
I cannot make a single sound as you scream
It can't be that cold, the ground is still warm to touch
This place is so quiet, sensing that storm

Red rain is coming down
Red rain, Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me

Well I've seen them buried in a sheltered place in this town
They tell you that this rain can sting, and look down
The aliens have created life for us
Hay ay ay no pain, Seeing no red at all, see no rain

Red rain is coming down
Red rain, Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me

Red rain-
There sprouts a human, o'er there a puppy
To return again and again
Just let the red rain splash you
Let the rain fall on your skin
It's like fertilizer, oh yeah
To create a new child

Red rain is coming down
Red rain, Red rain is pouring down
Pouring down all over me
And I can't watch it yet
No eye formed yet
It's so hard to lay down in all of this
Red rain is coming down
Red rain is pouring down
Red rain is coming down all over me
I see it, Red rain is coming down
Red rain is pouring down
Red rain is coming down all over me
I'm bathing in it, Red rain coming down
Red rain is coming down
Red rain is coming down all over me
I'm begging you, Red rain coming down
Red rain coming down
Red rain coming down
Red rain coming down
Over me in the red red sea, Over me, Over me, Red rain

(apologies to Mr. Gabriel)

Re:Ancient Semitic religions

[ArcherB]

Well, the Bible does speak of rain and rivers running red with blood. Now we've seen it happen. Start looking for a plague of toads next and be ready with the sheep's blood.

New Scientist article

[woodlouse_man]

Read this in New Scientist over the weekend. Link here (but you need to be a subscriber)

http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/mg1892541 1.100 [newscientistspace.com]

Very interesting article, with several possible explanations.

The most plausible, to my mind, is the mammalian red blood cells. They seem to be the right shape, and have no DNA (like the particles).

As they said in the NS article, the question really remains is - if they are mamallian red blood cells, how did the clouds get seeded with them int he first place?

Alternative Explanations?

[Lord_Dweomer]

Can anybody here suggest some plausible alternatative explanations? Is it at all possible that minerals or "organic soup" or something was reabsorbed enmasse into the atmosphere and rained down? I mean....I am DEFINITELY not religious...but this is a little creepy (read:cool) even for me. Raining blood? Isn't that one of the signs of the apocolypse or something?

Re:Or it could be

[xtracto]

But kind of interesting on principle. As we humans make something similar (in a smaller scale) trying to plant trees in the earth as they get CO_2 and and release O_2...

Of course, although the theory is good, in practice it is not working that good. On the other hand, we are being very good at improving this CO_2 emissions don't you think?

Re:Or it could be

[bri2000]

Another similar theory (which I found quite amusing - while hastening to add that I am quite aware it is basically BS, has no evidence to support it and is not very credible) is that an alien race with an extremely long time horizon looks for planets which are capable of sustaining life (for the sake of argument say planets on which water is in liquid form), seeds them with bacteria or RNA strands or whatever then sits back for a couple of hundred million years while an ecosystem evolves so there's plenty for them to eat and hydro-carbons to use (for plastics if not fuel) when they get here. Obviously there's a risk that intellegent life will evolve and use all these resources before they arrive but if they've seeded plenty of planets this shouldn't be too much of a set-back for them. They just eliminate the infestation, leave things to recover and go somewhere else for now.

Possible Strange Earthlife More the Point

[Rob Carr]

New Scientist has a more extensive article titled Alien rain over India [newscientistspace.com]. The possible causes for 50 tons of the red gunk range from panspermia to sand to high flying bats killed by an exploding meteor. Somehow, I think panspermia is more likely than the bats, although that's not saying much.

More interesting is the idea that "alien" life might originate on Earth. Modern techniques involve culturing and DNA analysis that assume standard DNA in an organism: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. Viruses can have RNA, but they're not considered alive (that's another argument for another day).

There are other nucleic acids and other nucleic acid pairs. There might even be molecules that could polymerize and act as hereditary subunits. Such life wouldn't have to come from space. Standard theory taught that several kinds of life might have come from the prebiotic soup, but only one survived.

We now know that's not exactly true. There are a few organisms that don't use the exact standard DNA code. The mitochondria in your cells are a perfect example, although they're no longer free-living independent organisms.

What else is out there? The possibility that there is a parallel and intertwined ecosystem is becoming a hot topic in biology.

Rains of frogs, seaweed, sand, and other things aren't uncommon. A rain of non-standard bacteria isn't beyond possibility. Of course, neither is a government experiment on deploying biological weapons, although 50 tons is a lot, whether English or Metric. A foul-up in the biochemistry or some weird damage to the DNA is still more likely. But wouldn't it be fun if it turned out to be Earthlife that's alien?

Re:Too bad the facts are so humdrum.

[Becquerel]

The story has got the front page of the NewScientist this week (no doubt where the origional interest started), a publication i trust far more than and newspaper. In that article the scientist makes the (previously unpublished) claim that:

...[if noone can prove what it is] someone will have to verify the observation that Louis [the scientist] made whicheven he finds astonishing: that the cells replicate. In earlier unpublished papers, Louis says he cultured the red rain cells in unconventional nutrients, such as cedar wood oil, and showed that these DNA devoid mcrobes divide happily at a temperature of 300oC. Louis admits he left these claims out of his latest paper because he thought they would be considered "too exaordinary"(NewScientist 4th March 2006)

Non DNA based replication would seem like pretty good evidence for alien life.... if you believe him.

His latest paper to be published in the respectable Astrophysics and Space Science Can be found here [arxiv.org]. Dr Godfrey Louis website, with a pic of the particles and mirrors to this paper and links to other papers, here [vsnl.com]

Re:New Scientist article

[bcmm]

Two other points made in the NS article:
50 TONS of mammal RBCs? That's a lot of blood. I don't know the proportion of RBC in blood by weight, but it works out as a lot of blood.
More importantly, red blood cells would swell by osmosis and burst in rain water, probably before reaching the ground.

And then there were the "unofficial" claims he didn't want to publish yet, such as the claim that they can divide, and the claims about conditions under which they can divide (300C in ceder oil? WTF?).