Re: Skepticism greets claim of possible alien microbes

jacob navia wrote:

>Is this new?
>
>I did a Google search for "Red rain" and I stumbled into this.

>http://www.strangemag.com/scient.analys.redrain.html


The red-rain paper by Louis and Kumar [1] does not mention the
historical context for "red rain" outlined in Strange Magazine, [2]
which could facilitate inquiry into the nature of red rain. I did a
journal search at jstor.org and found two more historic reports.

The first report I found (in "Science, New Series," Vol. 10, No. 257,
1899) cites an 1896 report of red rain from the Australian Association
for the Advancement of Science. In that case "red rain" reportedly
"fell over Melbourne and much of Victoria on December 27, 1896." It
notes that while the red content appeared to be volcanic-rock soil,
"Under the microscope the presence of diatoms, scales of lepidoptera,
quartz and granet were detected." The second report (in "Past and
Present," No. 166. Feb 2000) incidentally mentions: "[...] on one
occasion in 1914 he comments on a report of a shower of red rain in
the Jiangsu town of Songjiang." That's all the second says about it.

It seems unwarranted for Louis and Kumar to jump to a hypothesis of
extraterrestrial origin. After all, we know that structures similar in
appearance (biological cells) are produced on the Earth, but there's
no known case from elsewhere. As such, the default hypothesis would be
that they came from the place where similar structures are produced
(Earth) and should not be abandoned for such a far-fetched hypothesis
until it was absolutely falsified, which is hardly the case.

Moreover, the fact that the red rain fell periodically in a fixed
region of India *over three months* defies the theory of being derived
from an interstellar body, the trajectory of which should coincide
with the Earth at a discrete time (or discrete times separated by long
intervals if Solar orbits come close). If there were a series of
interstellar bodies (like Shoemaker Levey [4]), then they would
deposit their debris along a path over a steady time interval, not
fall in one region over three months. As such, there does not even
appear to be prima-facie evidence of extraterrestrial origin, yet
there does appear to be prima-facie evidence of local origin.

My off-the-cuff hypothesis for the red cell-like structures in rain
examined in [1] is that they may originate from the ocean where they
collected on or near the surface and were drawn up into the clouds by
waterspouts. [3] I believe that might explain several curious features
of the distribution of red rain. Supporting such an ocean-origin
hypothesis is that many (if not all) historic cases of red rain were
close to an ocean. For example, the documented cases in [1] were all
next to the Arabian Sea (see Figure 3). Furthermore, in the historic
cases I cite above, both Melbourne and Victoria are along the Indian
Ocean, while Jiangsu runs right along the Yellow Sea. ~Ian

_____________________________________________________
[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0601022
[2] http://www.strangemag.com/redrain.html
[3] http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/historic/nws/wea00312.htm
http://www.cimms.ou.edu/~schultz/c-k/waterspouts/
[4] http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/sl9/


http://IanGoddard.net

"Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct;
its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
.

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