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I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s

#161

Post by Razengan »

tbabb wrote: post #158
Razengan wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume by "spreading" you mean that the Pikachus can reproduce? No, they're all created by the mad scientist but can think, reason, communicate, teach, interact, invent and construct perfectly fine on their own. > I don't think "what material they're made of" matters much ... If the Pikachus don't reproduce themselves, and/or are created with perfect fidelity every time, then yes, I would call them technology and…

> Species must consist of "individuals" who join in pairs Where did you get pairs from? If the Pikachus reproduced by binary fission (splitting in half and then growing a new half, like cells do), or had 18 genders, they would still evolve. They only have to make copies. Doesn't matter how. > No, they're all created by the mad scientist but can think, reason, communicate, teach, interact, invent If they can't reprodu…

Alright: An individual of an species has to initiate the production of another individual of that species, and the new individual must have some differences from the preceding individual.

Do I have it correct?

Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s

#162

Post by rzzzt »

asdff wrote: post #104
ianai wrote: post #77

Earlier 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.

"However improbable", Sherlock Holmes is often brought up in cases like this...

Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s

#163

Post by Jweb_Guru »

jacquesm wrote: post #57
dleslie wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not intend to state the implications are the end of religion; simply that many faithful will alter their faith, in no small manner.

I highly doubt that. If the genetics, the silicon revolution, access to space imagery, quality education, the internet and science in general did not alter faith in a drastic way I don't think 'life on Mars' is going to do anything either unless it comes in the form of little green creatures.

Yup. It's like how many religious people differentiate between "evolution" and "microevolution," with the latter (basically) encompassing whatever evolution happens to have been experimentally witnessed, no matter how drastic. Generally anything involving bacteria gets lumped into this latter category.

Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s

#164

Post by CryptoPunk »

Hextinium wrote: post #156
xvector wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if Type 3 civilizations might engulf their star in a Dyson Sphere to block out light and make it harder to find. A dark forest where the life-bearing trees aren’t even visible.

The thing about that is all the energy from a star is still being radiated, just in infared. So if this was true a IR telescope should see a star like object with no visible light but a large amount of infared emitted.

Apparently Dyson spheres can be undetectable with IR telescopes:

https://www.tillett.info/2016/08/03/carnot-efficient-dyson-s...

Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s

#165

Post by jf- »

asdff wrote: post #104
ianai wrote: post #77

Earlier 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.

The fastest way isn’t to eliminate the other possibilities, it’s to find a unique test for a that can’t be met by any of the others. Bear in mind that your list of alternative causes may be very long and each require large amounts of work to eliminate.

I too find it strange that multiple landers have been sent to mars since Viking, ostensibly looking for evidence of present or past life, and have yet have carried no tests for it. I find the best way to find something is to look for it.

Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s

#166

Post by tbabb »

Razengan wrote: post #161
tbabb wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Species must consist of "individuals" who join in pairs Where did you get pairs from? If the Pikachus reproduced by binary fission (splitting in half and then growing a new half, like cells do), or had 18 genders, they would still evolve. They only have to make copies. Doesn't matter how. > No, they're all created by the mad scientist but can think, reason, communicate, teach, interact, invent If they can't reprodu…

Alright: An individual of an species has to initiate the production of another individual of that species, and the new individual must have some differences from the preceding individual. Do I have it correct?

Yes, but it's not everything. You've got two and a half of the original four criteria there:

> An individual of an species has to initiate the production of another individual

️^ reproduction

> of the same species

It depends on what you're defining to be "the same species", but if we take that to mean "shares traits with the original", then that's "inheritance".

> new individual must have some differences

^️ mutation

The one you're missing is "selection"— that the future success at copying depends on the traits you inherited.

If you have variable traits, but they don't at least indirectly result in either more or fewer copies, then there is no cause for some traits to become more prevalent than others in the population and evolution won't occur. You'll just get a jumble of random traits without any trend toward fitness (aka more efficient copying).

It is a fact of nature/mathematics that those four rules are necessary and sufficient for evolution to occur. If you set them up, evolution will happen, guaranteed. Those rules constitute an algorithm, carried out by the laws of nature on the substrate of physical matter, whose result is evolution— a trend toward increasing reproductive fitness.

Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s

#167

Post by RobertRoberts »

Science becomes corrupted when the research focuses on finding proof of and ideal instead disproving it.

There are no aliens. With the money wasted on looking for aliens we could have saved millions of lives with clean water, shelter, food and education.

Scientists need to stop deluding themselves and tricking congress into funding pet projects that are so far fetched they border on fraud.

Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s

#168

Post by mytailorisrich »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #167

Science becomes corrupted when the research focuses on finding proof of and ideal instead disproving it. There are no aliens. With the money wasted on looking for aliens we could have saved millions of lives with clean water, shelter, food and education. Scientists need to stop deluding themselves and tricking congress into funding pet projects that are so far fetched they border on fraud.

What is your evidence that there are no aliens, then?

Proving a negative in a virtually infinite universe looks like an uphill struggle, don't you think?

Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s

#169

Post by tudorw »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #167

Science becomes corrupted when the research focuses on finding proof of and ideal instead disproving it. There are no aliens. With the money wasted on looking for aliens we could have saved millions of lives with clean water, shelter, food and education. Scientists need to stop deluding themselves and tricking congress into funding pet projects that are so far fetched they border on fraud.

The search for meaning, for answering fundamental questions and for furthering scientific progress has a value, to blame the search for aliens for the state of the world is misguided. Perhaps there are other cuts we could make that would have a bigger impact... "Total world military expenditure rose to $1822 billion in 2018" https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2019/world-militar...

Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s

#170

Post by stan_rogers »

rzzzt wrote: post #162
asdff wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"However improbable", Sherlock Holmes is often brought up in cases like this...

That's contingent on eliminating the impossible.
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