(meteorobs) Life in Meteorites

[Ian Musgrave & Peta O'Donohue]

G'Day All

Richard Kramer wrote:
> These obituaries are disappointing. Substantially ad hominem without
> any proper refutation.

You did actually read them didn't you?

It's not ad hominem to point out that
1) The paper has *severe*  technical issues
2) These claims have been made by this group before and not stood to up to
scrutiny
3) The Journal is a known promoter of crankery

> Not to say that life on comets has been proved, but these refutations
> fail to be at all persuasive.

Rosie Redmond's analysis is more detailed (and Rosie being the
microbiologist who burst the "Arsenic Bacteria" bubble, knows here stuff),
but both posts quickly get to the heart of the matter, the "evidence" is a
bunch of squiggly stuff that bears little resemblance to actual bacterial
fossils unless you obscure the details by rescaling the images.

That's my conclusion too. While I'm not a professional astrobiologist, it
is a hobby of mine and I've spent a fair amount of time looking at genuine
images of cyanobacterial fossils. Theses things look like a wide variety
of filamentous non-fossil inorganic material that you can find in a
variety of rocks. The elemental profiles are virtually identical between
the "fossils" and the matrix, no more than instrumental error.

To support the existence of extraplanetary life, you are going to need
more than what looks like SEM and x-ray images of magnesium sulfate
whiskers.

Cheers! Ian
> At 03:37 PM 3/6/2011, you wrote:
>> > http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html
>> > Interesting article, may generate a lot more interest in Meteorites.
>>
>>Obituaries for these bizarre claims abound already - see e.g.
>>http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2011/03/is-this-claim-of-bacteria-in-meteorite.html
>>and
>>http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/did_scientists_discover_bacter.php
>>and ... and if you google for the author you'll see that he's been
>>publishing this stuff for *years* (had encountered his papers several
>>times already), without anyone in the astrobiology community taking him
>>seriously.
>>
>>Dan (sorry to burst the bubble)

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