I serien «vitenskapelige oppdagelser annonsert via Fox News», kan VG og forskning.no i dag melde om utenjordiske bakterier.

Nok en gang. Det gikk ikke så godt sist vi hørte det ryktet. Ikke da heller.

Norske medier er ellers nokså edruelige, og de inkluderer en del tydelig om forsiktige skeptiske merknader fra norsk forskerhold. Men på tross av noe distanse, ordlegger VG seg også som dette:

I en rapport publisert hos The Journal of Cosmology dokumenterer Hoover at han har funnet fossiler av bakterier i meteoritter.

«Dokumenterer»? Vi skal la PZ Myers og andre få et noe mindre forsiktig ord eller ti med i slaktlaget.

For det første, dreier det som et paper som er refusert i det relevante tidsskriftet det først ble sendt til, Journal of Astrobiology.

For det andre er det tidsskriftet («tidsskriftet» det ble publisert i, for å en av de frittalende passasjene:

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.

Hva med «funnene»?

Vel, det er nok én og annen kritisk stemme som er litt mer frittalende enn de norske. Sistnevnte oppsummerer en diskusjon av artikkelen slik:

The Ivuna meteorite sample showed a couple of micron-scale squiggles, one of which contained about 2.5-fold more carbon than the background. One of the five Orguil samples had at least one patch of clustered fibers; these contained more sulfur and magnesium than the background, and less silicon. As evidence for life this is pathetic

Myers er som vanlig et hakk mindre diplomatisk:

I’m looking forward to the publication next year of the discovery of an extraterrestrial rabbit in a meteor. While they’re at it, they might as well throw in a bigfoot print on the surface and chupacabra coprolite from space. All will be about as convincing as this story.

While they’re at it, maybe they should try publishing it in a journal with some reputation for rigorous peer review and expectation that the data will meet certain minimal standards of evidence and professionalism.

Otherwise, this work is garbage. I’m surprised anyone is granting it any credibility at all.