At www.technology.review.com/blog/arxiv/25699/ Sept 1st … ‘The extraordinary Tale of Red Rain, Comets and Extraterrestrials’ is the title but the shortish piece on the blog does not give much away – you need to read the paper on the earlier post on the same subject. Panspermia is not a mainstream fancy in science but a growing body of evidence suggest it is a subject to be explored rather than casually ignored – given the treatment. The red rain is said to have occurred shortly after a sonic boom which might have been caused by the disintegration of an object in the upper atmosphere. The big problem is that the red rain persisted for two months. The paper indicates the red cells proliferate when encountering heat – which is what may have occurred if a meteorite or similar cosmic body exploded, but clearly there are a lot of sceptics out there – not least in cyber space. The comments therefore are perhaps more interesting than the blog itself (the article can be downloaded from http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0601/0602022v1.pdf ). One of them appears to be a regular nuisance with a beef – nothing to do with red rain. AKT is apparently not taken by Einstein or relativity and at one point quotes a Cambridge comologist (unnamed) that recently said, questioning relativity theory meant academic suicide. This guy is absolutely one hundred per cent opposed to relativity – and claims to be a mathematician with numerous publications in top mathematical journals (somewhere in Europe beyond the UK) and top research mongraph series. Later, he picks on dark matter and really gets on a roll – much to the irritance of other bloggers who wish to discuss the red rain subject. He adds, it is my view there is something fundamentally wrong with classical electrodynamics and this caused a chain of errors resulting in the kind of 20th century physics he seems to abhor. Later, he says the peer review system is dysfunctional. It works not to maintain standards but to block critical discussion, finally having a go at quantum mechanics, the treatment of David Bohm by the science community, and even says that Einstein himself ran up against the buffers at first. However, once his ideas were accepted critical discussion of them was not allowed.
Another commenter mentions micrometeorites – and how many there are out in space. He provides a link to a site that purports to show how to trap and filter these small pieces of space dust from a downpipe from the gutter. Wikipedia has a lengthy piece on micrometeorites if anyone is interested.