peteryoung | Panspermia

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peteryoung

I've never had a head for anything more rigorous than pop-science, but this is another of those occasions where I wish I could do more than merely skim the surface of a particular type of scientific paper. By many accounts, this article at the Journal of Cosmology looks promising for the confirmation of extraterrestrial bacterial life found within three carbonaceous meteorites found in Antarctica. Maybe it's also another step in the direction of an expectation I've held since first seeing the above photos, that every time we look at the lineae in the chaos terrain of Europa – a moon of Jupiter – and the 'tiger stripes' of Enceladus – a moon of Saturn – we could be looking at life that already exists elsewhere in the solar system. The end of the paper goes a little further into such speculation.

I hope very much that the peer review will produce positives rather than negatives, as happened in the case of ALH84001.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

purplecthulhu.livejournal.com

Journal of Cosmology is not a journal I've heard of before, and I work in cosmology. This sounds an alarm to me. If this is as big as claimed, then Science or Nature would have been the places to send it. My suspicion is that they've punted to this lesser known, more fringe journal because the results are not secure enough to go anywhere else - if not Nature then Astrophysical Journal or Bioastronomy or Astronomical Journal or Icarus - all have greater impact and reputation as far as I can tell.

From:

peteyoung.livejournal.com

That's interesting, and it's a journal I had also not heard of before. But then as you know, unlike you I'm very much on the outside looking in on something that interests me enormously. So I'd certainly be interested to read your take on this.

Edited Date: 2011-03-06 10:24 am (UTC)

From:

stillcarl.livejournal.com

I found the site's design off-putting enough! As if whoever manages it hasn't updated their HTML skills since about 1995.

But note their "Because there are no subscription fees, publication costs are paid from an author's research budget, or by their supporting institution, in the form of Article Processing and Publication Fees." I can imagine amateur scientists paying up in the hope they'll see their work in print, but wouldn't real ones be a bit wary of vanity publications? I'd think it'd do their reputations more harm than good.

From:

purplecthulhu.livejournal.com

To be fair, page charges, as 'publishing fees' are called in paper journals like Astrophysical Journal, are actually quite common. In fact they're the rule to which free publication, paid for by subscribers, is the exception. A good journal is one that still requires things to be properly peer reviewed before publication even when they're requiring page charges. ApJ is one of these. I don't know if the same can be said of The Journal of Cosmology.

From:

peteyoung.livejournal.com

Do some of the names attached to the J of C give it any greater credence? Wickramasinghe and Penrose, for example.

Also, YMBITK

joe_haldeman has just posted some comments on this.

From:

purplecthulhu.livejournal.com

If that's Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University then their credibility just went through the floor as far as I'm concerned. He wasn't known as Wacky Wickie there for no reason.

From:

peteyoung.livejournal.com

Yeah I know he's a bit of an oddball, and his idea that panspermia was the cause of the SARS outbreak was when he jumped the shark as far as I'm concerned. But Penrose, I imagine, is surely in a rather different league.

From:

stillcarl.livejournal.com

Fair enough. It's not vanity publishing if there's no guarantee of publication. Though going by the scienceblogs.com blog linked to below, there probably is a bit of a guarantee at The Journal of Cosmology if the editor happens to like what you're saying...