On the 5th of March, Fox News released an article on their blog where they announced that Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist who works at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre, thinks he has found evidence for extraterrestrial life. And since then I’ve seen this crop up on more and more places on the internet.
Now what Hoover found were structures inside a rare type of meteorite, a carbonaceous chondrite, it contains structures that have a resemblance with certain terrestrial bacteria we know. But it’s extremely difficult to rule out contamination of the sample. And as such it is wise to wait to get independent confirmation that this indeed might be remains of extraterrestrial life. Especially as Hoover has already made similar claims that have not been confirmed.
There is however one part that raises really big red flags with this find, and that is where it was published, in the Journal of Cosmology. A journal where they have the rule, I kid you not, all articles must avoid jargon. Which is quite an odd rule for a journal to have, and as you can imagine not a single respectable journal has that rule.
If I wasn’t very sceptical and allergic to bad science I probably wouldn’t be the tech guy for SkepticTV. And yesterday a story about the discovery of extraterrestrial life hit the news that raised a lot of red flags.
Yesterday, the 5th of March, Fox News released an article on their blog where they announced that Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre, thinks he has found evidence for extraterrestrial life. And since Fox News published this article I’ve seen this crop up on more and more places on the internet.
If I wasn’t very sceptical and allergic to bad science I probably wouldn’t be the tech guy for SkepticTV. And yesterday a story about the discovery of extraterrestrial life hit the news that raised a lot of red flags.
Yesterday, the 5th of March, Fox News released an article on their blog where they announced that Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre, thinks he has found evidence for extraterrestrial life. And since Fox News published this article I’ve seen this crop up on more and more places on the internet.
What Hoover found were structures inside a rare type of meteorite, a CI1 carbonaceous chondrite – the one Hoover analysed fell in France in 1864 – and it contains something that looks very much like remains of microbes.
Continue reading Journal Of Cosmology And Alien Life On Meteorite
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