Source: http://redicecreations.com/article.php?id=12450


The Extraordinary Tale of Red Rain, Comets and Extraterrestrials


The Extraordinary Tale of Red Rain, Comets and Extraterrestrials
2010 09 07
From: TechnologyReview.com

For years, claims have circulated that red rain which fell in India
in 2001, contained cells unlike any found on Earth. Now new evidence
that these cells can reproduce is about to set the debate alive.
Panspermia is the idea that life exists throughout the universe in
comets, asteroids and interstellar dust clouds and that life of
Earth was seeded from one or more of these sources. Panspermia holds
that we are all extraterrestrials.

While this is certainly not a mainstream idea in science, a growing
body of evidence suggests that it should be carefully studied rather
than casually disregarded.

For example, various bugs have been shown to survive for months or
even years in the harsh conditions of space. And one of the more
interesting but lesser known facts about the Mars meteorite that
some scientists believe holds evidence of life on Mars, is that its
interior never rose above 50 degrees centigrade, despite being
blasted from the Martian surface by an meteor impact and surviving a
fiery a descent through Earth’s thick atmosphere.

If there is life up there, this evidence suggests that it could
survive the trip to Earth.

All that seems well established. Now for the really controversial
stuff.

In 2001, numerous people observed red rain falling over Kerala in
the southern tip of India during a two month period. One of them was
Godfrey Louis, a physicist at nearby Cochin University of Science
and Technology. Intrigued by this phenomena, Louis collected
numerous samples of red rain, determined to find out what was
causing the contamination, perhaps sand or dust from some distant
desert.

Under a microscope, however, he found no evidence of sand or dust.
Instead, the rain water was filled with red cells that look
remarkably like conventional bugs on Earth. What was strange was
that Louis found no evidence of DNA in these cells which would rule
out most kinds of known biological cells (red blood cells are one
possibility but ought to be destroyed quickly by rain water).
Louis published his results in the peer-reviewed journal

Astrophysics and Space in 2006, along with the tentative suggestion
that the cells could be extraterrestrial, perhaps from a comet that
had disintegrated in the upper atmosphere and then seeded clouds as
the cells floated down to Earth. In fact, Louis says there were
reports in the region of a sonic boom-type noise at the time, which
could have been caused by the disintegration of an object in the
upper atmosphere.

Since then, Louis has continued to study the cells with an
international team including Chandra Wickramasinghe from the
University of Cardiff in the UK and one of the leading proponents of
the panspermia theory, which he developed in the latter half of the
20th century with the remarkable physicist Fred Hoyle.

Today Louis, Wickramasinghe and others publish some extraordinary
claims about these red cells. They say that the cells clearly
reproduce at a temperature of 121 degrees C. "Under these conditions
daughter cells appear within the original mother cells and the
number of cells in the samples increases with length of exposure to
121 degrees C," they say. By contrast, the cells are inert at room
temperature.

That makes them highly unusual, to say the least. The spores of some
extremophiles can survive these kinds of temperatures and then
reproduce at lower temperatures but nothing behaves like this at
these temperatures, as far as we know.

This is an extraordinary claim that will need to be independently
verified before it will be more broadly accepted.

And of course, this behaviour does not suggest an extraterrestrial
origin for these cells, by any means.

However, Wickramasinghe and co can’t resist hinting at such an
exotic explanation. They’ve examined the way these fluoresce when
bombarded with light and say it is remarkably similar to various
unexplained emission spectra seen in various parts of the galaxy.
One such place is the Red Rectangle, a cloud of dust and gas around
a young star in the Monocerous constellation.

It would be fair to say that more evidence will be required before
Kerala’s red rain can be satisfactorily explained. In the meantime,
it looks a fascinating mystery.


Article from: technologyreview.com
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