A question of definitions

NASA scientist announces possible evidence of life in meteorite:

Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites, the remains of living organisms from their parent bodies — comets, moons and other astral bodies. By extension, the findings suggest we are not alone in the universe, he said.

“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover told FoxNews.com. “This field of study has just barely been touched — because quite frankly, a great many scientist would say that this is impossible.”

I picked up the link from Glenn, who notes the articles’s title: “NASA Scientist Claims Evidence of Alien Life on Meteorite“.  Now, you can expect this to be “debunked”.  One of the peculiar things about exobiology is that, for all that the study is supposed to be searching for life off Earth, every positive result has found a “debunker” to explain how it could possibly have been the result of some other process.  As somone once pointed out, there are people who wouldn’t take this photo

as evidence of extraterrestrial life.

But here’s the thing.  If this pans out, it’s probable that life on Earth was seeded from wherever this came from.  So maybe there’s no such thing as alien life.

Maybe there are just distant cousins we haven’t met yet.