So I happen across this article:
Scientists Publish Controversial Paper About Extra-Terrestrial Life on Meteorites
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/scientists-publish-controversial-paper-about-extra-terrestrial-life-meteorites
and think to myself, “that is quite interesting that there should be such ‘definitive’ evidence of extraterrestrial life and I am only finding out about it accidentally”, so I investigate. Fortunately the main author has a rather unique name (well, it seems unique to me, perhaps it is as common as John Smith wherever he is from), sure enough I find he has a Wiki page as the first hit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Wickramasinghe. I am a bit surprised that I haven’t heard of this guy, I am quite interested in the origin of life and while I am no expert, I have read quite a bit over the years and the guy’s name really stands out, I figure I would remember it. Well, I get really suspicion when the second sentence reads “He was a student and collaborator of Fred Hoyle”. Those of you who know anything about the history of science know that Hoyle started out as a really smart guy, then sort of drifted off into left field (really, he just left the ball park) and absolutely could not accept any of the evidence of the big bang (indeed, Hoyle invented the term ‘big bang’ as an insult to the theory; how vexing it must have been to him that it stuck and became a badge of honor). Hoyle was a proponent of the steady state theory of the universe (which was quite fine at the time when we knew pretty much nada) but rather than accept that his theory lacked any sort of evidence AND that the competing theory (big bang) was stacking up evidence, he sort of went crazy and started to make personal attacks and did his level best to discredit the science in the public eye. So, to make a long story less long, he became a real nut job toward the end of his life and pretty much has burned every shred of his scientific credibility by the time he died. (Note that he was a major contributor to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and the vast bulk of that work has withstood the test of time. He wasn’t an idiot.) So to find out that the guy behind this extraordinary claim is associated with Hoyle automatically makes me treat everything he says with skepticism.
So, looking at the Google results I scroll down a bit to the first hit that doesn’t seem to be a repeat of the article above and click over here: Chandra Wickramasinghe replies…and fails hard which is rather unflattering, then follow the link to this: Diatoms…iiiiin spaaaaaaaaaaace! which is even less flattering. I decide to look up the journal (Journal of Cosmology) and am more than a bit put off by the page and its ‘color scheme’. I have been to a _lot_ of journal sites over the last 3 decades and this one seems to strive hard to break every bit of the mold it could. Never-the-less, I do a search to find the article: FOSSIL DIATOMS IN A NEW CARBONACEOUS METEORITE (at least I think this is the article that is the focus of the link above, but it seems there might be more than one) and skim through it. I don’t know a whole lot about meteorites, but I have read off and on over the years so I am not totally ignorant. The picture they have of the meteor doesn’t look like any I have ever seen, but hey, I am not an expert. So I decide to pursue it a bit more and look up the following links: No, Diatoms Have Not Been Found in a Meteorite and UPDATE: No, Life Has Still Not Been Found in a Meteorite. Granted, none of these are scientific sites, but then again, neither is that of the original link. However, everything that the author of these last two sites had to say jives with what I have absorbed over the decades and little of what the controversial author of the extraordinary claims had to say jived with my knowledge base. Sadly, I have to conclude that this paper is nothing more than willful ignorance that is substantially harmful to science since way more people are going to read about it from uncritical sources than will ever follow up with the critical sources. Such is life in good old anti-science USofA.
And I would like to believe! I have theory that there is life between the solar systems, but I also demand extraordinary evidence from extraordinary claims. When someone is claiming something that is way outside the scientific mainstream he/she has to go to extra lengths to bolster those claims. When NASA claimed many years ago to have found fossils on a Martian meteor (I actually happened to watch that presentation live, purely by accident, and could barely sit still as I came to understand what they were claiming), though they were very confident of their claims, none-the-less they were careful to discuss alternatives and have outside investigators comment on their work. That work, btw, has been mostly debunked over the years as other scientists with particular expertise have weighted in (all without name calling, btw! something that seemingly can’t be said of the Journal of Cosmology). Panspermia has some things going for it and is impossible to prove impossible. It is, however, trivial to prove it is correct, one need merely find extraterrestrial material with life that is clearly not of terrestrial origin. However, when/if that happens, I expect to see papers devoted entirely to describing the evidence and extensive methods involved in clearly demonstrating that all scientifically rational efforts have been made to eliminate any other explanation. To me this paper claiming diatoms from space is light years away from achieving that end.
