Life In The Universe

[Mighty AC]

In this very cool experiment, scientists sent weather balloons up to the stratosphere, collected samples and returned. The vessels were loaded with tiny organisms never before seen on earth. These organisms were found too high in the atmosphere to have been sent up from the surface by anything other than a violent volcanic eruption. Since, there have been no major eruptions in the last 5 years it appears that these organisms arrived in the stratosphere from space via comets and meteors, like the Perseids shower that hits the earth annually in July and August. Hence, it appears that life is being seeded with from space.

"Our conclusion is that life is continually arriving to Earth from space," the professor wrote. "Life is not restricted to this planet and it almost certainly did not originate here."

Recently, the natural formation of RNA precursors from substances and conditions present on an ancient earth have been demonstrated in the lab. This work highlighted a reasonable pathway for the origins of life on earth. Now it appears that even if it was possible for life to have spontaneously formed here, that it may have in fact been seeded by alien organisms arriving on space rocks.

News article: http://mashable.com/2013/09/19/alien-space/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link

Journal of Cosmology article: http://journalofcosmology.com/JOC22/Milton5R.pdf

[Michael Hardner]

Exciting, perhaps, but the Journal of Cosmology has been questioned about promoting fringe viewpoints:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Cosmology

[The_Squid]

I don't believe their conclusions... They haven't adequately shown that these diatoms didn't get there from Earth. I think their conclusion is a huge leap...

"We don't know how it got up there, so it is an alien life form"...

Not good science.

Edited September 23, 2013 by The_Squid

[Mighty AC]

They do provide some discussion as to why they believe the organisms could not have originated on the surface, but I agree that a lot more work will have to be done to prove those claims.

The particle mass shown in Fig 4, which we have seen contains biological filaments, is around 300

micron in size. Rosen (1969) states the widely accepted view that particles greater than 5 micron

cannot be carried from the surface of the Earth, through the tropopausee and into the stratosphere,

except possibly following an exceptionally violent volcanic eruption. No such eruption occurred

within three years of our stratosphere sampling, during which time any particles of the size shown

here would have fallen from heights above 22km. It also seems statistically highly improbable that the

biological entities shown here could have originated from orbiting satellites or other man-made space

objects. We note that recent news reports of unpublished work relating to the meteorite, which

exploded at 23 km over the Russian city of Chelybinsk on February 15, 2013, projected minute dust

particles into the high stratosphere and which then spread around the globe. Our sampling trip took

place 5 months after this airburst, which it must be emphasised did not carry soil and water from Earth

to the stratosphere and could not therefore have acted as the source of the biological entities shown by

us, both in this and in our earlier communications.

We argue therefore that, based on established physics, there is simply no way that the particles

described here (especially that shown in Fig. 4) could have been lofted from Earth to the stratosphere,

as a result, we conclude that these particles must be incoming from space to the stratosphere and that

biological entities are continuously arriving from space. Again we reiterate an observation made in

our previous papers on this subject (Wainwright et al., 2013a, namely the remarkable fact that the

stratosphere-derived biological entities are remarkably pristine and are not associated with dust or any

other debris, including soil or cosmic dust.

Edited September 23, 2013 by Mighty AC

[Moonlight Graham]

I don't believe their conclusions... They haven't adequately shown that these diatoms didn't get there from Earth. I think their conclusion is a huge leap...

"We don't know how it got up there, so it is an alien life form"...

Not good science.

I agree.