Astrobiologists discover fossils in meteorite fragments, confirming extraterrestrial life

[thesummerqueen]

When an article says right in the middle of itself that all of the findings could be false, that means someone was jumping the gun in order to get some news out...not reporting any real science.

[Aractus]

Yeah, looks like this scientist has a history of exaggeration and bad science: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy...wrong.html

Thanks for the link. After the first few replies I was going to be like "where the fuck is your scepticism guys, or is it a biased and directed scepticism"... We've brought back rocks from the Moon and from Mars - the Moon was once covered in water. We've examined them for decades, and haven't found any signs of life in Moon rocks or Mars rocks - two sources close to the earth that should contain an abundant amount of microbes to find inside of rocks - we simply haven't found them. If we can't find them from rocks we selected and took from there, then how likely is it we're going to find life inside of a random meteorite from some random unknown source? Furthermore for Panspermia to have any credibility at all we would find life on the moon - it was once covered in water, we should find plenty of life in the rocks if life can be "seeded" that way.

[Jackalope]

"The moon was once covered in water" - I'm gonna call citation needed on that one.

Certainly not liquid water - or even ice for any reasonable definition of "covered" that I'm aware of. I'm thinking some clarification is in order.

[Aractus]

[SiRade]

Those people claim their paper was published in peer reviewed sceintific journal, but uppon reading the original paper I was... Well, don't know how to say it. It didn't look like a paper at all. Just some giberish nonsense.

[popeyespappy]

It's been found in many moon rocks (virtually all the ones that have been brought back and tested with the right equipment), and is believed to have originated from the Moon itself - thus I think that qualifies as "covered" in water.

LoL!

Abundant hydroxyl does not equate to covered in water. Did you even bother to read the article you linked?

[Anomalocaris]

Moon was never covered in water. We once thought it had for all practical purposes no water whatsoever. We now know the moon has many times more water than nothing. But many times nothing is still a very very small amount for a moon sized planetary body.

There is abundant evidence that the moon was formed very energetically and was molten all the way through at its beginning, however. That puts a strict upper limit on how much of any initial water inventory in its constituent materials the moon could have retained.