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Section A22 APRIL 2011

Has a NASA scientist ound evidence o

lie in space?Astrobiologist Dr. Richard Hoover o

NASAs Marshall Space Flight Centerclaims to have ound ossil bacteria inside arare meteorite. He concludes that bacteriallie could exist on comets or icy worlds likeEuropa or Enceladus.

Hoovers paper is Fossils of Cyanobacteriain CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites: Implications to Life onComets, Europa, and Enceladus in the March 2011 is-sue o the Journal of Cosmology.

Moons

Europa is the sixth-innermost moon o Jupiter, thesuns largest planet. Its the smallest o Jupiters ourGalilean moons, which were all discovered by Galileo

in 1610. Slightly smaller than earths moon, Europahas an icy surace and an oxygen atmosphere.

Jupiter has 50 moons and 12 provisional moons,but the Galilean moons are the our largest. One o

them, Ganymede, is the largest moon in the solar sys-tem. Earths moon is fth in size.

Enceladus was discovered by William Herschelin 1789. It is the sixth-largest and ninth-innermostmoon o Saturn and contains water and carbon. Sat-urns largest moon Titan is oten proposed as a loca-tion or lie also; its the solar systems second-largest

moon.Jupiters moon Europa and Saturns moon Ence-ladus are commonly speculated as possibilities or liebeyond Earth because they both have water. No def-nite evidence o lie has been ound on either, how-ever.

ClaiMUnlikely

Hoovers new claim is highly unlikely. Over the lasthal-century, thousands o meteorites have been rig-orously examined or evidence o lie with no suc-cess.

As many have said, extraordinary claims requireextraordinary evidence. And extraordinary evidence

or Hoovers claim is lacking. His conclusionrests on interpretations o highly technicalwork with electron microscopes and chemi-

cal analyses with plenty o room or errorand presuppositional bias.Senior research scientist

Rocco Mancinelli rom theBay Area EnvironmentalResearch Institute expressesdoubt about Hoovers con-clusions: As a microbiologistwho has looked at thousands

o microbes through a microscope, anddone some o my own electron micros-copy, I see no convincing evidence thatthese particles are o biological origin.

NASA has ofcially distanced itselrom support o Hoovers claim. Manymicrobiologists and astrobiologists

dispute Hoovers claims o extraterres-trial lie.

Fiteen years ago in 1996, similarclaims o extraterrestrial lie were made

about supposed bacteria os-sils ound inside a Marsmeteorite. Worldwidehoopla accompanied theannouncement, but even-tually it was rejected. Its nolonger cited as extraterres-trial lie.

It will take some timeor scientists to com-pletely evaluate Hooversevidence, but I think thisclaim will all by the way-side, just as all similar pastclaims have done.

WheredidlifeCoMefroM?

Senior astronomer Seth Shostak specu-lates on Hoovers work: Maybe lie wasseeded on earth it developed on cometsor example, and just landed here whenthese things were hitting the very earlyEarth. It would suggest, well, lie didntreally begin on the Earth, it began as thesolar system was orming. Shostak isrom Caliornias SETI Institute (Searchor Extraterrestrial Intelligence).

Panspermia is the speculative beliethat lie originated in outer space and wasseeded on Earth and other astral bodies bycomets, asteroids, and meteorites. Propo-nents overlook that panspermia, literallyseeding everywhere, does not explainthe origin o lie. It just movesthe problem elsewhere in the

universe.The ot-repeated claim that lie on earth

was seeded rom outer space is a worldview-generated belief, not a conclusion based onevidence. To date, there is absolutely no sub-stantiation or it. There is no evidence orlie originating in space, nor any evidencethat lie on earth was seeded rom space. It ssimply a belie.

The other popular explanation or lie isabiogenesis, the belie that lie arose spon-taneously rom non-lie. No evidence sup-ports this belie either. It has never beenobserved to occur, and no explanation existsor how non-lie could assemble the vastamount o inormation needed or lie andproperly organize it. The inormation con-tent in the DNA o a single cell exceeds thato the Library o Congress.

Even i lie is unquestionably proven toexist on a meteorite rom space, this would

neither prove abiogenesis nor panspermia. Nobodywould have observed it arising rom non-lie, norwould we know its true origin.

Moreover, evidence o lie on a space meteoritewould not address these undamental issues: Howdid lies inert building blocks initiallyoriginate? How did they supposedlysel-organize into living creatures?How did the spark o lie originate?Where lie began is very dierent romhow lie began.

I remnants o lie are someday dis-covered elsewhere in the solar system,

rom earth, rather than lie on earth

How could this be? Genesis sug-gests a possibility: Noahs Flood.Prior to the Flood there were huge

subcrustal reservoirs o water (thegreat deep, Genesis 7:11). WhenEarths crust ruptured and the foun-tains of the great deep burst open withexpulsive energy ar surpassing thato volcanoes, bacteria-laden mudand water could have been propelledinto space.

Thus its conceivable seeding couldhave been generated rom Earth rath-er than vice-versa. Bacteria on mete-orites could have originally come romEarth. Its interesting that Hooverhimsel says the meteorite composi-tion he studied is similar to earth.

Thus an earth-centered reversepanspermia may have elements otruth. Maybe lie went out rom earthinto space, rather than coming toearth rom space.

planation or lie that comes along. Beret o ground-ing in truth, he alls or anything, no matter how wildand unbelievable the explanation is.

We know rom the history book o the universehow lie originated on earth, and it did not come onmeteorites or comets rom space. The Almighty cre-ated the universe and all lie in six days about 6,000years ago. And, according to the Genesis record, Hecreated lie directly on earth, not in space.

There is no evidence that He created physical lie

anywhere else in the universe. Soli Deo Gloria.

E-mail Dr. Pelletier at BibleScienceGuy@woodsidenews.org. Read the Bible-Science Guy blog athttp://BibleScienceGuy.wordpress.com and follow him athttp://twitter.com/BibleScienceGuy.

WiLLiAM T. PELLETiERPH.d.

Over the last

half-century,thousands of

meteorites

have been

rigorously

examined for

evidence of

life with no

success.

PhOTOcOuRTESyNaSa

Jupter an ts 4 gallean Moons (top to bottom): io, Europa, ganymee, Callsto

Is There Alien Life in Space?

THE bIbLE AND SCIENCE BY WiLLiAM T. PELLETiER, PH.d. [WOODSIDE NEWS COLUMNIST]

2011William T. Pelletier

Unregenerate man jumps at any non-Biblical ex-

its possible that they originally came

having come rom them.