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* Confirmation of our 2014 RSR Prediction: As predicted on February 21, 2014 at rsr.org/creationist-predictions, "By 2020 (just to put a date on it), powerful and less disputed evidence of biological matter scattered in the solar system will be added to the currently existing apparent evidence." From the reports of evidence of biological material in space, the bolded discoveries include all those published after our prediction, including from 2014, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2020:
* Nature Astronomy Sept. 2020: Phosphine gas in Venus' atmosphere at 20 parts per billion has no known abiotic production but on Earth arises from biological life.
* ARXIV 2020: submitted to Earth and Planetary Astrophysics, Harvard and other scientists have found in meteorite Acfer 086 a polymer including the amino acid glycine which they believe is most likely a protein. [The paper hasn't a word, however, on enantiomers.]
* NASA 2012: proteinaceous amino acids in meteorites recovered on Earth including "excesses of left-handed aspartic and glutamic acids, two amino acids [among the twenty] common in terrestrial life". Many non-protenaceous amino acids, not known to be involved in "terrestrial" life, also exist and have been found in meteorites (see below), but only biological life is known to concentrate left-handed amino acids which then naturally begin to racemize back to a 50-50 state, so the "excess" itself argues strongly for youth and against million-year ages.
* Nature 1978: light coming from space carries the signature of having passed through cellulose dust, as reported in Nature by Fred Hoyle (theory of stellar nucleosynthesis), Chandra Wickramasinghe, et al.
* NASA's Richard Hoover 2011: As reported in Wired, Marshall Space Flight Center's Dr. Hoover analyzed filaments and low-nitrogen organic chemicals in meteorites that on Earth signify ancient fossils.
* NASA 2009: first discovery of an amino acid building block of protein, glycine, on a comet (Comet 81P/Wild 2).
* NASA 2010: scientists discovered "a fundamental building block of life", amino acids, in a meteorite "where none were expected."
* NASA 2018: Compounds that could have come from life include, "large organic molecules on the surface of Mars" "the watery lake that once filled Mars’ Gale Crater contained complex organic molecules"; "Sulfur may have helped protect the organics..." Hmm. Not iron? :) And "methane—the simplest organic molecule—is present in Mars’ atmosphere. Methane’s presence on Mars is puzzling, because it survives only a few hundred years at a time"; "a gas in the atmosphere of Mars that really shouldn’t be there," says NASA scientist Chris Webster; and "inexplicable" methane plumes randomly belch out thousands of tons at a time of this organic gas. "We really can’t tell if this methane we see today is a current product of... microbial activity..." said the NASA scientist who discovered Mars’ methane plumes.
* Earth and Planetary Science Letters 2000: apparent bacterial remnants in meteorites and even dormant bacteria.
* (Fringe) Journal of Cosmology 2013: a diatom collected in the lower stratosphere during the annual Perseid meteor shower by a microbiology professor at the University of Sheffield; See also Diatoms reported in Sri Lanka meteorites with isotope test results "suggestive" [per NASA] of meteoritic material (research from professors at the University of California San Diego, Cardiff University, the University of Buckingham, the Medical Research Institute of Sri Lanka, following up on an earlier paper at the University of Buckingham).
* Nature & NASA 2010: as reported in the journal Nature, "long-chained" molecules, the building-blocks of life, observed on an asteroid.
* Organic material and salts on a moon of Saturn sampled by Cassini during its repeated flybys (2004-2015) of the outgassing Enceladus, directly detecting "violatile gasses, water vapor, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide as well as some organic material", which does not indicate but is highly consistent with biological material.
* Sagan 1997; Huggins 1868: the father of spectroscopic astronomy, William Huggins, from 1868 to 1881 observed that components of comet Winnecke and others included simple unsaturated hydrocarbons, not unlike those found in Earth's crude oil, including ethylene (which on Earth functions as a plant hormone, etc.).
[* Stanley Miller and Arthur Weber: In 1981 the Journal of Molecular Evolution published, Reasons for the occurrence of the twenty coded protein amino acids. This Weber and Miller (of Urey-Miller infamy) paper documents the existence of non-proteinogenic amino acids in meteoroids. Such amino acids were also documented in 1983 in Advance Space Research along with eight "terrestrial protein amino acids" by then already had also found in carbonaceous chondrite meteorites.]
