What an excellent couple of months it's been for the science blogs. It seems like every few weeks we are being treated to another shiny new pebble, to borrow Newton's analogy, from the endless beach of nature. Who would have thought the count of stars in the observable universe would plausibly be recalculated at a staggering 300 sextillion? Or that those stars found to be so much more common--red dwarves--would be the ones typically old enough to harbor life, opening the possibility of "trillions of earths" overhead? Or that the existence of alien species would finally be confirmed . . . ?
Oops.
Looks like some of those pebbles only appear to be new. On closer inspection they seem more familiar, and less shiny. Thus with a particular pebble that fell from the sky over what is now France and which, according to a much reported and blogged-about release this month, contains fossil evidence of alien bacteria.
Now, I try to keep a skeptical mind. (Not a cynical one: skeptical in the noble sense of the word, meaning an attitude that matches belief to evidence.) You say you found alien life? That's fantastic. What's your data?
And: Is it compelling? And, if so: Is it compelling enough to warrant so extreme an interpretation?
In this case, my money says no.
There were some warning signs from the start: Why did FOX News, hardly a beacon of scientific credibility, break this story? What exactly is The Journal of Cosmology, anyway? (Were you aware of this non-print journal before this week? Chime in.) As science sites go, the Journal has a certain . . . improvisational feel to it, let's say. And it also seems to have an agenda--though not exactly a political one--in promoting the notion of Panspermia. Word is the site is also about to go under, and could really use a big, booming news release to shore up its funds and secure a buyer.
All of which is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the report, of course; I've blogged before about the importance of avoiding logical fallacies when examining extraordinary claims. Nor, for that matter, is the fact that this article was submitted by NASA scientist Richard Hoover of the Marshall Space Flight Center in itself material. NASA people can be as goofy as anyone else. All that matters is: Does Hoover have the goods?
If these squiggly things that appear under the SEM are indeed alien fossils, then they are alien fossils, no matter where the story broke. (Gary Hart really was running around with Fawn Hall, regardless of the fact that the National Enquirer made the catch.) So if the humble Journal of Cosmology has the prize discovery of the century in its hands, more power to them.
But we remember the arsenic-eaters, and how that turned out. And, of course, we remember the 1996 claim of Martian fossils. And we remember cold fusion. And so on.
Within just a few days the initial excitement over this report passed quickly into incredulity, and even hostility, among many in the blogosphere. The sapid folks over at Pharyngula put it this way:
"[This] isn't a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth."
To say nothing of the succinct: "[t]his work is garbage."
Ouch.
By coincidence, I spoke with Chandra Wickramasinghe (by email) a few years back when I was researching an article on Exogenesis. Which, I hasten to add, is perfectly plausible as a conjecture; though Hoyle et. al. were unable to get such notions into mainstream science, this isn't crackpot stuff. We may still discover that the reason life popped up on Earth with such bizarre alacrity after the bombardment period ended is that it had been much more slowly evolving on a wet Mars well ahead of time.
("Exogenesis" is a humbler supposition than Panspermia, merely positing that life on Earth got its initial start somewhere else. Panspermia posits that life travels, by various mechanisms, not only from planet to planet but even from star to star.)
Nevertheless, I remember that whenever I mentioned Wickramasinghe's name in particular I was greeted by a polite raising of eyebrows. I wasn't sure why, but I got the clear signal from folks in the Astrobio community that here I was venturing into "crank" territory. I have to say my experience in briefly communicating with Wickramasinghe, and others, at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology did not support this harsh read: these were rational, polite, and even-keeled people. Of course, we never discussed the more speculative elements of their enthusiasm: Do viruses come from space? Is SARS extraterrestrial? Are interstellar clouds made of E. coli, and is space more akin to a Petri dish than a lifeless vacuum? Looking back on it, this kind of conjecture was surely what was lifting the lids of my fellow reporters.
Still, the proof is in the carbonaceous chondrite. If these meteorite fragments are somehow confirmed to be a treasure-trove of E.T. fossils, uncontaminated and correctly analyzed, well . . . then Newton's ocean of truth just gave up one of its shiniest trinkets. Wouldn't it be amazing!
We'll see. But I suspect that particular gem remains somewhere farther along the beach.
