No joke!
As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis’s laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens. In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples — water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louisâ’s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001 — contain microbes from outer space.
They don’t have any DNA, but they seem to reproduce. Wild stuff. Click to read the full article, written by Jebediah Reed in Popular Science.
A rather more plasible explanation is that the red raindust was the result of incomplete incineration of chemical waste at the Eloor industrial zone.
Partcles formed from an aerosol of partly burnt agri-chemical waste around which microparticles of fly-ash or clay coalesced as the incinerator plume cooled would have a similar elemental composition to that reported. The pattern of fallout matches with the prevailing winds. And the presumed ‘reproduction’ is a simple process of physical replication which occurs with various organics in the presecnce of clay, see e.g. the work of Jack Szostak and colleagues at Harvard.
What is really puzzling about the red rain is that there seems to be more interest in sci-fi explanations than in actually trying to find out what happened. Why, for example, has no one published any analysis of what organic compounds are in the particles, using gas chromatograph mass spectrometry, for example?
Um, well, this blog takes no position on the, ahem, plausibility of the alien provenance of the particles. Although we do have an occasional passing weakness for flights of fancy.
Thanks for the comment ;-)