NASA scientist finds evidence of alien life | Hacker News Reader

NASA scientist finds evidence of alien life

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86 pointsshimi36 comments

Best way to deal with these discoveries is just to forget about them and in a few years time look back and see if anyone stood up to challenge them. Reviewers can only look at the sanity of the paper, not at its truth. Even if they are very sceptical, they typically decide that a paper should be accepted because it is interesting and opens discussion. It is not the first time that structures like these have been found and published [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001

Full paper can be found at http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html

Given that paper, it seems odd they chose the image for the article that they did.

The image in the Yahoo news entry is an image of: "Giant bacterium Titanospirillum velox". There are quite a few pictures of life-like forms in the meteorites, why not use one of those?

Did they have to make it look like a conspiracy website?

It is weird the sites design, maybe it's one of the reasons they are going out of business, people arriving there from a search engine may not find it much of a reputable journal at first glance.

Finding fossil microorganisms and observing that they look very similar to those found on Earth would be an indication to me that the rock may not be a meteorite after all, or that it may be a meteorite from Earth (i.e. blasted out into space by an impact, then fallen back to Earth some time later).

Second that.

Altough

"There are some that are just very strange and don’t look like anything that I’ve been able to identify, and I’ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stump."

makes me a little curious. I'm not a biologist, so someone who is, how often do you find organisms/fossils completely different from known organisms?

... or a supervolcano right around dinosaur bedtime.

I'd imagine those would be very easy things to check. Per the article, the meteorite was identified as being an exceedingly rare (9 on earth. Total.) CI1 carbonaceous chondrite.

I suspect the claims will likely be debunked, but not for the reasons you gave.

This was published in a crockpot journal and is likely fake:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2294516

The "analysis" presented there is heavily laden with emotion, which reduces its own credibility in short order.

I know nothing about the Journal Of Cosmology, but the tone of this blog entry prevents me from accepting it as useful information, it comes across more as axe-grinding.

But let's assume JoC is a crackpot journal. Why is a NASA scientist publishing there?

Did he decide that NASA's credibility on alien life discoveries has not been damaged enough and he wanted to make it worse?

NASA employs many people. I worked there once myself. That there are crackpots and other less-than-credible folks working there is not only not surprising, but something I witnessed first hand. Despite popular culture's imagery, NASA is not some elite group of the world's finest intellects. It is really no more big a deal than working for a giant military contractor. In fact, most of the workers at NASA do work for a giant military contractor.

That said, I have nothing to offer on the actual subject at hand - the validity of the claims.

"But let's assume JoC is a crackpot journal. Why is a NASA scientist publishing there?"

He's publishing there because he couldn't publish it in a reputable journal, indicating its quality is rather low. I agree that this article doesn't take the most mature tone ever, but it breaks down what's wrong with the article itself further into it. It's unnecessary to rely on credibility at all; of the journal itself OR the fact that the guy worked at NASA.

Ever get the impression that NASA is doing a disservice to the scientific process with these sensational media pushes? Arsenic based life anyone?

Second that, the so called "astrobiology" is one of those fields which we don't know if the study is at all scientific or meaningful until we meet the alien in person. I remember watching a video of the 80's featuring a Professor of "Supernatural Studies".

These are, as one may call the study of "unknown unknowns"

In older news, the Journal of Cosmology is going out of business:

http://daviddobbs.posterous.com/journal-of-cosmology-going-o...

David Dobbs's Wired article on the "meteorite life" story is worth reading:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/aliens-riding-mete...

Please submit this! I'd love to read qualified commentary on many claims this blog post makes.

I submitted the Wired story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2293947

and then realised that was probably not the link you meant, since it was not the blog post. If you are wondering about the validity of the press release, I trust David Dobbs to quote a press release correctly; I'm guessing the journal is making another go of things.

>“Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5,000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis ... No other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough vetting, and never before in the history of science has the scientific community been given the opportunity to critically analyze an important research paper before it is published.”

Seriously? That seems... sad. Borderline pathetic, that they're apparently that insular.

This isn't true. Claims about something never occurring in the history of XYZ incredibly basic human endeavor should be taken with a tbsp of salt.

It does say "before it is published". Presumably you would want to vet a paper with trusted colleagues before releasing it even semi-publicly.

But once it's published, it's (seemingly) most-often behind a paywall, blocking further access to those who could analyze or benefit from it.

Journal of Cosmology is open access on the internet. Given the field though, I doubt anyone that could really add to these findings is going to be held back by a subscription, I assume it's very hard to get access to these rocks and without the evidence to experiment on your just taking the authors word really.

Very different from say an algorithms paper where anyone can implement and run the code and possibly find improvements.

Robin Hanson has an interesting take on (and links to) some criticisms of the paper, from evidence and philosophy of science pov, here, http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/03/alien-life-info-but-no....

this is bad. If we're the only life in neighborhood it is evidence that life is rare and we might already be past the great filter. If life is relatively common it makes the fact that the sky is silent fucking terrifying.

elaborate please, I'm not following entirely

you'd be better served looking at Hanson's posts on the subject.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/at-least-two-filters.h...

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/very-bad-news.html

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/beware-future-filters....

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/brain-size-is-not-filt...

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/12/berserker-breakout.htm...

Off-topic but I'm not sure where else to ask: Does Overcoming Bias have any organized index of posts remotely similar to LessWrong's sequences[1]? I'll probably just dive in and navigate via tags, but a more directed approach would be preferable.

[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

it is possible that the consequences of the competitive tendencies implicit in natural selection, notably conflict and resource exhaustion, often destroy civilizations before they transmit a lot of radio. if this is very likely then it is likely true of us.

What do you think about the Anthropic Principle? Not only in the sense that the physics of the Universe is just right for complex life to exist, but also in the sense that if aliens 'got there first' we would never have been allowed to evolve to our current state? We don't observe alien civilizations because if they existed we wouldn't!

Life on Earth took almost 3 billion years to go from single-celled organisms to multi-cellular ones. 3 billion years is almost as long as the life of the Universe (~13.7 billion years). There's one data point that suggests that there was a big filter in our past.

I'm not impressed. The evidence backing the Martian microbe claims for meteorite ALH 84001 were far, far more robust than these seem to be and yet at the end of the day succumbed to the onslaught of criticism.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Claiming that you've found life inside a rock that has sat in a stew of micro-organisms (the Earth) for thousands of years is one thing, claiming that such life must be extra-terrestrial in origin is another thing entirely and requires a higher standard of evidence.

I searched but I cannot find any scientific criticism of ALH84001. Can you bring to light what you're referring to?

From what I've read, CI chondrites are extremely fragile and don't last very long on exposure to liquid water, which is why about half of the recovered CI chondrites on Earth have been witnessed falls (with the other half found in Antarctica). The two he analyzed for the paper were witnessed falls from 1864 and 1938.

I'm not saying this isn't just a case of pareidolia (it probably is), but the meteorites haven't been sitting in a stew of microorganisms for "thousands of years".

if they were sure bout that, they would post it on nasa.gov i guess

I hope that it is really true and that this is only the first of such discoveries.

So, in a few centuries we will have finally opponents and maybe then we will stop to kill ourselves.

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