Living creatures from space? false alert

We are still alone: ​​the editor of the blog Bad Astronomy did a critical reading of an article that argued for the invention of life from outer space in the atmosphere and found a lot of holes in it

Phil Plate, the owner of the Bad Astronomy blog, commented in his blog on the extraordinary claim published a week ago by researchers from the University of Sheffield that they allegedly found evidence that tiny living beings are coming to Earth from space, as also appears from the (cautionary) report from September 21: Living creatures from space or just drifting?

According to their article published in the Journal of Cosmology they raised a balloon to a height of 22-27 kilometers. When they took it back down, they discovered a particle that looked like part of a diatom - a microscopic plant. In their opinion, this is proof of the arrival of life from space.

First, Plate warns, among the authors of the article there is also a man named Chandra Wickramasinghe who claimed several times in the past that he discovered diatoms in meteorites. However, his previous claims were not convincing enough: the methodologies he used were slippery, the conclusions were not supported by evidence, and it was not even proven that the stones studied were meteorites. There is a history of observing life from space everywhere based on extremely shaky facts.

Given all this, the claims related to his work should be taken with a grain of salt. Moreover, the team published the results in the Journal of Cosmology which is an online journal who does not have a good history of loyalty to science.

jumping to conclusions
In spite of all these doubts, Plait also refers matter-of-factly to the scientific claims that appeared in the article. "They (the scientists) found the hard shell surrounding the diatom. He does look like that, but is he really like that? They claim in the article that this thing taxonomically looks like part of a diatom and therefore it is, but they did not ask a diatom expert to examine the specimen. Looks weird.

Still, diatoms are a terrestrial plant found almost anywhere there is water. Did this also come from Earth? While they claim to have taken precautions to ensure nothing contaminates their samples, it still cannot be ruled out. This diatom also looks like a familiar species on Earth (they also said so in the article). How did it get so high in the atmosphere?

Volcanoes are a possible mechanism, although the researchers claim that no strong volcano has erupted recently and that such particles should fall from the stratosphere quickly, but it is not certain that this is the case. They cited research showing how quickly a particle would fall from different heights, and said that a diatom would fall within hours, but from reading the article It turns out that it is based on the assumption that the atmosphere is stable and does not move. It does not specify any forces acting on the particle other than gravity and buoyancy. There are also winds and air eddies in the stratosphere that might keep a small object like this afloat for a long time. I'm not saying he did, but there is no indication in the article that they ruled out this possibility.

Just because they couldn't think of another way to get small living things into the stratosphere doesn't mean such mechanisms don't exist. Given the alternative of living creatures, of which there is no evidence (although they link to the previous arguments of Wickremesinghe who claimed to find diatoms in meteorites, which I am convinced are wrong writes Plate), they should have tried harder and looked for ways to bring the creatures up. The fact that they ruled out other ways, simply by pointing out that they won't work, is not convincing. However, in the article itself they do not repeat too many times the claim that these are aliens but in the press release they emphasize this: "In the absence of a mechanism by which large particles like this can rise to the stratosphere, we can only determine that the origin of these biological creatures is in outer space.

Plate says that in this case the aliens constitute the argument of the god of gaps. They make an unusual claim: these diatoms originated in space, possibly on a comet, and they entered the stratosphere as part of the meteoric material.

There are many reasons to think that this claim is baseless, but one of them is in the article itself - in the attached photo (see above) which looks clean, even pure, as they themselves say: "It is worth noting that the diatom fragments are very clean and do not contain soil or soil material. This may be unlikely in extreme cases if they came from a comet or meteorite. Why wouldn't it be incorporated into a piece of rock? This point works against them more than it supports the claims. As in the other cases, this time too, it is most likely the contamination of the sample with an earthly plant.

Later, Plate states that he finds the idea of ​​panspermia - which claims that the origin of life on Earth is in space - very interesting. "We have circumstantial evidence that life can exist in space. Conditions on Mars looked pretty good billions of years ago, and we found amino acids in comets and meteorites. What we lack is direct evidence. Panspermia theory is worth investigating, but making fantastical claims based on flimsy evidence and jumping to conclusions is not the best way to do it. Stories like this are certainly sexy for the non-skeptical media and they do not help the general public learn about science and the scientific process.

Lead researcher Milton Wainwright of the University of Sheffield says he is 95% convinced the diatom did not come from Earth. This may be so, but the evidence given in the article does not support this.

Dr. Natalie Strakey Examined the behavior of the media and was disappointed with all the media in Britain. And with us. Written by Maariv and NRG Assaf Golan quoted part of the press release without comment or criticism.

Channel 2 news reporter Yet, Yativ Tal tried to balance And he wrote that: "The new finding will certainly cause a lot of controversy in the scientific world. This is because until now the popular belief was that the formation of life on Earth was the result of chemical compounds that over the years turned into organic compounds, from which proteins developed that formed the first stage in the evolutionary process." However later he was tempted to point out that the research was published in a prestigious journal (a fact that is also probably wrong, although the name of the journal is very similar to the name of a respected journal in the field).

At least I formulated a careful title: "Living creatures from space or just drifting" and warned that it is worth checking if these are not earthly creatures that live in the harsh conditions of the stratosphere? And perhaps contamination of the balloon facilities itself with materials from the ground?"

For Plate's article on the bad astronomy website