UK BALLOON FINDS ALIEN LIFE?

Seems like a day for ET type stories on the BBC.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22904141

I remember not so long ago, Prof Brian Cox had that series about the universe, and he was explaining that all the precious metals are made at the last moment of a star collapsing, when heat and pressure are right off the scale, and then when it explodes it gets sent out through the universe.

Something like that, anyway.

Farmerman will be able to translate for me.

Here you go......

That's exactly right, all elements heavier than Iron (and therefor including Gold) are formed during during the collapse of stars.

The fusion of elements within a burning star produces heavier and heavier elements as a waste byproduct of the fusion cycle. This happens up through the lighter elements until the star begins to accumulate Iron in its core. Up until Iron the fusion process releases more energy than it consumes (thus perpetuating the cycle), but the fusion of Iron actually takes energy rather than releasing any, so once Iron is produced a core collapse is imminent. It's during the collapse itself (nova) that increased temperatures are reached and the heavier elements can be formed within the maelstrom.

The making of gold......

Some aspects of this article sound fishy.

For one, they claim to have found a diatom fragment. Diatoms are single celled algae which form in the oceans, so if one of those got up there then other things might have also.

The other thing that bothers me is that they say "biological entities" instead of organic compounds or specific organisms. I don't see any need for such ambiguity if they were able to identify things as being "biological entities" rather than organic molecules.

Other things about the report seem less than scientific to me as well.

I guess we'll find out if they ever release more accurate data and results. But in the end, "alien" organisms aren't very interesting if there turns out to be nothing "alien" about them. If they are just earth style DNA based organisms then the real question is going to be "how did they get there", not "where did they come from".

Also, the Journal of Cosmology does not have a good reputation for being a real Scientific Journal. They tend to accept any article which implies that life did not originate on Earth.

Another article on this: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-truth-is-out-there-british-scientists-claim-to-have-found-proof-of-alien-life-8826690.html

So, in order to explain this process, he, his "staff" and a BBC film crew had to go to Rio, to see a prison demolished? Nice gig, if you can get it. I'm assuming that BBC paid the bill for their "work" in Rio.

As we say here.....lovely jubbly!

Brian Cox is one of those people who is above all criticism. National Treasures are the new aristocrats. Like this guy.

One of the worst cases i've ever seen was about 20 or 30 years ago. In his novel Chariots of the Gods Erik von Danikan poses a tendentious question which he posed as though it were rhetorical. There are huge carvings on the rocks at Nazca in Peru, and he was trying to suggest that they could only have been laid out from above.

Well, a bunch of jokers got a grant from the National Institutes of Science, and went down to Peru to see if they could construct a hot-air balloon using the materials which were available naturally, using stone age tools. They actually succeeded. They were filmed by a crew from the Public Broadcasting System.

The question arises, how could people in a hot-air balloon communicate with or control people on the ground? Furthermore, with today's technology--helicopters and radios, for example--how could you control a bunch of primitives carving a huge rock plateau? Well, there is an answer--you don't have to. You can use grid transfer . . .



You take a drawing, you lay out a grid over it, and then you construct a much larger grid, and copy the image from each square of the smaller grid into the larger grid. That, in fact, makes much more sense than loony claims about aliens flying around controlling primitive people on the ground.

It bothers me that alleged scientists are so dense that they would fall for von Daniken's goofy rhetorical trick. What bothers me more, however, is that NIS and PBS are paid for by the tax payer. Nice, expenses-paid vacation in Peru for the NIS grant-writers and the PBS crew.

I read a good book about Chariots of the Gods back then

Von Daniken does seem to have been a flash in the pan. However, he made a few bucks, and as long as he stayed ahead of the police on the fraud charges against him in Europe, it was probably not a bad life. This sort of thing, along with UFOs, allegedly unsolved mysteries (such as Amityville) and any number of conspiracy theories won't make the shysters rich, but it will provide an income.

actually, von Daniken wrote his "Chariots..." while in prison.

I looked it up about his criminal pranks and even he, in 2005 admitted that "Chariots"... was lifted from some of the story line of "The Mountains of MAdness"

I believe the Journal of Cosmology is also the ones who published stories of the "Red Rain in India" a few years back. Many people excitedly claimed that the red rain was definitive proof of extraterrestrial organisms. Turns out it was some type of red algae if I remember correctly.

Well, if you can sell it to the rubes, more power to ya.

I suspect the red rain story was what inspired Bewildered in his career of interplanetary delusion.

I checked on Bewildered a while back to see what he was up to (google still reveals a trail of insanity leading right to him). His latest rant is "concrete blocks all over Mars" I couldn't even think up stuff that good.