Actual proof of alien life!

Wolf_O, A little patience is needed; I'm one person rather excited about the research into finding the origin of life. At least the scientists are looking for answer for now.

Me too Eryemil. I am surprised at the lack of media coverage on this whole thing. Even if the life form is not extraterrestrial it still represents a form of life never seen before. Why the silence?

It's tough to explain, however, how 50 tonnes of mammal blood could have ended up in rain clouds. Cockell takes a wild guess that maybe a meteor explosion massacred a flock of bats, splattering their blood in all directions. India is home to around 100 species of bats, which sometimes fly to altitudes of 3 kilometres or more. "A giant flock of bats is actually a possibility - maybe a meteor airburst occurred during a bat migration," he says. "But one would have to wonder where the bat wings are."

Dr Wainwright told New Scientist there was every reason to take Dr Louis's report seriously. "Everything in the paper is done correctly.
"There is nothing wacky about it, although clearly it needs verifying."
Having carried out a first batch of tests on the red rain particles, he told the Yorkshire Post: "They are clearly cells. No argument about it. They look like the spores of some kind of rust fungus."
His first job is to try to find DNA, using a different set of tests from those Dr Louis tried.
If successful, it might be possible to identify it. If the DNA is unidentifiable, all possibilities remain open.
But if there really is no DNA, the mystery deepens and the extra-terrestrial explanation becomes even more likely - especially if it is possible to repeat the reproduction experiments, left out of Dr Louis's paper for Astrophysics & Space Science because they seemed too amazing to be true.
Dr Wainwright expects to have results within a few weeks, although he will make no public announcement until he is sure his experiments and his reasoning are beyond reasonable challenge.
"When Hoyle and Wickramasinghe started the panspermia theory in the 1980s, it was pooh-poohed," he said.
"But now it has become fashionable. With what we now know about microbes, it is quite easy to see how they could be transported onto Earth, and blown off Earth by collisions, so you get a two-way traffic throughout the cosmos."
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06 March 2006

I am very surprised that more is not beng made of this. Cornell published the paper describing it as panspermia. Many publications are looking at this phenomenon closely. Surely by now someone would have noticed if the cells had DNA. And they reproduce rapidly at 300 C. That's unlike any rust fungus on Earth. Give me an Earthly explanation and I will accept it. And how did it wind up in the clouds over a certain section of India?

I agree it's intriguing, but I'm not surprised that it's taking time to get through the process. Nobody wants to go flying off the handle calling press conferences on the biggest news of the century, only to have to eat crow when someone says "oops, we did a test wrong and it actually has DNA, and it's just a fungus. Never Mind... "

arXiv (pronounced "archive", as if the "X" were the Greek letter χ) is an archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science and biology which can be accessed via the internet. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are placed on the arXiv, with some minor work remaining purely as e-prints and not published in paper peer-reviewed journals. As of February 2006, arXiv.org contains about 355,000 e-prints, with three to four thousand new e-prints being added every month. {emphasis added}