These British scientists are climbing that they are almost certain that they have discovered extra-terrestrial organisms. What’s the straight dope, and what happens next? More experiments? Or is this just laughable?
Read The Bad Astronomer’s take. It’s about as crappy a claim as you can get without invoking channeling.
Wickramasinghe in particular has a not so good track record in recent years.
Thank you that’s very revealing.
The Journal Of Cosmology is a known loopy fringe journal. They print shit like this all the time, and it never pans out.
Seconded on the Journal of Cosmology. If this had any substance, they would have published it somewhere decent. Surely, if they are claiming to have foound unusual living (or once living) organisms, this ought to be in a biology journal.
Also, the Independent article linked in the OP seems to contradict itself:
But
So this does not seem to be high quality science journalism.
What vastly bad logic these people have demonstrated.
If you find evidence of life in the atmosphere of a planet that is jam-packed with and literally crawling with life, the vastly more likely explanation is that it came from the planet. It takes extraordinary evidence to support the extraordinary claim it didn’t, and “there’s no dust on it” doesn’t seem all that powerful an argument.
I was discussing this with a coworker and this analogy came to me.
Suppose you find a spot of blue paint on the sidewalk across the street from a factory that only makes blue paint. Since you don’t know how the drop crossed the street, do you assume it came from some hypothetical different blue paint factory on another continent?
I listen to a number of science pod-casts. They’re all laughing.
Most science blogs are laughing, too. The Panda’s Thumb, for example.