As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis's laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens.
In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples -- water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis's home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001 -- contain microbes from outer space.
i reckon in our lifetime they will find a planet with life on it
Well in order for humans to find life I'd think we'd first need to become a species that can build a spaceship that is capable of lasting for thousands of years that allows countless generations of people to live in space without ever relying upon the Earth to even stumble upon the remote chance of finding even a microbe, fungus, plant, etc., on another planet or moon.
I don't necessarily think a NASA robot is going to find definite traces of life even if it has the most sophisticated software installed and an artificial intelligence ("AI") that verges on pure brilliance, because I think it's going to take that human thing called exploration and sticking our noses into everything to eventually stumble upon it.
With that said in the vastness of the universe I doubt very much that Earth is the only planet with life on it.
the long range satellites their sending out now can detect life easily, did u not pay attention in science class. think the first one they sent to mars could tell us. and that was a long time ago
To quote from a film "I'll tell you one thing about the universe, though. The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just us... seems like an awful waste of space. Right? "
I think it's a good way to think. Just my 2 cents worth.
I was at a presentation given at a museum one time hosted by a NASA scientist. At the end of the talk he made himself available for questions and answers. I finally got to ask a question I'd always wanted to. Every test that was conducted by a soil sampling experiment done on Mars came up positive for indications of life. I asked him why in spite of that they decided that there was no life. He said they decided the tests were flawed. An awful lot of time and money to conduct flawed tests I guess.
Some people say that if there is life other than us in the universe, and given that if there is some of it must be far more advanced than us, why haven't we been contacted?
Since the vast majority of the signals that radiate from the Earth into the far reaches of outer space consist of television broadcasts I figure they're too busy laughing at us and feeling sorry for us to waste their time .
the long range satellites their sending out now can detect life easily, did u not pay attention in science class. think the first one they sent to mars could tell us. and that was a long time ago
And just how is a sat going to detect something that may be living very deep within a cave that may be surrounded by some material that can't be probed from space, and has to be investigated on foot. Sure the current space hardware and such may be able to detect allot of stuff, however in my opinion it's going to take boots on the ground (people) with a brain to make an informed decision versus depending upon some robotic machine to decide what's interesting or not.
If the sats were so good, then why would America be so poised to send people to Mars by the year 2030 (I think that's the year Pres Bush wanted it to be accomplished by). If sats and all the robotics were so good there'd be no reason to even send people into space.
That's a good point Andavari. We're still finding life here on Earth in places we assumed were too inhospitable for it to exist. Volcanic vents, buried far below the surface of the Earth in ice fields, etc. I think they've even found life within solid rock.
If I remember the common denominator for all life is water. People may believe that in the universe there is no life but I can't imagine anyone would argue there's no water. So in my humble opinion the possibility of life must exist wherever there is water.
"Specifically, Louis has isolated strange, thick-walled, red-tinted cell-like structures about 10 microns in size. Stranger still, dozens of his experiments suggest that the particles may lack DNA yet still reproduce plentifully, even in water superheated to nearly 600 degrees Fahrenheit . (The known upper limit for life in water is about 250 degrees Fahrenheit ."
No dna,can reproduce and survive such high heat.Well you could say that it is alien compared to all other life forms on Earth!
"Life as we know it must contain DNA, or it's not life," he says. "But even if this organism proves to be an anomaly, the absence of DNA wouldn't necessarily mean it's extraterrestrial."