Yea, it is that time of year, and so once again the claims being made by Mr Wainwright have been popping up …
- Express – Is this picture a ‘seed’ sent to Earth by aliens? Scientists discover mysterious organism
- Huffington Post – Aliens May Have Sent Space Seeds To Create Life On Earth
He was promoting this claim in 2013, and then again last year, and so like some game of whack-o-mole up it pops once again.
So what is going on here?
Professor Wainwright (yes he really is one, but don’t let that fool you) has for the past couple of years now been launching balloons to gather samples and then examining what gets captured.
So once they have launched a balloon carrying sterile microscope slides up into the stratosphere they then expose them only when it got up there. Once back on the ground they then take a look and … “gasp … look, here are some bacteria and some diatoms we have not seen before and don’t know about, so it must be aliens”.
Let me translate – “Oh Look, I have no idea how these got up there so it must be evidence of aliens, that big blue planet just below me bursting with a vast diversity of life could not possibly be the source, it must have been aliens”. Sigh! … so yes, while the actual samples collected are indeed interesting, the huge leap made to “aliens” is a conclusion that is based upon an argument from ignorance.
So what is new?
Well, this time the claim is that his balloon has picked up a “tiny metal circular object”, and so his immediate go-to claim is …
it was sent to Earth by some unknown civilization in order to continue seeding the planet with life,
(Sigh!) … er no. Each and every day stuff that we have launched into orbit will re-enter our atmosphere and fall back to earth, and also another potential explanation is that a tiny fragment of a naturally occurring metal in a meteorite melted upon re-entry and took that shape.
If he truly does want to be taken seriously, then he is going to have to explain why the rather obvious explanations have been dismissed and discarded.
Some of the articles get some stuff correct
For example the Huff Po article ends with …
the alien space seed proponents know they have a long way to go before that can be proven and accepted by the scientific community.
Correct, that is indeed spot on, and in fact I would argue that it is not simply “some way to go”, but is more correctly rendered “begin”,because so far what is on the table is not exactly credible.
Finally, I am rather bemused with the claim in the express that all of what has been offered by Wainwright has “baffled scientists”. It might indeed be correct in the sense that Wainwright is a tad baffled, but as for the rest of the scientific community, nope, expect perhaps there is a degree of bafflement concerning the willingness of some media outlets to take any of this seriously.