"Astronomers say features of comet landed on by spacecraft in November, such as black crust and icy lakes, suggest living micro-organisms beneath surface."

http://www.theguardian.c...p-scientists?CMP=soc_567

This comes from Max Wallis from Cardiff university who is heavily influenced by the works of Chandra Wickramasinghe, and that latter person came up with quite a few improbable theories and is not taken too seriously in the field of astronomy.

So even though it is an interesting hypothesis I would not bet on this one to be true.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

Very interesting. I've been thinking about the possibility (or perhaps inevitability) of extraterrestrial life quite a bit recently. I was even considering posting a thread to see what the rest of the nexus thinks.

Admittedly, Prof Wickramasinghe has come out with some rather wild ideas in the past (ideas that, one might argue, should have been kept to himself given his position), but so too did Terrence McKenna, and we don't scoff at the ideas and ideals he espoused.

I think Prof Wickramasinghe is just keeping his mind open to any possibility (a trait that I find is somewhat lacking in the scientific community), and for that I commend him (not that I find many of his theories plausible). Call him a dreamer if you will, but it is often the dreamers who have the most profound influence on our world.

We do not scoff McKenna because he himself told us that we should not take his words for it.

McKenna was more a bard and a storyteller.

And dreamers are nice but should not push their dreams as something that they are not. This to prevent disappointment and the clouding of real research. Carl Sagan dreamed as well but was much better in telling us the story without the 'headlining'.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

Hey Mr Traveler,

I missed that claims were being made by such people...I remember about Max's claims regarding alien particles being detected previously. So such claims are to be taken with a pinch of salt (like any extraordinary claims made by anybody).

Still, an exciting time in cosmology...the more we look around us, the more planets were are discovering, and more in the right distance from their respective suns, and the more we look explore our own cosmic backyard, the more we are finding organic chemistry and some of the very basic, raw chemical building blocks of life. NASA predicts we will discover alien life within the next 25 years or so, so certainly an exciting time.

True Bancopuma,

I myself cannot wait for more discoveries in this area of research.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

Only reason I referred to McKenna earlier was because they both gave us an alien spore theory. Seemed like a good connection I certainly didn't intend implying much more similarity between the two than that

This is such an interesting field of research, but the difficulties involved in acquiring evidence often lead to wild speculation, which in turn leads to the speculators being publicly shunned, which then ends their credible research. The lesson being, don't make claims of fact unless you can back them up.

Regardless, I'm very interested in this field of inquiry and am willing to entertain even the wildest notion (if only for the entertainment )

Related, since the numbers are in our favour:

Fascinating , i was following philae for awhile, it was months before the thing gained power again, well, thankfully it did! Short answer is, no, philae did not discover life on the comet, and nor would it able to prove it if it did. But of course, where would we be in science without speculation ? Not far at all, and the media certainly wouldn't have any headlines . Common sense should be to only accept extraordinary claims if there is extraordinary evidence. But that shouldn't ever bar you from even the wildest speculation.

The einstein quote in BongWinners signature is a pretty great one, and coincidentally very applicable in this thread.



Einstein was a very wise man. He turned out to be right about some extraordinary things, when the evidence finally came through to back it up... and back then you were in the right to take that with a grain of salt. He was also wrong about a lot of things. He was human.

Funny how to 99.999999999999999999999(etc.)% of the universe, we are the aliens

Can't comment on this article, but when it comes to space exploration it's very cool to watch as our boundaries of the possible are always being pushed. It's very frequently that I see science headlines on new stars, planets, galaxies and so on, that in one way or another defied astronomers current models of what they thought should be possible.