Further to “Don’t let Mars fool you. Those exoplanets teem with life!“, and the claim that alien life was recently found floating 27 km above Chester, England: People such as Terry Kee at Ars Technica, who would be quite happy to accept the claim if at all reasonable, have choked on it:
They found something called a “diatom frustule,” which is, in essence, the non-living outer shell of a dead organism, a type of algae that thrives in rivers, streams, and oceans. Diatoms are so common and so populous in such environments that they are central to those ecosystems. Wainwright makes a case that the inanimate material they see once belonged to a living entity.
The elephant in the room of course is, how did the diatoms end up in the stratosphere?
The authors conclude that they come from some other planet. But the explanations and (more to the point) the scientific evidence provided in the authors’ paper are rather weak. While terrestrial sources for diatoms so high in the stratosphere, such as volcanic eruptions and contamination of the original sampling equipment, are considered unviable by the authors, they offer as an alternative that the material must have come from space. However, to date there is no supporting evidence for that hypothesis either.
No, but then NASA found a previously unidentified bacterium in its own clean room.
And the Rover is still having trouble detecting any methane (a possible indicator of life) at all on Mars.
Don’t bring the space suits down from the attic just yet, Schmiddle.