Looking for life on other planets? Go deep | Hacker News Reader

Looking for life on other planets? Go deep

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41 pointsHooke18 comments

My hunt for life isn't for bacteria in caves. I take it as written that that sort of life exists out there somewhere. Send the probes, but don't kill the dream of finding ewoks. I don't want to spend billions/trillions of dollars to find pond scum in a Mars cave. That's interesting, but not my dream. Spend the money on telescopes necessary to image exoplanets. Find the green/blue one with and O2-heavy atmosphere. I want the one with city lights on the dark side.

Finding any extraterrestrial life is much more interesting than finding any specific kind of ET life. Having an n > 1 for biology would be one of the most profound advancements in the history of science.

I agree. And I don't. Let me explain.

Discovering that our planet is not a special snowflake would be one of the most inspirational experiences I can dream of.

Discovering intelligent life, end more so!

Discovering super-intelligent life - think of the possibilities!

Then nearly every sci-fi movie flashes before my eyes, and I wonder: would they be as amazed at our presence in the universe? Or a pest, dirtying up a rocky ball of perfectly harvestable resources they intend to process for their alien armada?

and then imagine all of the fossils you might find deep underground. I wonder if Mars has an environment to fossilize anything.

Would rocks on Mars detract from the special snowflake? Mars isn't all that different than earth. Both are in/near a Goldilocks zone around a stable star. Both are of similar size/makeup. And there has been not-insubstantial transfer of material between the two, suggesting the possibility that 'life' started on one and was transfered to the other. But life on a distant star would be truly unique and independent, properly shattering the snowflake.

> Discovering that our planet is not a special snowflake would be one of the most inspirational experiences I can dream of

To each their own. Finding unique pond scum on Mars would deeply horrify me.

If life independently emerged twice in one system then the paucity of intelligent life's cosmic signature means something happens between formation and broadcast with deafening regularity.

Not necessarily. It might merely reflect a too-narrow definition of broadcast baked into current assumptions. Right now SETI is looking for its lost keys near a street lamp, because "that is where the light is". Not to fault that approach, but I would not make any larger inferences about their lack of success.

Discovering super-intelligent life - think of the possibilities!

This is what scares me. The universe follows long time horizons. It's unlikely that we'd find someone just +/- 10,000 years of us. It would more likely be much more advanced, or much less. And if they were much more advanced, they'd find us first. And that rarely ends well for the less developed species. We eat cows, and have vaccines for bacteria.

I think finding ewoks in our solar system was completely ruled out already.

People can keep looking for them in exoplanets, but they won't dig those any time soon either. Those are two very different goals that just share the name of "finding ET life".

If you want this, one place to start is restoring government funding of SETI. We pulled the plug 20 years ago. Right now they are pushing along on a small budget which limits its capabilities.

SETI is too ambitious, and is too focused on radio. I mentioned ewoks specifically because I don't much care whether they are radio-using or even intelligent. Imho the fastest path to finding non-microbe life is through the measurement of exoplanet atmospheres. From the mix of various gases we can infer the presence of life, substantial life. A planet teaming with enough life to alter its atmosphere is far more interesting than a few microbes under a rock.

"Spend the money on telescopes necessary to image [and take spectra of] exoplanets."

HabEx is a mission in the planning stage for precisely this purpose: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/habex/. It's one of the four upcoming candidates for a post-JWST flagship space telescope.

I'm not convinced city lights would be what we're looking for. Visible light from space is "waste energy" and, over time, our civilization has gotten better about wasting less. It's certainly imaginable that a civilization 10,000 years more advanced than us (a blink of eye in geologic time) would not have visible waste light.

Given how rapidly VR, remote work/telepresence, and so on is advancing, it's plausible that a civilization slightly more advanced than us won't even physically travel their bodies anymore, or potentially not even use biological bodies at some point, resulting in difficulty detecting any sort of industrial emission or spectrum from the planet.

But even 'pond scum' would be a fascinating discovery imho... does it has gact DNA or not? Either way would be mind-blowing.

This is actually one of the few scientific reasons to send a human to Mars. (Or at least, low Mars orbit.) Cave teleoperation with a seven-minute delay is completely infeasible, but teleoperation with a few-second delay would work much better.

You could deal with the wireless communication problem by having the robot be tethered - I think a human could figure out how to drive said robot, without snagging the cable. This could even be done from low Mars orbit, reducing mission cost, and the risk to human life.

As true as all of that may be, I don't think it's politically viable to send people to Mars orbit, without putting at least one of the mission crew's footprints in its regolith.

FYI I was just awarded a NASA postdoc and my project is to add ice-climbing capability to this robot (LEMUR).

The article made me curious about lumenhancement. Seems to be about this 3D datasets of caves: http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/NIAC_Caves/

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