to believe or not to...?

Slashdot says that in 2001 there was strange 'red rain' in a south western state in India called Kerala (where Sandhya and Pramod are from), and that scientists now believe (have published results) claiming that it might contain extraterrestrial microbiological life...the original publication even has pictures (but i'm techie-idiot so i don't know how to get them on here :( ) But what troubles me is simply trusting such data/such claims..in that the TEM images make these 'cells' look like red blood cells..exactly like the 3D structure of slightly deformed red blood cells, but apparently the electron microscope reveals an almost bacterial spore-like envelope structure and the complete absence of DNA!!! But they are composed of carbon and oxygen..strange eh? Are these people simply claiming so just to 'get attention' as in the cloning controversy? A huge part of me just says sheesh..they simply slapped in a coupla pictures they could have obtained from anywhere and claimed its from teh red rain...Should we trust this, and if so its almost scary that we've 'suddenly' confirmed the presence of extraterrestrial life!!!! (that like totally ruins the major part of our curiosity, not to mention NASA's missions to Mars etc.)

I truly believe there is life out there...its arrogant of us to be so ignorant of this simple truth (in that there are infintesimal amounts of planetary bodies that could be inhabited by SOME form of life...which leads to another controversy, which is how do we define life in teh first place?) It just makes me wonder how there's so many 'races' going on...the race to space was accomplished, now begin the race to successfully clone entire humans (which is a bunch o' crap...unless speaking of organ/tissue cloning), and also the race to find extraterrestrial life. Is our adrenaline rushing too much that we're just making assumptions without considering the full impact of our choices to finish these races? Don't we have a greater ethical responsibility to make claims only once they've been FULLY and FACTUALLY confirmed? ...I dunno, maybe i'm just scared. :)

Apart from the abovementioned 'philosophizing'...Spring break just FLEW!..I have NO CLUE how 168 hours of my life went by..for those of you just starting...*enjoy every minute*!!!! Don't say you're going to study and catch up on a ton..nope..that ain't going to happen. :) And now, all the tormenting tests are back..i seem to be dazed right now..simply cannot get across the fact that i have soo much to do that i've completely stopped functioning. Lets see...I have all of the following ALL due the same week of April: MCATS, class finals, and my research stipend, o..and did i mention *M.C.A.T.S*!!!!!! *AAAAAAAAAAAAA*