“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

Post by scrivna » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

teamonkey wrote: post #269

weberer wrote: post #5

Here's the primary source https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adc1c8 They possibly detected dimethyl sulfide, which is only known to be produced by living organisms.

A lot of science papers are like “we found a hint of this thing, we need to do more research” and it’s reported as “ALIENS??!?” I understand why this is the case but I think it can lead to a loss in trust in science when the reporting jumps to conclusions that aren’t supported by the research itself. In this case the abstract is far more grounded. In particular, > The observations also provided a tentative hint of di…

Post by pfdietz » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 3:44 PM UTC

ninetyninenine wrote: post #261

pfdietz wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slow but plausible starships can be designed with 1960s technology. The obstacle is not the technology but the scale of the effort, a problem that could be solved by extension of civilization into the solar system with much larger populations. https://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109.jvn.spring00/n...

Humanity will never put effort into this. We don’t have the technology yet but yes we can develop it but doing this is harder than building a bridge across the ocean between Asia and the US. That bridge is also within our technological capacity. But it’s not happening period.

Post by D-Coder » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 3:53 PM UTC

vivzkestrel wrote: post #183

ta8645 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If life is very common in the universe, then that is probably bad news for us. It means that civilizations should exist that are millions of years more technologically advanced than us; and should be leaving telltale signatures across the sky that we'd likely have detected by now. And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived. Suggesting that our demise t…

no matter how advanced the civilization is, proxima centauri will always be 42 trillion kms away. Our civilization in current stage is not even close to 0.1% the speed of light but lets say your advanced civilization goes at 99% the speed of light, still doesnt change the fact they need 4.25 years approx to reach earth. Still doesnt change the fact that unless they have a 1 billion km wide telscope, they cannot relia…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

spacemark wrote: post #262

perihelions wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced about the methods. It looks a lot like p-hacking to me: they have a highly specific hypothesis drawn from a large universe—that dozen or so molecules (§3.1) in their infrared spectrum model they're fitting experimental data against. I don't buy the way they created that hypothesis. The put a handful of highly specific biosignature gases into it, things that were proposed by exobiology theory papers.…

Don't be bothered by the down votes. HN consensus is not something worth pursuing. Your criticism is valid, it's just that it runs against what HN readers want to believe in this instance. Readers here like to think they're motivated by reason and intelligence and whatnot, but that is laughable - examples of logical fallacies and assertions of fact rocketing to the top comments abound. Overconfidence and readiness to…

Post by dguest » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 4:01 PM UTC

weberer wrote: post #5

Here's the primary source https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adc1c8 They possibly detected dimethyl sulfide, which is only known to be produced by living organisms.