Why no aliens yet?

Mushroom Rocket Fuel

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for Europa Report. Continue reading at your own risk.

Over the weekend I went to see Europa Report; a science fiction film portraying a privately-funded human-on-board mission to Europa, one of Jupiter's 67 moons. Europa has particular interest because of its fractured icy facade and potential sub-surface oceans. What tentacled creatures might be creatching in the depths?

Using documentary-style cinematography reminiscent of the Truman Show and District 9 the film is presented as "found footage" compiled after-the-fact leading the viewer up to the big reveal at the end. The footage is choppy and claustrophobic as it is mostly from the perspective of "web-cams" mounted around the ship.

I commend the directors for staying true to the realities that may accompany a space journey hundreds of millions of miles long; pale complexions, back-sweat, and the drab glow of florescent lighting.  I could barely stand two hours of it so I can only imagine the psychological effects of 22 months in that environment.

I'm not here to completely spoil the film for would-be movie-goers but I want to talk about a specific plot twist that amused my biochemical inclination.

When communication with earth is lost due to a solar flare chaos ensues. The crew-members start dying off by a series of unfortunate events. The first character to go is Engineer James Corrigan played by Sharlto Copley (pictured above).  The situation which leaves him hanging is where the mushroom connection comes into play.

Corrigan is suited up with fellow engineer Andrei Blok (Michael Nyqvist) to go on a repair mission outside the ship.  While attempting to repair the communication fuse-box Corrigan reefs on a stuck pin which causes a minor explosion. As the metal panel flies off the communication module it tears a hole in Andrei's space suit and draws blood.  Andrei tries to cover the hole with his other hand but is loosing air quickly.  The two engineers high-tail it for the ships open hatch but before they enter Andrei notices a yellowish-brown smear all over Corrigan's space-suite.  Hydrazine! Hydrazine is a rocket-fuel used by NASA inside the orbital maneuvering systems (OMS) and reaction control systems (RCS) of spacecraft and also as fuel to stabilize landers during terminal descent. If Corrigan enters the ship he'll pollute the precious oxygen supply and everyone on board will eventually get sick and probably die. If it were just him out there they could perhaps figure out a way to get him out of the suit in space and then he could enter the open hatch but Andrei is running out of air because of the tear in his space-suit.

Hydrazine, hydrazine. Where had I heard of this before? It was in a wildly different context.  Ah ha! It was during an edible mushroom identification course at the Oregon State University extension building in Jacksonville, OR.  An MD was highlighting the worst-case-scenarios of misidentifying morels.  He described receiving patients in the ER who had passed out while chopping up a bag full of what they thought were the edible morels (in the genus Morchella). The cause of their hostpital visit? A form a hydrazine in the false-morel (genus Gyromitra). Whilst preparing what they thought would be a culinary delight filled with complex earthy flavors, the unwitting victims of the false-morels were breathing in the volatile hydrazine off-gassing from their mound of mushrooms. If these ill-trained mushroom hunters had not received medical attention they very well may have died.  And here we come back to our crew of marooned Eurpopans.  If they had allowed Corrigan to enter the hatch they would all breath in the same substance the poor Oregonians had encountered but without the benefit of a hospital down the road.

In the movie the captain (Daniel Wu) made a decision to let one person die to save everyone.  This is not a difficult decision when put in a broader context of time (if Corrigan had been allowed in everyone, including Corrigan would have died) but in the moment the captain shuts him out it seems cold.  This dilemma is a microcosm of the bigger ethical question proposed by the film as a whole. What kind of sacrifices are worth making for discovery?

 

Sperm from Space?

The interwebs are exploding right now with buzz about a paper published in the Journal of Cosmology authored by a NASA scientist - Richard B. Hoover. The title of the controversial paper published online late last Friday is Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites.

Hoover claims to have found evidence of extra terrestrial life.  

This isn't a new claim.  This evidence comes by microscopic observation of a freshly fractured meteorite that landed on earth in 1864.  If it is life it's been dead for awhile. 

A torrent of criticism has quickly spewed from the scientific community.   When a journal drops names like NASA, Harvard, and Smithsonian it is not something to brush aside without consideration.  But I have spent some time looking into this "Journal of Cosmology" and come up disappointed.

The fact that my University does not have any record of this journal's existence and I can not get researchblogging.org to recognize any of the digital object identifiers (DOIs) attached to Dr. Hoover's paper are both red flags that this is a bunch of bollocks.  

I'm all for online open access journals but when peer review means you get a bunch of astrophysicists to weigh in on matters of microbial biology, Huston, we have a problem. 

The one figure from the paper that looks  interesting to me is figure 5. Seems as though someone got a bit over-excited to crack open that rock.  
 

I tend to agree with PZ Meyers after looking at this paper myself.

"I think many confuse their wish to see evidence of extraterrestrial life with the evidence for extraterrestrial life. Personally, I'd love to see the discovery of life that originated elsewhere other than our world — that would provide a radically different insight into evolution. I know there has been evidence of organic molecules in space, and I suspect that life does exist on other planets (possibly even other planets in our solar system), but I'm not going to accept a claim of discovery without adequate evidence.

And I'm sorry, but Hoover's paper is poorly written, sloppy work that uses a non-biologist's impressions of complex textures in a mineral to imply morphological evidence for fossilized bacteria. You'd think NASA would know better: we had a similar phenomenon a few years ago, in which people claimed to see a "face on Mars," a claim that NASA effectively debunked. This is the same thing. It's a shame that NASA isn't being as quick to dismiss bad science this time around.

It is disheartening to see this kind of article be presented as "peer-reviewed" because it chips away the integrity of what peer-review actually means.  On the other hand the journal in question is willing to publish negative critiques of these claims in parallel to the paper.   So let's see what the scientists that actually study microorganisms have to say about these complex textures. 

 

Hoover, Richard B (2011). fossils of cyanobacteria in C11 carbonaceous meteorites Journal of Cosmology, 13