A few select quotes:
"You’ve got to hand it to NASA for their ability to routinely make a ruckus: Whereas many scientists struggle to elicit anything more than yawns from their audiences as they try to explain why their work matters (and, more pointedly, why it deserves tax or grant money), the whole aliens and outer space thing gives NASA a more receptive audience, and they know how to press that audience’s buttons.
In this case, though, things have gotten a little out of hand: A NASA press release on an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life morphed into Jason Kottke’s Has NASA discovered extraterrestrial life?, a question which he admitted was hyperbolic, which in turn mutated into progressively crazier herp-a-derp Internet speculation. Wired’s Alexis Madrigal tweeted, I’m sad to quell some of the @kottke-induced excitement about possible extraterrestrial life. I’ve seen the Science paper. It’s not that. geekosystem.com
"Then the stories calmed down, and instead it was that they had discovered an earthly life form that used a radically different chemistry. I was dubious, even at that. And then I finally got the paper from Science, and I'm sorry to let you all down, but it's none of the above. It's an extremophile bacterium that can be coaxed into substiting arsenic for phosphorus in some of its basic biochemistry. It's perfectly reasonable and interesting work in its own right, but it's not radical, it's not particularly surprising, and it's especially not extraterrestrial. It's the kind of thing that will get a sentence or three in biochemistry textbooks in the future." p.z. myers
"Admit it, when blogs spread the news that NASA would hold a briefing pertaining to newly-discovered life forms, you imagined something out of the movies.
But, in the end, all of the excitement turned out to be just this.
And, no, that's not an alien ... that's Bill Nye, the science guy.
The words "bait and switch" come to mind ... and so does the reality that NASA is fighting for survival now that the shuttle program is dying ... dare I say it? Training microbes from California to thrive on arsenic just doesn't have the same cache as sending a man to Mars... or does it.
On the scale of major disappointments, I'd rank this right up there with the day I realized my email pal from Nigeria never meant to share that inheritance
It's like channel surfing the Grammy show and in hopes of hitting Katy Perry... and landing on Justin Bieber instead.
It's like rooting for the 2022 World Cup to go to Kansas City ... and watching Kansas City lose to Qatar .... that's right ... Qatar.
The dream of encountering alien life dies hard ... but there's some consolation ... you you won't have to learn to speak "gort" ... at least for the time being."
http://www.necn.cm NASA Bait and Switch
"Incidentally, the CJR suggests NASA and AAAS handled this badly, as a matter of science communications. Hyping up a discovery with an exobiology spin that's a bit of a stretch, then gagging the professional journalists with an embargo so they can't debunk runaway rumors, and finally disappointing the public with a story that - however cool to biologists - is not what they expected. . . that seems like a series of questionable choices to me. I'm just sayin'. Scienceblogs.com
Oh, and one more thing...kiss my unimpressed derriere, preacher.
Edited by Bolder-dash, : to work some french into the discussion
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