>Our nation has now committed to sending astronauts to Mars. Any life there might threaten them, and us upon their return. Thus, the issue of life on Mars is now front and center.
I'm pretty sure this is the whole point of the article.
I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
131–140 of 268 posts
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's assume for a moment that we did find something resembling simple organic life on Mars and confirmed that earth isn't the only life bearing planet. What functionally changes for our existential understanding of the universe? I'd argue little to nothing. We'd learn a bit more about organic life, but no fundamental philosophical or existential questions would be resolved. Life has been confirmed to be able to thri…
I read your whole post and all I can come up with is that if we found life of any sort on another planet it would completely change my internal narrative and I guarantee I'm not the only one. This would in a subtle or unsubtle way gradually influence literally most of the decisions we make on earth.
> Life of any sort
Aside from the narrow one involving the oxidization of carbon, I have a hard time coming up with a definition of life that doesn’t consider storms, planets, or star systems “alive”. In particular, they are all time-limited phenomena that are organized but somewhat unpredictable at macro scale and chaotic at micro scale.
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It makes copies of itself (reproduction) ... Again, what about species that don't reproduce themselves, but spawn from a single "factory"? That factory may be nothing like them. It could be a mechanical factory producing automatons (with human-level thought if you need that criteria), or a universally-unique "mother" creature, or even a non-sentient spawning pool where they spontaneously form every now and then. If…
> or a single "mother" creature How did the "mother" creature come to be? By what mechanism did its complexity emerge? There is no known or plausible mechanism by which complex life can arise without evolution, and technology which does not change its design is (very appropriately) by the definition above, not life.
> How did the "mother" creature come to be?
It could be a human "mad scientist" creating hordes of Pikachus.
Suppose the scientist has also attained biological immortality for himself, and the Pikachus have spread to multiple planets over thousands of years.
You come upon such a colony planet, but you have no knowledge of their creator. They display no clues that hint at the scientist's role in their civilization (for a civilization it has become by now.)
You cannot discern how the Pikachus are coming into existence. Would you classify them as life? Why not?
How would your interactions with them and their interactions with the universe be fundamentally different than any other life you encounter?
What if they were robotic instead of flesh-and-fur?
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#134Excuse the cliche question, but what is Life? If we make an AI whose thoughts and communication are practically indistinguishable from humans, and it controls a bunch of things that affect the physical world, is it alive? If there's a disembodied mind somewhere that can think and imagine but never communicate or interact with anything, is it dead? What about a human in a coma or permanent dreaming state? What about w…
I'm guessing they're using the scientific definition:
"A distinctive characteristic of a living organism from dead organism or non-living thing, as specifically distinguished by the capacity to grow, metabolize, respond (to stimuli), adapt, and reproduce"
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
This fact often catches people by surprise when I tell them also. The more conspiratorial theory is that JPL prefers not to include life detection equipment because it would mean the end of robotic missions and more of an emphasis to get humans there to do real biology, which is more the domain of Houston Mission Control. Follow the money...
This argument can be flipped, though. If life were found on Mars, that might lead to a ban on manned Mars missions, because there's absolutely no chance that a manned mission will not contaminate Mars with microbes from Earth. So to protect a Martian ecosystem, we might have to use only robots to explore Mars.
or rather to protect us from what is coming back; I remember that the Apollo astronauts were kept in quarantine due to that fear. I think it's sort of funny that the effort to make us a multi planetary species might as well doom us if we catch something unusual while on Mars.
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> no fundamental philosophical or existential questions would be resolved If you don't consider "does life exist on other planets?" to be a fundamental, existential question, can you share an example of what you do think is such a fundamental question? Finding life on Mars wouldn't necessarily resolve any fundamental questions, but it would open up a whole new realm of questions. Is it similar to life on Earth? How s…
Sure: Is the concept of objective meaning valid in any possible universe? Is it possible for the universe to be a fully observed deterministic system? Is there a universal objective function motivating what we consider reality? Is it possible to determine with certainty the origins of what we can conceptualize as reality? Is it possible to forecast with mathematical certainty events in future time steps. Basically ju…
> is godels incompleteness theorem disprovable
Do you actually understand its proof? On what basis would it be disproven? It's really difficult for me to even conceive of what disproving it would even "mean" - you seem to think that it's somehow tied to whether the universe is deterministic, but it's not. A "disproof" would essentially break the very logical tools used to construct itself (since it is the nature of these that Godel's theorem concerns); it's like trying to drive further north than the north pole - there simply isn't a conceptual direction to go unless you completely redefine the meaning of "north".
Edit: Also, Laplace's demon has likely been formally proven to be impossible: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-proof-reveals-fundamental-limi... Perhaps your apparent belief in Laplace's Demon combined with the comparison of this proof to Godel's Theorem is your motivation to suggest that it can be disproven?
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is life on Mars -- JPL just doesn't want to tell us. Follow this logic: 1) two planets in habitable zone - both spontaneously cause life; 2) then many or most habitable zone planets have life; 3) Of the trillions of stars in our galaxy, there must be multitudes that have hosted intelligent life; 4) we don't hear SETI signals; 5) that means SETI must have snuffed themselves out with some super-technology; 6) erg…
We already know we’re all doomed. The sun bakes us in somewhere around 5 billion years.
Oh no my 401k retirement fund isn’t going to last that long
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd argue that the jump from 0 to 1 of "knowledge of life on other planets" would be huge. Currently, we have an almost pseudo-religious understanding of what place life holds in the universe, but that's based on the fact that when we've looked up at the cosmos for all of history, it seemed impossibly devoid of anything familiar. The discovery of life on another planet (even if that life somehow originated on Earth),…
Disagree- folks outside of the sci-fi bubble won't appreciate microbes on other planets. 0 to 1 happens when we find multicellular organisms with cognitive capabilities IMO
"Folks outside of the sci-fi bubble" rarely appdeciate much about non-monetary impacts of space. But discovering life - even alien life - would really shake up many big religions, which tend to assume we're special, unique creations. I'm sure religions would eventually evolve to accomodate the discovery in their belief systems, but it would get noticed by regular Joes and Janes.
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fear that the “it’s never aliens” credo was taken to the pathological case. Nothing can be life so why look for it? Nothing can be life, so any really complicated scenario not involving life must be true, always.
But they are looking for it. Science demands evidence for your claims. If x could be due to a, but also b, c, d, maybe e, you can't say x = a until you've proved that x ≠ b, c, d, e.
Conversely you can't say x != a until you've proven x = b or c, d, e. Which is GP's point if I understood correctly.
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#140Excuse the cliche question, but what is Life? If we make an AI whose thoughts and communication are practically indistinguishable from humans, and it controls a bunch of things that affect the physical world, is it alive? If there's a disembodied mind somewhere that can think and imagine but never communicate or interact with anything, is it dead? What about a human in a coma or permanent dreaming state? What about w…
I'm guessing they're using the scientific definition: "A distinctive characteristic of a living organism from dead organism or non-living thing, as specifically distinguished by the capacity to grow, metabolize, respond (to stimuli), adapt, and reproduce" - https://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Life
Yes, I'm saying that definition may very likely be challenged once we actually start discovering extraterrestrial entities.