Let me just say that I’m skeptical.
To make such a claim, one has to be able to show that there was not contamination from any source. For a meteorite found on the Earth’s surface, that’s pretty hard to do.
Just manipulating the rock in a sterile environment is not sufficient. “Sterile” means that microorganisms are dead, not that they are absent. Whatever process presumably enabled microorganisms of non-Earth origin to penetrate into the interior of the rock would allow Earth organisms to penetrate its interior.
The way I see it, to make such a claim with reasonable assurance, the rock would have to be found and manipulated away from Earth (say, on the surface of the moon or another planet). Then, all of the instruments used to manipulate it would have to be shown to be completely devoid of microorganisms or their remains. Furthermore, putative microorganisms would have to be shown to be, in fact, living or the remains of living things and not artifacts that resemble living things.
To make the claim of bona fide extraterrestrial life requires an extraordinary standard of proof.
“To make the claim of bona fide extraterrestrial life requires an extraordinary standard of proof.”
I don’t understand where this meme came from. Basically, it’s saying “if I don’t agree with a hypothesis, then what comprises evidence to support a hypothesis is different that if I think it’s a good hypothesis.” Is there actually any scientific justification for it or is it just a rhetorical arguin’ point?
The closest you can get to that in statistics is a strong Bayesian prior agin’ the proposition, which itself has to be justified as more than someone’s whim. And actual evidence in favor of the proposition quickly overwhelms even strong priors to the contrary.
The evidence is either consistent with the hypothesis, inconclusive, or it disproves the hypothesis, regardless of the biases of the reviewer.
Personally, I don’t think there is ET life—at least not complex life. But that doesn’t change what evidence supports and doesn’t support the hypothesis.