A couple of months back I wrote about the red rain that fell over India in 2001:
“The Observer is reporting that scientists may have found the first evidence of panspermia, the idea promoted by Hoyle (among others) that life on earth was seeded from space, in samples of a strange rain which fell over India for two months in 2001. To quote the article: “There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University’s microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers.—
— Link
But that wasn’t the first time, a week before that I had the following blockquote in another post:
The best article so far on the the “red rain†phenomenon is in New Scientist. The Observer had a decent article too. An Indian scientist, Dr. Godfrey Louis, thinks the red particles found in the rain are the remnants of a meteorite that exploded. He further thinks that they might be extraterrestrial life forms.
The New Scientist article linked to his full-length paper that is to appear in the peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science. Intrigued, I took a look at his paper. It is surprisingly readable considering it’s meant for a journal.
— Link
Well third time’s the charm they say and it is back. This time on PopSci via BoingBoing.
[Godfrey] 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—water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis’s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001—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 600ËšF. (The known upper limit for life in water is about 250ËšF.) So how to explain them? Louis speculates that the particles could be extraterrestrial bacteria adapted to the harsh conditions of space and that the microbes hitched a ride on a comet or meteorite that later broke apart in the upper atmosphere and mixed with rain clouds above India. 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.
A comment on BoingBoing points out that the cells have the same structure as blood, red cells, thick walled, does not contain DNA. Alien life raining from the skies is freaky - but so is a rain of blood. While both seem damned unlikely it is one or the other. You have to assume that those looking into this have discounted blood cells already, and can blood reproduce at 600ËšF? Nope. So just what is this stuff? I would have though the mainstream media would be all over this clamouring for answers, I guess that is why i don’t work in the media.
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