Alien Bacteria May Have Landed in India

coastal984 writes "CNN & Popular Science are reporting that a scientist in India believes he may have discovered alien life in water collected from a unusually colored rainstorm. From the article: 'So how to explain them? Louis speculates that the particles could be extraterrestrial bacteria adapted to the harsh conditions of space and that the microbes hitched a ride on a comet or meteorite that later broke apart in the upper atmosphere and mixed with rain clouds above India.'"

Um

[hawkbug]

Yeah, or they could be from some mountain top somewhere or from any other number of sources.

Sorry, this is not news

[Aging_Newbie]

This story has been surfacing periodically since

"blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis's home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001"

but it never seems to reach a conclusion. Precisely why the sample has not been distributed to a variety of scientists continues to amaze me. I would think it would not take too long for a group of scientists to qualify or reject his hypothesis.

Panspermia is not a bad hypothesis but lack of rigor in evaluating it does little for its credibility.

Ahh yes, "popular" science....

[argStyopa]

..more like "hysterically overblown science with little basis for their hyperbole but it sounds pretty cool..." ie the Weekly World News of Science.

When you consider that JUST in ONE LAKE (Yellowstone Lake) in a heavily-studied US national park: "...One park biodiversity expert believes that 99% of the park's microbes and 75% of its invertebrates remain undiscovered.", I guess I'd assume that these strange little structures are Earth-generated, before I'd start reaching to outer space for explanations of their origin.

Re:Sorry, this is not news

[shotfeel]

Even so, you don't send it to an astromomer. Send it to a biologist, a chemist, or, hey, even a biochemist to evaluate. Does this guy go to a lawyer for medical advice (or vice versa)?

We have yet to determine how he came to the conclusion there is not DNA (he's a solid state physicist). Its really hard to go to any "puddle" of water and not find DNA, even if there aren't any living organisms (just ask anyone who does DNA work how careful they have to be to avoid contaminating samples).

Re:Sorry, this is not news

[LionMage]

Agreed, although there are astronomers and astrophysicists who also dabble in astrobiology, as I pointed out in a response to a sibling comment to yours. Just because someone specializes in one field doesn't mean they don't have a right to diversify and branch out into other fields. Furthermore, what input would a carbon-chauvanist biologist have about a life form that was not recognizable to biologists as "life as we know it?" A biologist can speak authoritatively about biological processes that are understood, but no biologist has any training in looking for genetic information carried by anything other than DNA.

(Yes, I know there's work being done with prions, but those are self-replicating protein structures which, to my knowledge, don't carry information we'd think of as "genetic" in nature. Prions don't form cells around themselves, to the best of my knowledge, nor do they seem to "code" for structures other than more of themselves.)

Astrobiology, being a speculative field of science, has people in it drawn from a much broader spectrum of scientific endeavor, and as such is a bit more immune to prejudice and narrow-minded thinking; astrobiologists routinely speculate about "exotic" biochemistries.

So... why not give samples to an astronomer? It's not as crazy an idea as you seem to suggest. The tendency in the modern world to overly-compartmentalize and over-specialize can retard the progress of science. Considering that the astronomer in question, Prof. Wickramasinghe, was one of the co-authors of the seminal paper on the theory of panspermia, why not let him participate in the research?

Many scientists have profitably crossed between disciplines in the past. I don't see why we should take a provincial view in this particular case.

Presigious?

[CheshireCatCO]

The article claims that the study was published in the "presigious" journal, Astrophysics and Space Science. I'm an astronomer and I've never heard of it. And yes, this does matter: a major find like ET life will have journals like Science and Nature tripping over themselves to publish it. Every step down from there is an indiciation that someone didn't think that the research was reasonable. Of course, the fact that this is a solid-state physicist who published this and not, say, a biologist is disturbing, too.

Also, I'm going to be a bit junior-high here and point out that "Astrophysics and Space Science" has a very unfortunate acronym and must be difficult to cite with its abbreviation.

Re:Ahh yes, "popular" science....

[Dr. Photo]

Frankly, given the fact that outer space is like FIVE TIMES bigger than the Earth, I'd say that Occam's Razor puts the burden of proof squarely on the "It came from Earth" crowd. ;-)

Five times bigger, folks. That's a lot of space!

Chemist

[Mark_MF-WN]

I'd say the chemist/biochemist might be the best bet. Really, what is the hallmark of life, other than that it causes unusual chemical reactions to take place? You don't typically see CO_2 turning into sugar when bombarded by sunlight, unless there's a cyanobacteria or something around to do the job. Sugar tends to be fairly stable in O_2 without monsters to catalyze its breakdown. So if you seal up a wee little ecosystem, and catch it changing in some way that is inconsistent with simpler, non-living chemical reactions, that's a good clue that you might have a sample worth probing further.

Actually, now that I think about it, wouldn't a chemosynthetic creature (or what would be called a chemosynthetic creature were it part of our tree of life) be hard to detect, since they typically just expedite reactions that take place anyway? Like metal oxidation?