Daily Archives: March 7, 2011

Convincing proof of extraterrestrial life?

On March 2, the Journal of Cosmology has sent an invitation to send a 1000 words commentary on a paper of R. Hoover  (go there only if you are interested, as they’ll try to redirect you to the Amazon.com page of a book edited by Hoover. Very, very bad!), claiming the discovery of indigeneous microfossils in the interior of some meteorites, similar to fossilized Earth bacteria. The key-word in the sentence above is “indigenous”, since it implies that these microfossils represent the remains of bacteria which lived outside the Earth.
Now, I found it rather bizarre that a journal requests a 1000 words commentary to anyone in the scientific community is willing to say something. They even specify: 

Commentaries may focus entirely on Dr. Hoover’s paper, or you may speculate about the implications, e.g, the evolution of life on other planets, the origin of life on Earth, our genetic ancestry, “are we alone?” etc.

Oh, well. And to be honest, given the comments that actually appeared on the webpage of the Journal, I’d be surprised if they were actually peer-reviewed at all (as claimed by the editors).

Despite the premises, I tried to develop an informed opinion, to answer the questions of friends and family who read about the news everywhere on the web. After reading about it here, here, here and here, I am tempted to say that the claim is far from robust, and, to say the least, it should be taken with a huge grain of salt.