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Ricky
SFN Die Hard
USA
4907 Posts |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
 Posted - 03/06/2006 : 17:35:46 [Permalink]
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hrrmmm.....
Red extraterrestrial biological particles raining down on Earth?
I wonder what comes next?
Chtorr!
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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trogdor
Skeptic Friend
198 Posts |
Posted - 03/06/2006 : 19:39:24 [Permalink]
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next sign of the apocalypse, Bush steps down.
Although this seems cool, Why have I never heard of the journal that published this.
the BBC article on the rain said this:
quote:
The institute's Director, M Baba, said the scientists would not be able to say anything until the analysis was completed. He said it might take up to three weeks to reach a conclusion.
but the author of the article in the journal is named Godfrey Louis.
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all eyes were on Ford Prefect. some of them were on stalks.
-Douglas Adams |
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trogdor
Skeptic Friend
198 Posts |
Posted - 03/06/2006 : 19:41:48 [Permalink]
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never mind. the journal is put out by Cornell University.
I don't know what arXiv stands for though.
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all eyes were on Ford Prefect. some of them were on stalks.
-Douglas Adams |
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beskeptigal
SFN Die Hard
USA
3834 Posts |
Posted - 03/08/2006 : 02:15:08 [Permalink]
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Insight from BAUT post, if the rain occurred over 2 months yet was only local, it can't possiby be from above the Earth. Why would it keep hitting the same spot with a rotating planet?
My insight, any ET DNA would be recognizable by its uniqueness and easily determined. If the life evolved away from Earth for any significant time the DNA would be quite divergent. |
| Edited by - beskeptigal on 03/08/2006 02:16:11 |
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 03/08/2006 : 06:00:38 [Permalink]
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Im going to go way out on a limb here and say that this is not a Wildfire, so to speak.
But it did get me thinking about the potential for microorganisms which have laid dormant on this planet during the latest 'cool' phase and if the warming of the planet might not trigger a bloom of unknown microbes. |
"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 03/08/2006 : 06:56:19 [Permalink]
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My guess, and it's strictly a guess, would be some sort of cynobacteria; an algae, perhaps.
But I'll bet the roll that it's not ET.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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Ricky
SFN Die Hard
USA
4907 Posts |
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Plyss
Skeptic Friend
Netherlands
231 Posts |
Posted - 03/08/2006 : 10:18:11 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Ricky
The cells look pretty much exactly like red blood cells, which are red, and have no DNA. Doesn't that fit pretty much everything given in the paper?
The cells do bare a striking resemblance to red blood cells, and the elemental composition seems, at least qualitatively, to check out as well.
The red-rain cells apparently range in size between 4 and 10 microns, whereas typical erythrocytes are somewhere between 6 and 8. Not a perfect match, but fairly close as well.
The absorbance spectrum is a bit odd though. The rain-cells seem to have absorbtion maxima at around 500 and 600 nm, whereas typical erythrocytes have maxima at around 450 and 550 nm.
What i would like to see is some sort of chemical analysis to determine the form of the carbon that is present. It's fairly easy to test wether is it present in a form (lipids, protein, small metabolites) that also occurs in normal cells.
In fact, i myself would not have allowed this paper to pass peer review without it.
In addition, i think it's possible to determine extraterrestial origin of material by checking the isotopic composition of the atoms in the material. |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 03/08/2006 : 10:51:20 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by trogdor
I don't know what arXiv stands for though.
ArXiv.org is Cornell's electronic repository of science articles. Anyone with any sort of university affiliation can upload papers to ArXiv. It, itself, isn't peer reviewed.
Note that the article in question says that it has been "accepted for publication in Astrophysics and Space Science." But why that journal would choose to publish so Earthbound, meteorological and wildly speculative I couldn't say. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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beskeptigal
SFN Die Hard
USA
3834 Posts |
Posted - 03/09/2006 : 02:20:14 [Permalink]
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I went to this site and from there the article is available in three formats.
Re the time frame of the rain:quote:
An examination of the red rain data shows that more than 85% of the red rain cases occurred during the first 10 days after the airburst event. This delayed time distribution for the first few days can be accounted as due to the slow settling of the microscopic red rain particles in the atmosphere, with a settling rate of a few hundred meters per day. For this the meteor disintegration is expected to provide a vertical distribution of particles spanning over a few kilometres above the rain clouds. The remaining 15 % of the isolated delayed red rain cases occurred with a delay of up to 60 days, which presumably also reflect gradual settling of the particles in the upper atmosphere ....
They claim some meteor event occurred then the rain and that the particles slowly drifted down from the upper atmosphere. But here we have a couple problems. If that's the case, where is the additional material fro the meteor "burst"? And why wouldn't the upper atmosphere have carried the material further?
Then there is the composition of the stuff:
C 49.53%
O 45.42%
by weight
No DNA and mostly carbon and oxygen sounds like mineral material not organic by any stretch. The particles look like blood cells but that is not the composition of proteins. So the only thing organic here is the shape and appearance. Lots of things look organic but aren't. There is no evidence here there is any life form involved unless you subscribe to the Moon Rock People theory. |
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