SARS: Alien Menace From the Stratosphere!

[Winston_Bongo]

I don’t wish to cause any undue alarm here, but I think everyone should be made aware that the SARS virus may not be a variation of the common cold at all, but in fact may be Galactic Death from Outer Space.

:rolleyes:, you say? Well, just take a look at this article from CNN and then tell me we have nothing to fear from the unspeakable darkness of elder night which hovers above us all, waiting to rain down viral Doom upon humanity.

Whaddya think?

[CRorex]

Well, it has to do with a very complex system of dumbness and smortness.

Dumbness and smortness are like ying and yang.

So if you have -5 dumbness points you really aren’t smort, you’re just not very dumb. Same with smortness, -5 smortness points doesn’t really make you dumb.

So my guess is that they have -1000 smortness points and +5 dumbness points.

[Marley23]

Well, I’ve got absolutely nothing in terms of medical expertise to contribute here. And with science reporting being what it is, I have no idea if the doctors quoted do either.

This has started making the rounds on the 'net, I’m not sure where it’s from originally. A little food for thought, though (and I did a quick check, if anything, the 3000/day figure is very low).

"The WHO today issued a new warning against non-essential travel to the entire Western hemisphere following renewed concerns about the spread of Severe Loss of Perspective Syndrome (SLOPS). Officials are warning travellers not to visit the UK, the US, almost all of Western Europe, and Canada, following further outbreaks of the disease, which has led to mass panic among the media and the public.

The Sars virus has now claimed a staggering 500 lives in only six months [the actual figure is around 700], which makes it considerably more deadly than, say, malaria, which only kills around 3,000 people every single day [the actual number appears to be more than double this]. Sars has made at least one English person feel a bit iffy for a couple of days, and is therefore considered much more serious."

[dalovindj]

The idea known as Panspermia is slowly gaining support by more and more scientists. Tests have found living cells high in the stratosphere which should not be able to get that high if they came from the bottom. Some scientists suspect that we are bombarded every day by “space seeds” and that perhaps the origin of cellular life was not in some slimy pool on this planet, but instead rained down from the heavens and made earth there own. We, having most likely evolved from such creatures, are really just highly evolved viruses from space. And people thought descending from apes was an insulting idea . . .

“Cite?” you say? Then smack-boom linkalicious says I:

Link 1:

The electron microscopy could be equivocal in regard to the detection of viable cells, but the epifluorescence microscopy leaves little doubt that clumps of viable cells with sizes appropriate to bacteria are present at all heights ranging from 24-41km. Since the local tropopause over the launch site was estimated at 16km, the isolates are all above the level at which any terrestrial contamination can be expected, particularly so at the 41km altitude. With an average falling speed for 3 micron sized clumps at 40km of about 0.3 cm/s (Kasten13), the infall rate of clumps typified in Figures 2 and 4 (assuming a number density of 0.068 per litre) over the entire Earth, area 5x1018 cm2 would be (0.068x10-3) x (0.3) x (5x1018 ) per second.

Assuming an average of 100 individual bacterial cells each of mass 3x10-14 g in a clump we obtain a daily mass input of about a third of a tonne of biomaterial. A prima facie case for a space incidence of bacteria onto the Earth may have been established. Further work on culturing and PCR analysis is in progress.

Link 2:

The new work of Wainwright et al is consistent with the ideas of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that in fact predict the continuing input onto the Earth of “modern” organisms. In recent years and months there has been a growing body of evidence that can be interpreted as support for the theory of panspermia - e.g. the space survival attributes and general space hardiness of bacteria.

Link 3:

“There is now unambiguous evidence for the presence of clumps of living cells in air samples from as high as 41 kilometers, well above the local tropopause, above which no air from lower down would normally be transported,” said investigator Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University. The tropopause separates the troposphere—the layer of the atmosphere closest to the earth’s surface—from the stratosphere. Wickramasinghe maintains that the cells have rained in from space.

If you read the linked articles you will see that there is still some debate about whether or not the bacteria above the troposphere could have come from Earth. No one has been able to describe a process that would allow earthly bacteria to end up that high up. I’m fairly convinced that the evidence reveals that we are indeed frequently bombarded by space bacteria. That is probably how we all got here.

DaLovin’ Dj

[DMark]

Well I have been to the upperstratosphere and I feel fine.