A team of Uk scientists believe that they’ve discovered organisms in earth’s environment that originate from space.
As difficult as that may be to believe, Professor Milton Wainwright, the team’s principal, insists that this is definitely the instance.
The team, from the University of Sheffield, discovered the little organisms (misleadingly referred to as ‘bugs’ by a lot of overeager journalists) living on a probe balloon that was sent 16.7 miles into our environment during last month’s Perseids meteor shower.
Reported by Professor Wainwright, the tiny creatures couldn’t have been carried into the stratosphere on the balloon. He said, “A lot of people will imagine that these biological particles should have just drifted up to the stratosphere from Earth, but it’s generally accepted that a particle of the size found can’t be lifted from Earth to heights of, for example, 27km. Really the only identified exemption is by a violent volcanic explosion, none of these occurred within 3 years of the sampling trip.”
Wainwright maintains that only most important conclusion is that organisms originated from space. He went on to mention that “life isn’t restricted to the planet but it nearly definitely did not originally come here”
However, not everyone seems to be so convinced. Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project said, “I’m very skeptical. This claim has been made beforehand, and dismissed as terrestrial contamination.” The team responds to this by saying that they were thorough when they readied the balloon before the experiments begun.
Though, they would acknowledge that there might be an strange reason for those organisms to reach such altitudes. It should also be renowned that microbal organisms discovered in the 1980’s and 1990’s and called ‘extremophiles’ stunned the scientific community by living in environments that might instantaneously kill the majority of life on earth.
These creatures have always been observed living deep under Antarctic ice or 1900 feet below the ocean floor. In March of this year, Ronnie Glud, a biogeochemist at the Southern Danish Uni in Odense, Denmark was quoted as saying “Inside the most remote, unfriendly places, you are able to even have higher activity than their surroundings,” which “You can find microbes in all places – they are exceptionally compliant to circumstances, and survive wherever they’re,” so it seems more plausible that any the team is in error, or that this is solely another case of microscopic life showing up in an strange place.
Moreover, it is not the first time this particular team has come under fire for making such statements, either. Back in January of this year, astrobiologist Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe reported that ‘fossils’ found in a Sri Lankan meteorite were proof of extraterrestrial life, an assertion that’s commonly criticized by scientific community.
Other scientists have complained that there simply is not enough proof to generate a great claim, as a theory this notable would need a huge body of proof to confirm its validity.
What that says to the reporter is that microorganisms can live pretty much anyplace and that it simply is not good science to jump to wild conclusions like aliens each time a more plausible explanation is most probably present. Science should not be subject to such wild leaps of fancy. Imagination is a great aid to science, but it is not a science in and of itself. Sadly, Dr. Wainwright and his group look to be seeing exactly what they want to observe.
SOURCES:
http://www.livescience.com/27954-microbes-mariana-trench.html
http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/09/22/news/entertainment/have-we-found-alien-life/
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/alien-bugs-discovered-earths-atmosphere-152253962.html#13B0NDB
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