quote:In what's sure to rekindle the debate over the question of life beyond Earth, a scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center says he has fossil evidence of bacterial life inside of a rare class of meteorites .
Writing in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology, Richard B. Hoover argues that an examination of a collection of 9 meteorites - called CI1 carbonaceous meteorites - contain "indigenous fossils" of bacterial life.
"The complex filaments found embedded in the CI1 carbonaceous meteorites represent the remains of indigenous microfossils of cyanobacteria, " according to Hoover.
Posted by C3PO the Dragon Slayer (Member # 10416) on :
How is this different from the ALH84001 (that meteorite from Mars with fossilized bacteria) hysteria way back when?
EDIT: mistyped ALH84001 (I'm typing in the dark)
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
C3PO, it's not.
Science is not made in headlines.
Posted by Teshi (Member # 5024) on :
Phil Plait is extremely skeptical, but doesn't rule it out entirely.
Posted by Ron Lambert (Member # 2872) on :
Some claims have been made that the fossil evidence of bacteria indicated terrestrial type bacteria. If true, wouldn't that most reasonably be explained by the fossil evidence being found on "splash" ejecta from earth resulting from meteoroid impacts in the past? Some chunks of crustal rock might have been given suffient kinetic energy to escape earth's gravity, but then would do a long loop so that every few hundred years the ejecta crosses back through earth's orbit. Isn't this by far the most likely explanation?