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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

#241

Post by anon234345566 »

arcticbull wrote: post #115
noetic_techy wrote: post #72

Earlier 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...

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…

nobody knowing there's actually aliens out there would ever leak anything if they're sure there's certain danger in doing it so. If they found something and nobody is saying anything, not leaking a word, there should be a really important reason for that.

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

#242

Post by anon234345566 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #15
psaux wrote: post #7

I 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.

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…

But what would be the geopolitical effects of having found the ruins of an old datacenter, under the dust of a couple of millions of years, old hardware, looking like maybe 500 years more advanced than the state of the art on Earth.

You would know there's tech out there, the first able to reach to it will have the edge over the rest for centuries ahead.

The effects will be massive, no one dolar, yuan, yen, gold bar would be left unspent in the quest to get there and learn before the others.

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

#243

Post by CydeWeys »

drdeca wrote: post #226
ianai wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The authors suggest testing for chiraliry in an LR test. Life creates certain “handed” organic molecules while purely chemical reactions do not. They said there’s already designs for flight ready tests. NASA just needs to include it in a mars mission. But they have no plans to do so. This significantly increased my frustration with NASA.

I thought life on earth favoring a particular chirality was supposed to be primarily because of like common ancestors and stuff. If you flipped the chiralities of everything, would stuff no longer work? Or, I guess really my question is, would it be nearly impossible for life on another planet to use the opposite chirality instead?

The test is not for right chirality, it's for any preferred chirality. Non-life is half and half at random.

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

#244

Post by untog »

adrianN wrote: post #110
untog wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the desire is mainstream, just look at the TV shows and movies that explore the idea of alien life. But I think the reason it’s not talked about more is that our knowledge is essentially non existent and hasn’t really changed in, say, the last fifty years?

Fifty years ago we didn't even know whether there were planets outside of our solar system.

But that hasn’t really changed our knowledge of alien life much. We still know it’s possible for it to be out there, but we have no idea if it is.

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

#245

Post by alexanderdmitri »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #141
catalogia wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things may get pretty shitty for them, but if I could wager on such a thing, I'd wager on the species surviving.

who would you collect from if you wagered against, and how would you take it with you?

Basically Pascal's wager:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

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

#246

Post by mhh__ »

adrianN wrote: post #110
untog wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the desire is mainstream, just look at the TV shows and movies that explore the idea of alien life. But I think the reason it’s not talked about more is that our knowledge is essentially non existent and hasn’t really changed in, say, the last fifty years?

Fifty years ago we didn't even know whether there were planets outside of our solar system.

A large amount of our solar system hadn't been mapped yet (and wouldn't be for a few decades)

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

#247

Post by speedplane »

untog wrote: post #244
adrianN wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fifty years ago we didn't even know whether there were planets outside of our solar system.

But that hasn’t really changed our knowledge of alien life much. We still know it’s possible for it to be out there, but we have no idea if it is.

> But that hasn’t really changed our knowledge of alien life much. We still know it’s possible for it to be out there, but we have no idea if it is.

The Drake equation is a nice framework to determine the probability of life outside of our planet. Sure, the end result is still a big mystery, but many of the variables in the Drake equation have been solved or narrowed down (e.g., star formation, planet formation, etc.). To say that there has been no progress in the last 50 years is silly.

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

#248

Post by ianai »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #222
aflag wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that microscopical life in Mars is the biggest discovery in human history. It's more like an interesting trivia. But it doesn't change people's lives any more than the discovery of water on Mars.

I think one of the biggest questions about our universe is whether life is unique to Earth. It's pretty silly and self centered to assume that we're unique, but we don't really have any real way to confirm or deny the question outside of the ability to find signs of life within our solar system. So yes, finding signs of life on Mars is basically answering one of the most fundamental questions about our existence.

But only sort of a biggest question. Once we know there’s life out there beyond us other questions arise. Perhaps the next big question would be is any of it intelligent and/or industrial like us?

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

#249

Post by dkersten »

stOneskull wrote: post #217
keithnoizu wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But on the universes timescale, a slight variance could still be thousands of years or more. So maybe there is life in some distant reaches of the universe, who are +/- a thousand years from our level of development. Their signals simply haven't reached us yet, or ours them.

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

#250

Post by cgriswald »

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.

People have looked. There are some candidates that have not been ruled out, but are not particularly promising. Do a Google Scholar Search for "IRAS dyson spheres" and you'll get oodles of papers describing attempts, new places we might look (I recall one suggesting they might all be surrounding the galaxy's central blackhole), current theoretical limits of our ability to search, new methods we might use to find them, etc.
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