Is Contacting Aliens A Very Stupid Idea?

io9 - 6.12.13 by GEORGE DVORSKY

A group of scientists and entrepreneurs has created the world’s first continuous message beacon to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations. And for a fee, people can use it to transmit their own messages into space. But not everyone thinks this project is a good idea.

The idea of messaging ETs has been around for a while now, and typically goes by the name METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) or Active SETI. The basic idea is that, instead of just listening passively for an alien radio signal, we should deliberately try to send messages into space in hopes of attracting the attention of alien civilizations.

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Extraterrestrial Bacteria Find Debunked

Looks like the so-called evidence is found wanting. That didn't take long. (By PZ Myers)

Did scientists discover bacteria in meteorites?

No.

No, no, no. No no no no no no no no.

No, no.

No.

Fox News broke the story, which ought to make one immediately suspicious — it's not an organization noted for scientific acumen. But even worse, the paper claiming the discovery of bacteria fossils in carbonaceous chondrites was published in … the Journal of Cosmology. I've mentioned Cosmology before — it isn't a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth. It doesn't exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s, and publishes lots of empty noise with no substantial editorial restraint. For a while, it seemed to be entirely the domain of a crackpot named Rhawn Joseph who called himself the emeritus professor of something mysteriously called the Brain Research Laboratory, based in the general neighborhood of Northern California (seriously, that was the address: "Northern California"), and self-published all of his pseudo-scientific "publications" on this web site.

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Another Claim for Alien Bacteria

Think this one will amount to anything? We'll see.

FoxNews - 3.5.11 by Garrett Tenney

Dr. Riccardo Guerrero / Journal of Cosmology

A photograph taken through a scanning electron microscope of a CI1 meteorite is similar in size and overall structure to the giant bacterium Titanospirillum velox, an organism found here on planet Earth, a NASA scientist said.

We are not alone in the universe -- and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought.

That's the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology.

Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites -- only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth.

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More Evidence of NASA's Screwups

Slate - 12.7.10 by Carl Zimmer

On Thursday, Dec. 2, Rosie Redfield sat down to read a new paper called "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus." Despite its innocuous title, the paper had great ambitions. Every living thing that scientists have ever studied uses phosphorus to build the backbone of its DNA. In the new paper, NASA-funded scientists described a microbe that could use arsenic instead. If the authors of the paper were right, we would have to expand our notions of what forms life can take.

This Paper Should Not Have Been Published

Redfield, a microbiology professor at the University of British Columbia, had been hearing rumors about the papers for days beforehand. On Monday, NASA released a Sphinxlike press release: "NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life." Like a virulent strain of bacteria, speculation exploded over the next three days. "Did NASA Discover Life on One of Saturn's Moons?" asked Gawker, a Web site that does not often ask questions about astrobiology.

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