If it's "science" it must be true.

[urbpan]

Wild speculation worded as if it were science, published in a "science journal," proves wacky theory of panspermia.

I especially like the figure of "one trillion trillion times more likely" that life originated in the non-frozen heart clay-and water filled of a comet than on earth. Not that anyone has proven that any comets contain liquid water, or clay. That's a big number. It must be true.

If someone can mine a comet, and produce the building blocks of life from it, then we can talk about comets "seeding life." But in the meanwhile, Panspermia is just a way of saying that Earth isn't special enough to have produced life--it's just the telescope owner's version of Special Creation or Intelligent Design. Magic Man Comet done it.

Comments

[antarcticlust.livejournal.com]

Just the line "calculations PROVE" was enough to get me rolling on the floor.

[http://users.livejournal.com/purplebunnie_/]

That is pretty much what I got from the article. I felt cheated; the title said research "proved" life didn't start on earth, but the majority of the article was about why the theory is probably false.

[droserary.livejournal.com]

You know, I was reading all that on sciencedaily.com and also found another article that came to the exact opposite conclusion! It studied DNA from organisms in glacial ice and determined that DNA on ice doesn't last all that long, relatively. Interesting stuff.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Hhhhhh. Chandra Wickramasinghe has been beating his "comets brought life to earth" drum for as long as I can remember, and I would have thought he'd have dropped it after Fred Hoyle died. (Wickramasinghe was one of the defense witnesses in the 1982 Arkansas case against the "equal time" provision for creation science in Arkansas public schools, and his latest book Diseases From Space got a lot of snide commentary from the journalist pool. Since Wickramasinghe and Hoyle argued that lateral transmission of viruses was impossible, someone came up with a joke about a husband coming to his wife and telling her "I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that I have herpes. The good news is that I got it from outer space!")

[cottonmanifesto.livejournal.com]

that is a bad summary of a bad paper. i like the article in the journal that talks about the guys irradiating primordial soup though.