Possible hints of life found on distant planet. How excited should we be? | Hacker News Reader

Possible hints of life found on distant planet. How excited should we be?

phys.org

5 pointsPaulHoule6 comments

I think we are being softened up for a definite announcement of extraterrestrial life.

First, it's exoplanet, then many many exoplanets. Then exoplanets with atmospheres, then with water, now with chemicals that indicate life.

Just like Mars. Viking 1976, weird results when testing for life. 1996, Mars Pathfinder, areography that looks like water formed it. Then rovers that find clays and other minerals that only form in liquid water. Then seasonal methane, and organic molecules in rocks.

They know. There's too much trickling out. There's ET life.

I find UFOs hard to believe though.

I think there is no way to say "faster than light" in God's geometry as much as I wished the superluminal neutrinos at CERN were real (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steins;Gate_(TV_series))

I suspect interstellar travel is possible (somebody has done it in our light cone) but the odds of them showing up here in person right now seem unbelievable. It probably takes 10,000 or so years to make the trip and I think anyone who can swing that can also manage to subsist on comets between the stars and would probably be completely indifferent to dry inner solar system worlds like ours.

That is, if there were "grabby" aliens there wouldn't be any Ceres and probably not any Pluto (who needs the Sun when you have D-D fusion?)

I'm amused by the scenario that interstellar travellers might spend 10,000 years in transit (say with some fusion drive that makes relatively low thrust for a verrrry long time) and show up here and not have a space shuttle capable of landing and taking off from a world like the Earth (why haul it for 10,000 years?) with some luck they might have plans to 3-d print one but might still take a decade or so of fumbling to get it right.

I'm with you on this. The announcement is going to be about unicellular Mars life or unicellular life on one of those ice moons with subsurface oceans.

The announcement about observation of Bussard Ramjet exhaust plumes, or light sail launch lasers will happen after the unicellular life dust settles.

And that could be decades. A large fraction of the US population is young earth creationist. They're not going to take news of a 2nd abiogenesis easily.

Young earth creationism always struck me as bad theology. (Who can believe God is that small when we know better?)

I think of it as a solid “vote” in the direction of life, but not definitive. A great reason to further study that planet and system. And build more instruments like JWST and larger!!

Right, I mean one really interesting thing we know is that a lot of life-adjacent molecules like amino acids seem to be created in space by abiotic processes. So on one hand you can get those molecules without life but on the other hand those molecules seem to be common and may have something to do with life getting its start.

My hunch is that life may be pretty common in that it might get established just about anywhere it is possible for it get established, but if we assume Earth is a typical planet and it took us 4 billion years to develop intelligent life and maybe we last 10,000 years, intelligent life will be pretty rare. If there is something like algae within our vision it doesn't startle me at all. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if we found some kind of microbes and maybe simple animals in undersea vents on a moon like Europa.

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