British scientists claimed to have found first evidence of alien life • Hacker News Board

Re: British scientists claimed to have found first evidence of alien life

#31

Post by jerf » Fri, Sep 20, 2013, 12:41 AM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #28

jerf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What flags this for me is that if you have an organism in hand , it's easy to do more analysis to provide evidence that it is not terrestrial. At the moment, I'd still say that the hypotheses of "their probes was contaminated", "our model of what particles are in the stratosphere are wrong and this is fully terrestrial life", and "they're flat-out lying" remain higher odds based on this evidence than "they found extr…

I would buy the stratospheric model being wrong, but assuming good faith I think they've addressed the contamination objection - you'll note that they did a control with the same procedures except for opening the sample drawer and it came back clean. This is highly reproducible so I'm going to assume they're reporting in good faith.

Flat-out lying was mentioned last because I rate it the lowest. But also non-zero. This is a field that has had many more liars than discoveries, though certainly when there are zero discoveries to be made in the search space we've had access to so far that says less than it might otherwise.

Re: British scientists claimed to have found first evidence of alien life

#32

Post by lutusp » Fri, Sep 20, 2013, 12:02 PM UTC

> On its return they found organisms that were too large to have originated from Earth.

Too large? They had two choices -- too large and too small.

To be "too large", the organism would have had to be larger than an ostrich egg yolk, the single-cell record-holder for size.

To be "too small", the cells would have to be very small indeed -- the smallest earthly cells are extremely small.

In any case, if the cell has DNA, it's from here, so first run the test, find the DNA, then don't publish this ridiculous claim.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -- Carl Sagan

Re: British scientists claimed to have found first evidence of alien life

#33

Post by lutusp » Fri, Sep 20, 2013, 12:05 PM UTC

bencollier49 wrote: post #17

It's life, but it doesn't have DNA to test?

If the cell has DNA, that's evidence that it came from the surface, not space. There may be life out there, but it won't have DNA (an ad hoc solution to a problem unlikely to be repeated).