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June 03, 2006

It's Raining Red, Hallelujah

Well, this is weird.

As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis’s laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens. In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples...contain microbes from outer space.

Specifically, Louis has isolated strange, thick-walled, red-tinted cell-like structures about 10 microns in size. Stranger still, dozens of his experiments suggest that the particles may lack DNA yet still reproduce plentifully, even in water superheated to nearly 600˚F.... So how to explain them? Louis speculates that the particles could be extraterrestrial bacteria adapted to the harsh conditions of space.... If his theory proves correct, the cells would be the first confirmed evidence of alien life and, as such, could yield tantalizing new clues to the origins of life on Earth.

Given the track record so far on finding life from somewhere other than Earth, I'll refrain from getting too excited about this just yet. Now, I fully believe that life exists elsewhere in the universe and that some of it is probably intelligent, but given the vast emptiness of space, the enormous distances between stars and between galaxies, the odds of life from somewhere else plopping down here by accident strike me as quite small... but certainly not impossible.

(found via UTI)