
This Astrobiologist Is Collecting Unrecognizable Beings from the Stratosphere - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/this-astrobiologist-is-collecting-unrecognizable-beings-from-the-stratosphere
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mchahn
> They’re little round carbon circles,

I wonder how many pieces of carbon he has to look at to find his specimens.

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gus_massa
I think the "little round carbon circles" are there go trap the particles, so
they can put them later in a electronic microscope.

He shows the images he got in the video at 30:40.

I agree that the most sensible explanation is that in each launch they got
hundreds of carbon dust dots, and he cherrypicked the most symmetrical and
biological like, and then proclaim that they are "biological entity"s.

Some back of the envelope calculations: Let's guess that they have a team of 5
members, and each one looks at the microscope one day each week for 8 hours,
and to select and focus a dot they need 1 minute. If they do this for a year
they'd get 60x8x5x52 = 1 million samples.

The problem is how to design a control group. Perhaps someone can look at 1
million sand grains and find the more interesting. (This looks like an
interesting blog post.) The chemical composition is very different, and the
size is very different, but I guess it can test the human filter part.

(Bonus points: Repeat this 1 million of grains of other materials. Salt grains
a too cubic to look organic. Soot particles seams more interesting and can be
a possible contamination. How does flour looks under a microscope?)

