Researchers from Sheffield University believe that they have found traces of extraterrestrial life that came to our planet from space. Well, not a bad reason for a xenobiology session with an inevitable subsequent exposure.
You can practice your "wit" as much as you like (they say, "British scientists have discovered the remains of aliens in the stratosphere"), but the authors of this work launched an ordinary stratospheric balloon (HK) into the upper atmosphere, which lifted off the ground by 27 km and collected a number of particles there, including a fragment of a diatom shell.
The statement about the extraterrestrial origin of the latter was made by those who had already arranged such demarches. So, at one time, the authors of the study found traces of similar organisms in meteorites that fell to the Earth. And Nalin Chandra Wickramasingh - one of the authors of the idea of panspermia - and did make a career on similar conclusions, such as theories about the extraterrestrial origin of "red rains" and "SARS".
The idea of his group is simple: the shells of diatoms are heavier than air, which means that even if some mechanism unknown to science lifted them into heaven, they would immediately fall from there.
This is where the famous binary opposition “I want to believe” comes into play - Occam's razor. On the one hand, coming up with a mechanism that would allow diatoms (or their shells) to float in the stratosphere is not as difficult as agreeing with panspermia. On the other hand, no one has yet proposed such an Okkamov mechanism, emphasize Mr. Wickramasingh and his associates.
In addition, diatoms, according to today's data, appeared about 185 million years ago, in the Cretaceous period. This means that they cannot be such an ancient group as to come from space as the ancestors of all earthly life. That is, they must have a relatively recent cosmic origin, which forces us to make a series - rather long - of assumptions according to which DNA should be characteristic of both terrestrial and extraterrestrial life.
And that somewhere near us there is a planet with aquatic oceans, in which algae use the same chlorophyll as our plants. The latter is especially doubtful, since even on Earth, plant chlorophyll does not coincide with bacterial; some of them use the energy of the sun without chlorophyll at all. Well, outside our system, the spectrum of stars should cause the appearance of other key links in photosynthesis, which most likely excludes the presence of ordinary terrestrial chlorophyll in diatoms.
Finally, it is these organisms that are responsible for the existence of such a breed as diatomite. According to modern data, its weathering is one of the significant sources of dust in the earth's atmosphere. And with this dust, the accidentally undecomposed shell of a diatom is quite capable of getting into the stratosphere, although it should be admitted that the shell itself is really not a very typical phenomenon at such a height. Nevertheless, the Bodele Depression in Chad, believed to be the main source of diatom dust, "exports" these particles even to Europe. Perhaps some of this kind of dust is capable of rising above the troposphere?
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So, the question boils down to the following: which is more likely - that our knowledge about the transfer of particles from the troposphere to the stratosphere is incorrect, or that comets actually bring to us from nowhere from nowhere the shells of diatoms living, in general, in surface water bodies, which are outside the Earth in our solar is not too much?
Island observers note that instead of answering this question, Mr. Wickramasingh's group has labeled British science as "detecting alien life."