Monday 11 November 2013

Could we now have discovered possibilities of life from another world?

A team of Uk scientists believe that they have revealed organisms in earth’s environment that originate from space.

As demanding as that could be to judge, Professor Milton Wainwright, the team’s chief, insists that this is definitely the instance.

The team, from the University of Sheffield, found the little organisms (misleadingly known as ‘bugs’ by quite a lot of persistent journalists) living on a probe balloon that had been sent 16.7 miles into our environment during last month’s Perseids meteor shower.

In response to Professor Wainwright, the minuscule creatures couldn’t have been passed into the stratosphere by the balloon. He said, “Many people will imagine that those biological particles must have just drifted up into the stratosphere from Earth, but it is normally accepted a particle of the size found cannot be lifted from Earth to heights of, for example, 27km. Really the only well-known exception is by a violent volcanic eruption, none of these occurred within 3 years of the sampling trip.”

Wainwright maintains that only salient end is that organisms originated from space. He went on to mention that “life is not restricted to the planet and it almost certainly didn’t originally come here”

However, not everyone is so persuaded. Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer with the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project remarked, “I’m very skeptical. This claim has been made before, and dismissed as terrestrial contamination.” The team responds to this by saying they were thorough as they prepared the hot-air balloon before the experiments started.

Yet, they’d acknowledge that there might be an unidentified method for these organisms to reach such altitudes. It should also be noted that microbal organisms discovered in the 1980’s and 1990’s and called ‘extremophiles’ surprised the scientific community by living in environments that would immediately kill the bulk of life on earth.

These creatures have been observed living deep under Glacial ice or even 1900 feet below the sea floor. In March of this year, Ronnie Glud, a biogeochemist at the Southern Danish Uni in Odense, Denmark was quoted as saying “In the most remote, hostile places, you can actually have higher activity than their surroundings,” and that “You’ll find microbes in all places – they’re very compliant to conditions, and survive where they are,” so this indicates more plausible that either the team is in error, or that this is simply another case of microscopic life showing up in an strange place.

In addition, it isn’t the 1st time this unique 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 testimony of extraterrestrial life, an assertion that’s extensively criticized by the scientific community.

Other scientists have complained that there simply isn’t enough proof to make such a claim, as a theory this notable would need a huge body of proof to prove its validity.

What that says to this reporter is that microbes can survive pretty much anywhere and that it simply is not good science to leap to wild conclusions like aliens when a more plausible solution is most certainly present. Science shouldn’t be subject to such wild leaps of elaborate. Imagination is a superb aid to science, but it isn’t a science in and of by itself. Unfortunately, Dr. Wainwright and his group look to be seeing 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


No comments:

Post a Comment