A team of British scientists believe that they’ve discovered organisms in earth’s atmosphere that originate from space.
As difficult as that may be to trust, Professor Milton Wainwright, the team’s leader, insists that this is definitely the situation.
The team, from the University of Sheffield, discovered the tiny organisms (misleadingly referred to as ‘bugs’ by a great deal of persistent journalists) living on a research balloon that was sent 16.7 miles into our environment throughout last month’s Perseids meteor shower.
In response to Professor Wainwright, the minuscule creatures could not have been carried into the stratosphere on the balloon. He said, “A lot of people will imagine that these biological particles must have just drifted up into the stratosphere from Earth, but it’s generally accepted that a particle of the volume found can’t be lifted from Earth to heights of, for instance, 27km. The only well-known exemption is by a violent volcanic eruption, none of these occurred within three years of the sampling trip.”
Wainwright maintains that the only most important end is that the organisms originated from space. He went on to mention that “life isn’t restricted to this planet but it nearly certainly did not originate here”
However, not everyone is so persuaded. Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project remarked, “I’m very skeptical. This claim has been made beforehand, and dismissed as earthly contamination.” The team responds to that by saying they were thorough when they prepared the balloon before the experiments began.
However, they do acknowledge that there can be an strange reason for these organisms to reach such altitudes. It must also be renowned that microbal organisms discovered in the 1980’s and 1990’s and named ‘extremophiles’ stunned the scientific community by living in environments that will instantly kill the majority of life on earth.
These creatures have been observed living deep under Glacial ice and even 1900 feet below the sea floor. In March of this year, Ronnie Glud, a biogeochemist in the Southern Danish University in Odense, Denmark was quoted as saying “In the most remote, hostile areas, it is possible to actually have higher motion than their surroundings,” which “Yow will discover microbes everywhere – they’re enormously compliant to surroundings, and survive wherever they’re,” so this indicates more plausible that either the team is in error, or that this is simply one more case of microscopic life showing up in an extraordinary place.
Additionally, it isn’t the very first time this unique team has come under fire for making such claims, either. Back in January of this year, astrobiologist Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe reported that ‘fossils’ found from a Sri Lankan meteorite were testimony of extraterrestrial life, an assertion that’s commonly criticized by the scientific community.
Other scientists have complained that there basically is not enough indication to make this type of claim, as the theory this valuable would require a large body of evidence to prove its validity.
What that claims to a reporter is that microorganisms can live almost anyplace which it simply is not good science to leap to wild conclusions like aliens when a more plausible answer is most probably present. Science should not be subject to such wild leaps of elaborate. Imagination is a great aid to science, but it really is not a science in and of by itself. Unfortunately, Dr. Wainwright and his group appear to be seeing what they need to observe.
SOURCES:
http://www.livescience.com/27954-microbes-mariana-trench.html
http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/09/22/news/entertainment/have-we-found-alien-life/
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/alien-bugs-discovered-earths-atmosphere-152253962.html#13B0NDB
Could we now have found possibilities of life from another planet?
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