NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery

[Rubin Farr]

Michael Jackson was the sole representative of an alien race on Earth and we killed him. now we must pay.

 

[Bob Dylan]

They are gonna finally tell that E.T is a dupe

 

 

or that they found this image in a radio transmition :

 

 

 

[Guest ruiagnelo]

pics or it didn't happen

[Guest Ominous]

Maybe they found the first Earthlike planet in a Goldilock' zone?

[acid1]

They didn't find life on Titan... but evidence sure supports it.

 

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Have_We_Discovered_Evidence_For_Life_On_Titan_999.html

[awepittance]

They are gonna finally tell that E.T is a dupe

 

 

or that they found this image in a radio transmition :

 

 

 

 

haha nice one. such a good scene in the book and such a cheesy one in the movie. sometimes i just watch the trailer for 2010 to imagine how good it could have been, the trailer actually makes it seem like it could be a good movie

[GORDO]

could someone please make a graph about the posibble excitingness of this so i can better understand the news?

[Guest Coalbucket PI]

They are gonna finally tell that E.T is a dupe

 

 

or that they found this image in a radio transmition :

 

 

 

 

haha nice one. such a good scene in the book and such a cheesy one in the movie. sometimes i just watch the trailer for 2010 to imagine how good it could have been, the trailer actually makes it seem like it could be a good movie

Hey I know you're pretty judgemental but the film ain't so turrible

[Bob Dylan]

The movie was about a hundred times worse than the book, especially considering the symbiotic relationship between 2001: the book and 2001: the movie

[Atop]

[Guest nene multiple assgasms]

it looks like the discovery might be on earth; a second occurrence of abiogenesis. this could be big. link

[Guest analogue wings]

But our own investigations suggest that it follows a breakthrough in the discovery of microbes in a lake that get their energy from the usually poisonous arsenic. Experts say this shows they had a completely different origin to any other creature known on our planet. It means that life began not just once but at least twice on Earth.

 

Awesome. Now the creationists are wrong twice! :emotawesomepm9:

[azatoth]

But our own investigations suggest that it follows a breakthrough in the discovery of microbes in a lake that get their energy from the usually poisonous arsenic. Experts say this shows they had a completely different origin to any other creature known on our planet. It means that life began not just once but at least twice on Earth.

 

Awesome. Now the creationists are wrong twice! :emotawesomepm9:

 

Saw this notion brought up on Through the Wormhole documentary series. I think it was Paul Davies who said that there might be several types of life here on earth that have followed their own separate evolutionary path. This discovery just seems to confirm it.

[Guest analogue wings]

And if it happened twice on one planet, the whole "Earth was a fluke" idea looks a bit shit.

[awepittance]

And if it happened twice on one planet, the whole "Earth was a fluke" idea looks a bit shit.

 

that notion always struck me as a 'the world is flat' or 'the sun revolves around the earth' kind of theory

[azatoth]

The whole idea that Earth is somehow unique seems a bit dumb. The universe is unimaginably big and there are probably millions of planets with life on it. The only worrisome idea is that Earth is the first one to evolve intelligent life, if that is the case, it's pretty damn depressing.

[Solo Strike]

Abiogenesis II - The Creationing

[awepittance]

i have a silly theory that the reason we haven't been contacted by extraterrestrial life is because once an intelligent society develops perfect simulated/virtual reality, why would they ever have the urge to explore the real universe?

[kaini]

i have a silly theory that the reason we haven't been contacted by extraterrestrial life is because once an intelligent society develops perfect simulated/virtual reality, why would they ever have the urge to explore the real universe?

 

sagan thought that as a society switches from analogue to digital transmissions, the signal detectable by other civilisations becomes indistinguishable from noise.

[Guest analogue wings]

Thing is, we only know that this is an independent abiogenesis because the biochemistry is different. There may have been other independent abiogenises where the biochemistry is too similar to ours to tell.

[chaosmachine]

problems:

 

1. life is rare enough that the distance between livable planets is an impenetrable barrier to contact.