* TASS 2014: The Russian News Agency reported that cosmonauts collected sea plankton from the outside of the International Space Station.
* Science 2016: In related news, astronomers looking toward the center of the Milky Way have detected the complex organic molecule propylene oxide. If the HPT model of the solar system's history is correct, then there should be at least a slight parallax displacement when measured in summer vs. winter, or from spacecraft far beyond earth's orbit when headed perpendicular to the galaxy's center.
* Scientific American 2019: NASA's principal investigator in 1976 for a Viking Lander proof-of-life experiment, that placed nutrients in Mars' "soil" and then registered evidence of metabolism, insists they had proved the existence of microbrial life there especially when repeating the experiement after heating the soil (to kill any microbes) failed to produce the same evidence. [Remember also in 2019 NASA admitted to withholding for nearly half-a-century news of the "oldest" ever discovered Earth rock, which was found on the Moon!]
* PNAS 2019: In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Analysis of carbonaceous chondrites [stony meteorites] to understand organic-mineral interactions during aqueous alteration. Remember "organic" doesn't always mean biological, but does it in this case? Comets didn't bring water to Earth; Earth is the source of comets. Etc. How so? See rsr.org/evidence and rsr.org/evidence#hpt
* NASA & PNAS 2019: The first detection of sugars in three meteorites includes ribose (historically described as "made in cells" and is the R in RNA), and the other bio-essential sugars, arabinose, xylose, and lyxose". [Fifteen years earlier NASA incorrectly claimed regarding abiogenesis that the imagined idea that ribose binding to borate/borax was a key step that "has taken us closer to revealing the origin of life on Earth". Interestingly, there's no borate reported in these meteorites.]
* NASA & Advancing Earth and Space Science 2019: A "mind-boggling" 30% higher than expected oxygen concentration in spring and summer (which could imply the presence of cyanobacteria and cyanophyta; and see 2019 detection of a transient 21 parts per billion of methane, which could also imply microbial life on Mars).
Post-show Update: The European Space Agency's initial report on the Rosetta project's Philae craft that landed on Comet 67P stated that it has "'sniffed’ the comet’s atmosphere during the first touchdown, detecting organic molecules." Chemically speaking, organic compounds often have nothing to do with organisms, and so, until further news surfaces, the assumption is that these are non-biological carbon-based molecules. July 2015 Update: RT.com presents the Rosetta teams objection to the few scientists claiming that there may be evidence of microbial life on 67P.
Toward a confirmation of our prediction of more evidence discovered of biological matter scattered through the solar system, this ISS finding was reported six months after we published our prediction. For more information, see Terry Hurlbut's Sea plankton in Earth Orbit? Consider also our RSR recommendations. The chief of the Russian ISS orbital mission appears to indicate that this finding is repeatable, so of course 1) NASA should attempt to repeat it. Also, the Russians should 2) carbon date the existing specimens. And 3) check them for any sequenceable molecular content. And 4), as with all biological material apparently recovered from space, if Carbon-14 dated, this plankton will in fact contain 14c, indicating that it cannot be a million years old, and must have a *maximum* age of less than 50,000 years!
Where there is smoke there is fire. Just like the scientific community was in denial over dinosaur soft tissue, so too, both the creation and evolution communities seem to be in denial over repeated observations of biological material in space. These persistent and diverse indications of biological matter in space provide yet more corroboration that the fountains of the great deep ejected debris from the global flood into space.
* Hydroplate Theory Explanation: If Walt Brown's Hydroplate Theory is correct, then the fountains of the great deep launched great quantities of crustal rock, surface and subterranean water and rock, and other surface debris into space. Corroboration could then include findings of biological material in meteorite showers, spectral analysis indicating biochemicals in space, and biological structures in meteorites. The above list indicates that such findings have occurred. See below for some details, and also, see our Global Flood and the Hydroplate Theory video!
* Possibly Related Bicep2 Dust: There's enough dust in space to have badly embarrassed the 2014 Bicep2 team that wrongly claimed discovery of gravity waves, which was widely and wrongly proclaimed as the smoking gun of the hypothetical big bang inflation period. Could it be that the dust that was misinterpreted as gravity waves is not interstellar nor intergalactic but merely a local phenomena within our own solar system? If so, it may be possible for what looked like "waves" to be triangulated, which of course is just one way to theoretically validate this testable RSR hypothesis.
