The First Proven Extraterrestrial Life?

It looks like a serious report. I admit to having no special insights to add.

I await a peer review . It is pretty hard not to get excited though....debris may be a way life has found of seeding the galaxy . There are still many hurdles to get that to a planet that will support intelligent life .

Some churches may have to go into damage control mode, but most would simply accept it was God who made it . If true, then we have been visited by aliens, albeit not quite von Daniken style .

Thanks for the post Eorl, This is serious stuff and it is suppose to happen sooner or later. The human species will have to deal with extraterrestrials at some time in the future. They could be of any kind multicellular creatures to highly intelligent lifeforms. In this case it's fossils of multicellular creatures. I believe there are bigger and far more advanced organisms there than just the ones the good doctor has discovered and only TIME can answer to that question...

We don 't need extraterrestrial trouble.
We have enuf domestic trouble already.





David

I have heard extra-terrestrial is more expensive than domestic and is of inferior quality .

Well, I was kinda worried that life was (or is) scattered scarcely enough (even if it was plentiful) that we'd never know in my own lifetime. Hope this pans out.

I'll be anxious to see how far it gets through peer review.

But to me, Finding fossil/mineral formations which show some similarity to microbial life is still a far stretch from finding life itself. First they have to prove that it WAS life before things get really interesting. Then they have to prove that it came from the asteroid (and not some other form of contamination), then they have to deduce the environment of the asteroid, etc. Judging from the article, it seems to me that there are still a lot of assumptions being made based on speculative evidence.

In short, I guess I feel like they still have a long way to go before drawing the conclusion that multicellular life lived/evolved/grew on these chunks of rock while they were floating around in space (or laying on the ground on another planet or moon).

Yep

And it seems NASA have been the first in line with the stick.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/08/3157645.htm

Here's another story from Wired.com

His claims are spectacular, but the evidence he presents to support those claims, is far less than spectacular. And that's a very suspicious combination.

And here's the tail end of what PZ Myers thought about this publication...

ouch

There are different levels of scientific acceptance :

1st - It is absolute fallacy and anyone who believes it is a moron of the highest degree .
2nd - It has some very basic merit by highlighting already well established principles .
3rd - This study shows the beginning of an area that has some true potential .
4th - I have always thought this a well researched study and tend to agree with its findings .
5th - It is to be commended as a ground breaking discovery and I strongly agree with its findings .
6th - Anyone who doesnt accept that this is now well established fact clearly has only a 5th grade education and is not worthy of discussing science with .
7th - It is absolute fact and anyone who doesnt believe it is a moron of the highest degree .

This is clearly in the early stages.....

WHAT r the chances
of Earth being the only planet to have life on it,
out of trillions of Gallaxies ?????

Quite good actually....

Life can only exist on a second stage solar system . This means life can only have originated 4'5 billion years ago . Complex life emerged half a billion years ago . Intelligent life emerged 100,000 years ago . It is easier to imagine it taking a longer time to develop . It is harder to imagine it taking a shorter time, giving the ideal conditions here yet the number of times it has almost been wiped out and had to start again .

I hope that Earth is the only planet with life on it,
however little the chances thereof r.

Alien life will be bad news for us.

Thats a very interesting possibility . We tend to assume that higher life will be technologically advanced hippies.....but what if they have a hive mentality ? THAT would be very bad indeed .

If we simply look at the experience
of the vast numbers of different species
on Earth (land n water) we see that
when 2 species come together,
it is usually bad news for the weaker species.

When Europeans arrived in the Americas,
what happened to the Indians ?


I 'd love to believe that we were the only
life in the Gallaxy, but I realize how little the chances r of that.