NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
Why I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Finds Nothing: http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf
tl;dr: "Because it means life is not incredibly unlikely (after all, it occurred on two planets in our own solar system); ergo what must instead be incredibly unlikely is the ability for life to progress to the point where it can spread across the galaxy (after all, no other life form has contacted us); ergo we are doomed."
How often do you stop and try to communicate with the queen of a particular anthill?
Would we recognize it? Would we even know that it had happened? Consider that if there is a civilization capable of traveling across inter-stellar distances, they very likely have got a very different sort of life-span that people on earth. Because of this, their language (if they have something we would recognize as language) could be dramatically different than ours.
Honestly their brains, or "mechanism of creativity" as I guess you could call it, could be something that we would never be able to communicate with.
There are biochemical reasons why extra-terrestrial life would probably be similar to ours, but I can think of no reason why they would be neurologically or psychologically anything like us.
Think about the ants again. Ants have communications, sure, but it's not language, at least not in the human sense. Ants very probably don't have thoughts, and because they don't have thoughts, they don't have a reason to abstract them to words.
This hasn't prevented ants (or bees) from building incredibly interesting and complicated physical and organizational structures.
We've contacted bees. Do you suppose that they realize it?
It wouldn't spell "doom" unless you count the sun running out of juice/going supernova. The universe might be packed with life, each such patch effectively isolated to it's own little corner.
If the ants were to one day take note of the living creatures around them they would most certainly come to the conclusion that they are not alone.
Maybe the aliens have been here all along and we just didn't realize it, heh.
It never goes well for the less advanced civilization.
:-)
In both cases, fighting had been going on for centuries before the empires were finally toppled. Thus even if overall less advanced, the "barbarians" had comparable warfare technology.
In most known cases where a true first encounter event occured - such as Columbus arrival in Hispaniola, Pizarro in Peru or Cook in Australia - the less advanced civilization was indeed overrun if not exterminated by the more advanced one.
... on Earth. Let's be optimists for a change. :)
A bit far-fetched, but it could also mean we are the first. If there were/are sufficiently advanced civilizations in the past that could engineer on the scale of star systems or above (singularity hypothesis), there would be a certain probability that we would detect that (so far or in the future), no?
2. The probability of panspermia will still not be 1, or even approaching 1. That leaves enough room to avoid "bullshit argument" in favor of "questionable argument," which is a caveat Bostrom (and Hanson, in his Great Filter) would happily agree to.
3. Even if single-origin life has seeded multiple planets, if the seeding occurred far enough in the past and widely enough, that still leaves us with an anthropic filter problem.
You are not the target audience. This is a press release. Before the existence of the web you would have never heard about the announcement unless you are a science journalist. (The vast majority of people will never hear about this announcement. Reading HN or other places where this announcement might conceivably pop up is clearly not normal.) You really shouldn’t be annoyed about something that is not even directed at you.
* The media outlets can assign people to cover it.
* It's fun for the researchers.
Though I am curious: why are they announcing this via a press conference? It seems as though they would publish a paper to be peer-reviewed or something first.
Although saying that if something truly ground breaking were discovered it wouldn't surprise me if it were announced in the same way.
They did. The link mentions that it is under embargo until the time of the conference. It says "Science Journal" so I'm guessing that is an odd way of referring to the journal Science.
The italics are a bit off to me. Maybe they meant "Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 11 a.m. PST On Dec. 2"
edit - source: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1998/as...
And if nothing else, it helps to close a gap (well... turn a big one into two smaller ones) for those who like to make leaps of faith between points of understanding instead of looking for answers in the middle.
The world has heaping piles of money. Some minuscule fraction is spent on basic science, and you're all high and mighty about lack of access to drinking water. Give me a break.
You want perspective? It's all around you. If you need it from a one-word answer that succinctly responded to the original question, then I'm afraid you need to look elsewhere.
The examples that you quote citing colossal wastage of expenditure, ring quite true.Exactly my point. But really, wasted expenditure is wasted expenditure,plain and simple- There cant be any justification, more so, citing another wasted expenditure. Analogy- how rational would it sound, if a convicted murder says in trial "But I killed just one guy.Go,look at some war-ravaged place in Africa what people get away with".
Actually,I believe basic science encompasses a lot more than astrobiology-Even the issues I pointed out, would stand to gain a lot,from advances in basic sciences, and perhaps need more investment.
Perhaps you feel that discovery of ET life would changed your life for the good- I would completely agree with you, if it could make us humans healthier,welathier, or otherwise more intelligent. Till then, I would wait and watch :-) and... read the next interesting thread on HN!
That said, I'd think it'll be much less spectacular, possibly yet another condition added to the pre-requisites required for life.
What's interesting though, is that if they actually find evidence for microbial life on another planet far away, then it's mighty likely that said planet already has far more complex life on it (taking into account the time it takes for light to travel through space, we'd be viewing outdated information).
The question is not whether it's possible, but whether it's common.
Could there be some analysis of Mars rover data? Or of Mars meteorites?
Telescopes aren't good enough yet to get absorption spectra for relatively complex molecules in atmospheres?