Dr. Richard B. Hoover, a NASA astrobiologist, has come out with a discovery that has the power to shake the world of science - or just make him look stupid. Hoover believes that he has found a small fossil worm in a CI1 carbonaceous chondrite meteorite, a very rare meteorite of which only nine exist on Earth. According to Hoover, he has found small fossils, many resembling life on Earth. He uses this evidence to make a case for his theory that life evolved in space or on other planets.
Many scientests doubt Hoover's claim. According to The Journal of Cosmology, "no other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough vetting". However, many scientests are doubting the validity of The Journal of Cosmology. The most aggressive, PZ Meyers, says this in ScienceBlogs:
[The Journal of Cosmology] isn't a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth.However, the author has investigated Meyers post in ScienceBlogs (And he invites the reader to see for himself), and has decided that Meyers is a bit to Zealotical and critical, sometimes t the extent of being just plain rude. He says this:
It [The Journal of Cosmology] doesn't exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s, and publishes lots of empty noise with no substantial editorial restraint. For a while, it seemed to be entirely the domain of a crackpot named Rhawn Joseph who called himself the emeritus professor of something mysteriously called the Brain Research Laboratory, based in the general neighborhood of Northern California (seriously, that was the address: "Northern California"), and self-published all of his pseudo-scientific "publications" on this web site.
He also calls the people at the Cosmology "single-minded lunatics". Although some would argue that I sometimnes act similarly, I've never called anyone a "lunatic"(Although I'd be happy to describe both Old-Earth and New-Earth creationists using that term and more).
So let's wrap this up: Richard Hoover discovered what may be an alien fossil, but most scientists are skeptical. PZ Meyers attacks this point and uses some very rude language.
So what should we think? Hoover works for NASA, so he shouldn't be treated lightly, but on the whole, I think that TIME magazine says it best: "Scientist Claims to Have Found Evidence of ET, But Don't Phone Home Just Yet"
One thing's for sure: if more develops, you'll read about it here, at the Pokiphlanon Science Blog!
Sources:
Time Magazine: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/07/scientist-claims-to-have-found-evidence-of-et-but-dont-phone-home-just-yet/
Yahoo News: http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/nasascientistfindsevidenceofalienlife
ScienceBlogs: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/did_scientists_discover_bacter.php
