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Comment by scrumper | Hacker News Reader

The Journal of Cosmology has rather a bad reputation. The fact that the meteorite only landed on earth three weeks before publication doesn't suggest that much review has gone on either.

Don't get me wrong: I'd love for this to be actual, irrefutable evidence of extraterrestrial life and panspermia. It could even be that, but it's published in a crank paper unfortunately.

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"At the time of entry into the Earth’s atmosphere on 29 December 2012, the parent body of the Polonnaruwa meteorite would have had most of its interior porous volume filled with water, volatile organics and possibly viable living cells"

Begs the question...

"A few percent carbon as revealed by EDX analysis confirms the status of a carbonaceous meteorite."

Does something that sounds about as scientific as "point and guess"...

"The intricacy of the regular patterns of “holes”, ridges and indentations are again unquestionably biological, and this is impossible to interpret rationally as arising from an inorganic crystallisation process."

Argument from personal incredulity...

...etc...

I won't be celebrating this discovery just yet...

Looking at the wikipedia page [1] for this journal, not only do they have a bad reputation, but they have a bad reputation for publishing papers about precisely this topic. The general consensus seems to be that the papers' evidence have been too weak and not thorough enough for the claims they make.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Cosmology#Hoover_pap...

If we look at one of the authors, Chandra Wickramasinghe, it's clear he has an obvious bias towards this sort of thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Wickramasinghe

> We report the discovery for the first time of diatom frustules in a carbonaceous meteorite thatfell in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka on 29 December 2012

Yeah, my bad, I was looking at the url.

Perhaps a better word is specialization.

Most of us are armchair astrophysicists at best and we should not be so spontaneously dismissive. If there is something in all of this, we'll hear about it soon enough from the scientific community. In the meantime we should be conservative in how we depict the scientists and publications involved.

That is well said. One might equally accuse Leonard Susskind of a bias towards string theory. Chandra Wickramasinghe isn't himself a crank, and that's what gives me hopes for this research.

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