http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/150417-astrobiologists-discover-fossils-in-meteorite-fragments-confirming-extraterrestrial-life

Incredible find. I can't believe that they actually found this. I wonder if this would have been able to survive on the young earth.

the paper itself is published in a journal mired with controversy....plus the pdf version of the article actually links wikipedia...wtf??

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/18/extraterresterial-life-exists-chandra-wickramasinghe_n_2500008.html

Plait claims that the diatoms Wickramasinghe found, "a type of algae, microscopic plant life," are simply a freshwater species found on Earth. Wickramasinghe doesn't deny that the meteorite sample his team studied contains freshwater diatoms.
"But -- there are also at least half a dozen species that diatom experts have not been able to identify," Wickramasinghe said.

definitely sample contamination happened - whatever the sample was in the first place

read the whole article and also read: http://www.panspermia.org/chandra.htm

Although Chandra Wickramasinghe does not endorse creation-science, he was called as an expert witness to rebut the claim that neo-Darwinian evolution was a proven fact.

for chandra wickramasinghe (unfortunately a mathematician ) nothing but panspermia counts

It is a real problem that plagues any attempt to find traces of alien life in meteorites that land on the Earth. The Earth is literally infested with life, and will contaminate any sample. You would have to find something totally different to convince anyone.

He's also the guy who claimed SARS came from outerspace....

http://download.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS014067360313440X.pdf







This post was edited by Azrad on May 2 2013 08:52am

maybe the universe is infested with life...Why would it just be this rock.. Sure we have the right stuff for the seeds of life to grow, but the seeds are every where.

That may very will be true, but it causes a problem:

A meteorite falls into a pile of organic material (this describes just about every location on the Earth). Then you want to examine the meteorite to see if it carried any organic material from space... See the problem?

It would be like throwing a rock into a can of green paint, then trying to examine the rock to see if it had any green paint on it that didn't come from the can. Maybe it does have prior green paint on it, or maybe it does not; but once you throw it into the can it become almost impossible to tell.

The problem is often described as "looking for a specific needle in a needle factory" (instead of a haystack).

This post was edited by Azrad on May 2 2013 11:47am

and many more things - but the witness statement he gave is the most ludricous imo
even if he favours panspermia over earth bound abiogenesis how does he go from there?
how would the current fauna and flora have developed? or did dinosaurs ride the ride on on a celestial broom?
with his fanatic belief in panspermia he must have lost a lot of the logical reasoning one would expect from a trained mathematician
but perhaps he believes that the fully populated noah's ark sailed across from the andromeda nebula

very interesting