 

2. the discovery of science is an evolutionary dead end. it only takes a few thousand years to go from metalworking to planet-killing nukes and bioweaponry. this is not enough time for a species to overcome millions of years of kill-or-be-killed instincts. planet killing technologies become too easy to make too quickly. thanks to dna printers, it won't be long before anyone with a decent IQ can download and print out killer viruses. since extremely dangerous technologies are certainly precursors to intergalactic travel, most species probably kill themselves before they get very far from home.

 

3. given that intelligent species are likely to kill themselves off fairly quickly, the overlapping window for 2 such species to be active in the same section of the universe at the same time becomes vanishingly small. even if it does occur, it won't occur frequently, and it most likely won't occur near us.

[solarion]

i have a silly theory that the reason we haven't been contacted by extraterrestrial life is because once an intelligent society develops perfect simulated/virtual reality, why would they ever have the urge to explore the real universe?

 

sagan thought that as a society switches from analogue to digital transmissions, the signal detectable by other civilisations becomes indistinguishable from noise.

 

so the analogue fetishists were right all along.

[Guest analogue wings]

problems:

 

1. life is rare enough that the distance between livable planets is an impenetrable barrier to contact.

 

2. the discovery of science is an evolutionary dead end. it only takes a few thousand years to go from metalworking to planet-killing nukes and bioweaponry. this is not enough time for a species to overcome millions of years of kill-or-be-killed instincts. planet killing technologies become too easy to make too quickly. thanks to dna printers, it won't be long before anyone with a decent IQ can download and print out killer viruses. since extremely dangerous technologies are certainly precursors to intergalactic travel, most species probably kill themselves before they get very far from home.

 

3. given that intelligent species are likely to kill themselves off fairly quickly, the overlapping window for 2 such species to be active in the same section of the universe at the same time becomes vanishingly small. even if it does occur, it won't occur frequently, and it most likely won't occur near us.

 

1 is valid. In fact it is the only think we can definitively say about other intelligent species - they live in the same huge ass universe we do.

 

2 and 3 are extrapolations based on a sample size of 1. Not really sound. Ditto the analogue communications thing, the all species will understand the "language" of mathematics thing, the if they found us they'd blow us up thing etc etc etc

[chaosmachine]

well, if you accept that evolution is the only way an intelligence species will arise (ie: they don't appear out of nowhere, fully formed), and understand the evolutionary pressures that make intelligence a dominant trait (ie: the ability to create weapons to dominate more physically powerful species), then it seems likely that the path to space exploration first travels past nuclear energy and biochemistry, via weapons research.

 

evolution is driven by the war between species: the fight for control of resources and territory. biological and technological advances are driven by the same forces. and any species that still wages war is probably not sufficiently advanced to safely wield the virtually unlimited power that science bestows.

 

what i'm saying is: science is too easy. monkeys can almost do it, and we're almost still monkeys.

[kaini]

problems:

 

1. life is rare enough that the distance between livable planets is an impenetrable barrier to contact.

 

2. the discovery of science is an evolutionary dead end. it only takes a few thousand years to go from metalworking to planet-killing nukes and bioweaponry. this is not enough time for a species to overcome millions of years of kill-or-be-killed instincts. planet killing technologies become too easy to make too quickly. thanks to dna printers, it won't be long before anyone with a decent IQ can download and print out killer viruses. since extremely dangerous technologies are certainly precursors to intergalactic travel, most species probably kill themselves before they get very far from home.

 

3. given that intelligent species are likely to kill themselves off fairly quickly, the overlapping window for 2 such species to be active in the same section of the universe at the same time becomes vanishingly small. even if it does occur, it won't occur frequently, and it most likely won't occur near us.

 

1 is valid. In fact it is the only think we can definitively say about other intelligent species - they live in the same huge ass universe we do.

 

2 and 3 are extrapolations based on a sample size of 1. Not really sound. Ditto the analogue communications thing, the all species will understand the "language" of mathematics thing, the if they found us they'd blow us up thing etc etc etc

 

2 and 3 are of course extrapolations (we are working with a sample size of exactly one here) but considering how perilously close we have come to wiping ourselves out more than once i don't think that they are unreasonable extrapolations. yes, i just contradicted myself.