Have Aliens visited Earth? Possibly? Probably? It's true! Maybe?

[smilodon]

No not in space ships before you ask, but inside meteorites and in the form of single celled life, but life none the less. We seem to be seeing more and more glimpses of what might be life inside space rock. Here's more fascinating research about what might be real life from the stars. It's not yet been fully peere reviewed but at face value seems to be compelling. Time will tell
http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.1845 original paper
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512381/astrobiologists-find-ancient-fossils-in-fireball-fragments/ easier to read article for normal people like me

My view? The Universe is teeming with life. However very few species ever evolve far enough to wonder about life elsewhere. Even fewer (maybe non) ever develop the technology to communicate or visit other life before they themselves become extinct.

[Sparko]

Interesting read, I've always believed something has always been out there but just have never been able to evolve at the rate that our planets inhabitants have due to the environment they 'live' in.

[smilodon]

Pah mainstream media mess it up again. Seems this has already been mostly debunked

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/11/meteorite_life_claims_of_fossils_in_a_meteorite_are_still_wrong.html

[kregoron]

Ofc E.T. has been here, probing with his glowing finger...

[T-Bag]

The Arxiv is not a peer reviewed journal, it's a preprint server so they can essentially say whatever they like. The journal of Cosmology that they have submitted it to has an impact factor of over 5 which is reasonable (it means on average a paper published in it receives 5 citations), it means each paper is worthy of 5 replies. Something like Nature gets 37, Physical Review Letters 7, Physics of Plasmas 2.

Hopefully that means that if it gets published there it is to a reasonable standard. But based on the link in Smilo's most recent post, I would hope it wouldn't get through without significant modifications otherwise peer review will have failed. Significant questions like this should not be left in a publication.

[smilodon]

I must admit I am not familiar with technology review.com while I'm very familiar with Phil Plait and respect his views a lot. So if he says the research is questionable then I'm more than willing to accept that. It does make you wonder when 'scientists/researchers' publish stuff that's not properly researched, and ask how trustworthy their finding actually are.

I've also been following the Ketchum Bigfoot DNA debacle which is a text book case of quack research and terribly executed science.