Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would anyone care about Martian ecosystem?
Not my field, but I’ll hazard a guess: because once we contaminate it, we ruin our chance at getting an un-tarnished understanding of it?
We've already contaminated it
I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
211–220 of 268 posts
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
People could also see it as evidence for a creator, e.g. that the universe is obviously fine tuned for life. Theism isn't scientifically testable or falsifiable, so science can't say much of anything about it.
Moving the goalpost doesn't prove much. Going from how special we are vis a vis Adam and Eve, to accepting life is actually everywhere and has been since well before Earth was a thing is itself a huge leap to make.
Is it really different than any other retcon that's occurred in the last 500 years? At least in Christianity anything can be de-emphasized or treated as metaphor if it is inconvenient.
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#213Earlier 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.
On a civilizational time scale, I just don't see the whole human race deciding that "ohh nooooo, the pwecious pwecious native microbes might be disturbed if we go there" holding up for very long. This is far, far from the opinion of the entire human race right now, despite how common it may seem on HN. At most it'll be a funny footnote that the school kids learn about in their orbiting space station schools where they'll laugh at what the funny old groundpounders thought, before the Earth became uninhabitable after the asteroid pounding given to it in the Great Space Indepedence War of 2343.
In evolutionary terms, it does not seem to be pro-survival attitude.
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
the reverse side of this argument is that the human immune system may not be able to protect against alien bacteria.
I don't know that much about biology, but my understanding is that if the bacteria does not target our bodies, then it will be just some inert material that will eventually be eliminated by one mechanism or another.
the bacteria will be looking for food. either it finds it or it doesn't. if it finds it it will grow and reproduce. that in itself is not the end yet, as there are already many bacteria in our body that live in a symbiotic relationship. only if it reproduces to much and overwhelms our body somehow it becomes a problem.
but also, if it doesn't find food we are not safe yet. the bacteria itself could be toxic in some way and it could reproduce elsewhere and enter our body through food or other ways.
it doesn't need to target our bodies. it just needs to cause an averse reaction of some form.
compare to chemicals for example. they don't target anything. they are inert. yet some chemicals are poisonous.
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cmon folks, let’s be realistic. If someone at NASA had indeed reason to believe life exist(s/ed) on Mars it would 200% have leaked by now. No funding discussion would inhibit someone from leaking this information. It’s the biggest discovery in human history and you think someone’s sitting on it for funding reasons?! Especially since the immediate reaction would be to pour billions into them following up? A big discov…
TFA was written by a NASA team member, and is literally saying "we did discover life on Mars". If that's not "leaking" then I don't know what is. Yet here we are, discussing it as if this is fake news. I don't think we need to call this a "conspiracy", just the lack of official confirmation makes anyone saying that there's life on Mars sound like a crackpot.
What's TFA?
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
TFA was written by a NASA team member, and is literally saying "we did discover life on Mars". If that's not "leaking" then I don't know what is. Yet here we are, discussing it as if this is fake news. I don't think we need to call this a "conspiracy", just the lack of official confirmation makes anyone saying that there's life on Mars sound like a crackpot.
What's TFA?
The Farking Article
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
If "we were the only" is true so is "we were the first" ... However, there exists or has existed one planet with the first civilization ever.
it's not even entirely a given that we are the first, as it's unlikely any evidence of a small tribe of sentient dino villagers for example would persist to the present day.
Like a petal on the flower, or an apple on the tree, it's likely that planets fruit at about the same time.
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Sure, but where's the evidence?”
That is the evidence. Science is often done indirectly. We know that the Sun is made up of hydrogen gas but no one has been there. We know black holes exist, and that the big bang took place 15 billion years ago, that atoms are made up of protons, electrons and neutrons, and that gravitational waves ripple through spacetime. No one has directly seen these things, but we know them to be true based on indirect evidence…
The person who replied to you was actually making fun on people who claim there is no evidence.
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
I agree with you that any progress in these areas would include breaking pretty much everything we "know." That's kind of the point though, current epistemology and computability questions basically stop with these irreducable theories. So we live with this irreducable uncertainty currently.
I'm not proposing solutions or saying that there are errors with these proofs. Rather, when I finally understood them years ago it induced an existential crisis that I don't see any pathways to resolve.
My hypothesis is that humans aren't capable of conceptualizing experiments or building tools that could approach the three most intractable problems in epistemilogy. Maybe we don't have the math to do it, or it's fundamentally intractable and it will never be resolved, I dunno. But those are much more interesting questions than "is there an amoeba on europa?"
Re: I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s
#220I often wonder why these are always auxiliary conversations. Ever since I was young, like most kids (I have 4), I also had this deep yearning for knowledge on life external to earth. Wonder why this never has gone mainstream.
It might be too mainstream. As in, anyone who believes in extra terrestrial life is probably an enthusiast. "Real scientists" are sceptical. Thus many scientists try hard to dismiss evidence of alien life, because that is fashionable. Or at least, the alternative is very kitschy.
I'm certain that the vast majority of scientists, physicists for certain, do "believe" in extraterrestrial life. Belief makes it sound kind of quirky though. It's essentially a probability measurement. Is it more likely that we are the only life in the universe, or not? You reach the same conclusion whether by intuition or by what crude modeling we're capable of. It's not really possible to create a compelling scientific argument for the lack of alien life. This is why the Fermi Paradox is a thing.
The reason people try to discount aliens is because you can attribute literally anything to aliens. And so you reach another equally simplistic binary. You discover some unknown phenomena. It is aliens, or not? Well we've discovered a whole lot of unknown phenomena throughout the years (and centuries and millennia depending on how you want to play this game) and often times it really did look a whole lot like aliens, but to date it's never yet turned out to be them.
And since the determination of an unknown phenomena often comes down to probabilities, aliens get weighted down a good deal. But nonetheless, I have no doubt that at least lurking in the back of every physicist's mind is that something now as regular as a fast radio burst could indeed finally be those LGM - the kind of joking nickname given to the first radio pulsar discovery. Standing, of course, for little green men. Is it? Well probably not, but it'll always be probably not - including when it finally is.