* From a Respected Journal: Fred Hoyle et al. reported in the journal Nature that "The presence of interstellar polysaccharides [carbohydrates, etc.] has been deduced by comparing infrared spectra... with model calculations based on transmittance data for cellulose. We show here that the transmittance properties of cotton cellulose gives a good agreement to the observed emission..."
* From a Disrespected Journal: The Journal of Cosmology, disrespected because it publishes reports of apparent biological material in outer space and advocates the Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe claim that life came from space, is, nonetheless, a peer-reviewed journal.
In 2011 the Journal of Cosmology published a paper by retired NASA scientist Richard Hoover, Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites. NASA distanced itself from Hoover's findings, reporting that the paper had been previously submitted in 2007 to International Journal of Astrobiology which did not accept it for review (that is, they wouldn't even look at it).
* From the Tech Magazine Wired: Brandon Keim's March 2011 article in Wired, Alien Microbe claim starts fight over meteorite, begins, "NASA astrobiologist Richard Hoover thinks he’s found fossilized alien bacteria inside a meteorite" and quotes University of Oklahoma geophysicist Michael Engel saying, "There are legitimate reasons to initially be skeptical... [nevertheless] I encourage people to keep an open mind when forming an opinion as to the significance of this work." Keim continues, "Hoover’s study involves carbonaceous chondrites, a class of rare meteorite that... contain organic chemicals... When those chemicals are found on Earth, they’re considered signs of life." And then, adding to the information already provided in our own RSR article here, Wired's piece includes this, "But almost no nitrogen was found in the meteorites, consistent with what’s seen in ancient fossils in which nitrogen has degraded. The meteorites landed on Earth [recently]; for their fossils to be nitrogen-free, they would have needed to form thousands of years before crashing here."
* The 2012 Sri Lanka Fireball: Sri Lankans witnessing a flash across the sky resulted in the recovery of what appear to be meteorites containing objects that appear characteristic of "microalgae known as diatoms." A 2013 paper by professors at the University of California San Diego, School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Cardiff University, the University of Buckingham, the Medical Research Institute of Colombo, Sri Lanka, etc. at Cornell's arxiv.com was published by the Journal of Cosmology and follows up on an earlier paper at the University of Buckingham website. The team headed by astronomer, mathematician and one-time Cambridge University fellow, Chandra Wickramasinghe found that their specimens differed from Earth's crustal rock and so concluded, “that the oxygen isotope data show [our samples] are unequivocally meteorites.” Real Science Radio has sparred with the Discovery's bad astronomer Phil Plait who, while dismissive of this find and all the data on this page (and our List of Evidence Against the Big Bang) nonetheless reports: "I talked to planetary scientist Barbara Cohen, who studies meteorites at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. She told me the data in the paper is 'suggestive'" that the samples are actual meteorites.
The March 2013 issue of Journal of Cosmology published, Isolation of a Diatom Frustule Fragment from the Lower Stratosphere (22-27Km) - Evidence for a Cosmic Origin. While discounting the paper's claim, Ian O'Neill at Discovery.com nonetheless accurately reported, "Milton Wainwright, a professor at the Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at the University of Sheffield, and his team who flew a high-altitude balloon 17 miles over Chester in northwest England during the Perseid meteor shower on July 31. The balloon was carrying a sample capture system that opened for a few minutes and grabbed any aerosols floating around in the stratosphere."* Add'l Information: See Walt Brown's creationscience.com site and please email Bob@RealScienceRadio.com with corrections or additional evidence. Thanks!
Today's Resource: Please check out our 2014 science video...
The Global Flood and the Hydroplate Theory
Blu-ray, 2-DVD Set or HD Download
Real Science Radio co-host Bob Enyart presents the scientific evidence for Dr. Walt Brown’s model of the global flood, along with the relevant biblical material. Enyart also discusses Brown's opponents and contrasts both the vapor canopy and catastrophic plate tectonics with the hydroplate theory.
DVD Vol. 1
1. Walt Brown, Creation Leaders, and Scripture
2. Hydroplate Theory & Scientific Evidence
DVD Vol. 2
3. Hydroplates vs. Plate Tectonics
Bonus: Origin of Earth's Radioactivity
The Blu-ray disc contains all parts on one disc. And for now, save $10 with our special introductory pricing which discounts the $50 retail price to $39.99!