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Comment by superposeur | Hacker News Reader

No is declaring that there is no needle in the haystack. Please actually read my post.

“I just want to be clear that we’ve definitely not actually found life. We’ve found likely precursors everywhere, habitable bodies everywhere, have plausible theories on how to go from precursors to bootstrapping, and see life in every corner of the planet we have explored. But just to be clear we haven’t actually found life anywhere else yet.”

Yeah, we know. So what then was the point of your post?

Well, perhaps you know that none of the recent findings are evidence of life, but in my conversations with others I have perceived a great deal of confusion on this point, even among scientifically literate colleagues. Also, the fact that we have zero understanding of the probability of abiogenesis is, in my experience, a greatly under-appreciated fact. I speculate that the way findings are reported contributes to this confusion.

Also, at risk of incurring a flame, I'll gently point out that you are folding into this confusion and reinforcing it with your language: "likely precursors everywhere, habitable bodies" ... we absolutely do not know that these conditions are "likely" precursors, which is a statement about a probability we know nothing about and as for "habitable" we do not actually know anything about whether or not a body is habitable in the sense of likely to spontaneously form life.

absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

sorry your life has created this crusade of rhetorically reminding people about the absence is evidence

Not in general, just on this particular point. Because, in my opinion, we as a scientific community are currently flush with the (very cool) unexpected discovery of so many exoplanets and it is somewhat distorting our collective thinking about life and its origins.

We SHOULD (be flush and distorted). We can be realistic AND enthusiastic about it. Some technically challenging work was done and achieved results FAR FAR beyond expectations. That is a result worthy of changing outlook. Before, the outlook was on statistical grounds (the universe is so vast that there has to be). Now this outlook has been justified a billion billion times over. It's certainly time to be far more ambitious and inverse the presumptions that we had before.

I.e. before, "there had to be - some, somewhere" and now, "there is most likely all over the place".

You can make the less charged argument that expanding the search for life has in every case so far led to extremely interesting scientific discoveries. So as a pragmatic strategy, it has legs regardless of where you stand on the question of life origins.

Provided you're actively and systematically looking for evidence, then absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

But we've not even started doing that yet. None of the mars rovers have landed anywhere close to where we think is must likely to currently harbor life due to fear of contamination.

We've just now learned how to analyze atmospheres of exoplants.

5 years ago, we couldn't see exoplanets smaller than jupiter.

A decade ago, we couldn't see exoplanets at all.

We still can’t see the atmosphere of the majority of exoplanets. Can’t get around it unless we build a telescope thousands of times bigger than anything else or we make some incomprehensible breakthrough in optics. If we could we would detect life on another planet within a matter of a few hours of telescope time most likely.

I find the entire idea that life could only exist on earth farcical. A lot of people in this thread don’t seem to understand that we can’t directly image many exoplanets to begin with and that we haven’t even been trying to find life on other planets and moons in our own solar system, it has in fact been suppressed every time credible circumstantial evidence of life is found (Viking lander experiments and methane on mars both come to mind)

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