Comments on: “Noah’s Ark” via Meteorite?

By: Anabel Schilling

Anabel Schilling — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:18:41 +0000

scientist don’t know crap,someday they’ll land and the nonbelievers will look like what they are. http://www.factasy.com/civil_war/

By: ChrisD

ChrisD — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 19:58:22 +0000

@Nullius #9:

Well, it sounds like rubbish to me

I think you’re absolutely right. How weird is that?

By: Anthony McCarthy

Anthony McCarthy — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:46:17 +0000

No idea if it will turn out to be remnants of life, though the idea doesn’t bother me either way.

As to whether this is support for the entirely unsupported idea of panspermia, I’d want a somewhat larger sample from a number of places even farther away in just this galaxy, which is almost certainly not going to get to us in time for the April issue. Not without things happening that would probably pose some basic problems for physics. I hate to have to tutor people in Douglas Adams, but the universe is big. A lot bigger than our solar system.

By: Bangalorean

Bangalorean — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 10:50:18 +0000

There are chances that bacteria found in Antarctica, Siberia or Alasks.. might have resulted their presense there due to Volcanic eruptions occurred elsewhere on earth, which throws up tons of rocks laced with bacteria miles high into the sky and in all directions. Those rocks has to come back to Earth in similar condition as meteorite showers..

By: Coturnix

Coturnix — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 05:47:23 +0000

This seems to be happening more and more often now. MSM swallows bad science stories bait, hook and sinker, and the science bloggers debunk it. See Rosie Radfield, David Dobbs and PZ Myers for starters….

By: Rick Fienberg

Rick Fienberg — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 23:51:57 +0000

Here’s another informed commentary on the paper, similar to Phil Plait’s:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/did_scientists_discover_bacter.php

By: Andy Wakefield

Andy Wakefield — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 23:16:18 +0000

It would seem that Hoover is also engaging in resume enhancement. Does he or does he not have a Ph.D. i.e. is he really “Dr.” Hoover? http://nasawatch.com/archives/2011/03/nasa-msfc-astro.html

By: LJ

LJ — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 22:49:32 +0000

Thank you to all those who have seen through this. Unfortunately the events of the last two days show exactly how science should NOT work, that is in the blogosphere where this work was “published” and hyped. Rather, the time-tested method is to advance an hypothesis to explain a phenomenon. If the hypothesis does a better job of explaining the data, and has better predictive power than alternate hypotheses, it is conditionally accepted. But in this case there are far better alternative hypotheses.

And for those who think NASA has found fern spores or any life form from outer space orbiting earth, if only it were so. It would make my job a lot more exciting as I actually am a professional astrobiologist / microbiologist at NASA working on this kind of thing. if organisms are found elsewhere (something I DO hope and think there is reason to believe is true), there is very little chance they will be identical down to the genus to anything on earth. Even if the two life forms are evolutionarily related from way back when (think ~4 billion years) there would have been so much time for them to diverge that they would be unlikely to be identical to modern species on earth. Cyanobacteria apparently evolve very slowly (well, anyway are morphologically conservative) but still….

Finally, in terms of the lunar-forming impact kicking up life, this occurred about 50-100 million years after the earth formed which the earth was likely too hot for liquid water and certainly life.

By: LJ

LJ — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 05:29:58 +0000

Note to Buckeye: I agree completely with The Bad. As for The Good, Richard Hoover (I am pretty sure does not have a Ph.D. – see http://www.batse.msfc.nasa.gov/colloquia/abstracts_summer07/rhoover.html) is NOT a professional biologist. His excellent credentials are in engineering, not biology or paleontology. His is the 2009 recipient of the Gold Medal of SPIE, the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, which seems to be his home community. I would like to hear the comments of a professional microfossil expert, but it doesn’t ring true to this astrobiologist.

By: Buckeye

Buckeye — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 04:28:23 +0000

The bad:
A more respected scientific publication than the “Journal of Cosmology” would have been preferable.
There was no peer review before publication, which would have lent the findings a lot more credence.
Evidence similar to this has been debunked in the past.

The good:
Dr. Hoover has excellent credentials, and his findings appear grounded in research, not personal belief.
There’s complete sunshine on the findings and evidence, with an open call for peer review.
The findings of Dr. Hoover’s peers, whether they back him up or tear his research apart, will be available for all to see.

To Neil: Here’s a link to the research, no fee: http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html