They figured they should talk about their discoveries of life on other planets before Wikileaks says it first
NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery
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Re: NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or a good moment to remember what happens when a less advanced civilization meets a more advanced one. It never goes well for the less advanced civilization.
In the words of Iain M. Banks, the kind of problem "most civilisations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."
He calls it an "Out of Context Problem".
Re: NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery
#43Jason Kottke looked at the speaker list and thinks it's photosynthesis using arsenic. See this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953228
Re: NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other theory being that galaxy-spanning life is incredibly common, it's just that we're too immature/uninteresting to bother coming to visit. How often do you stop and try to communicate with the queen of a particular anthill?
The article mentions this theory, it says that if life is incredibly common, it would only take one civilization to be curious and come visit us.
What if interstellar travel is just really hard (= no advanced life form has figured it out, and it might just be impossible/not economical), and whatever signals their civilizations generate just aren't strong enough to be picked up by e.g. SETI?
It wouldn't spell "doom" unless you count the sun running out of juice/going supernova. The universe might be packed with life, each such patch effectively isolated to it's own little corner.
Re: NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other theory being that galaxy-spanning life is incredibly common, it's just that we're too immature/uninteresting to bother coming to visit. How often do you stop and try to communicate with the queen of a particular anthill?
The article mentions this theory, it says that if life is incredibly common, it would only take one civilization to be curious and come visit us.
I feel like I'm playing into a cliche by even giving this response, but:
Would we recognize it? Would we even know that it had happened? Consider that if there is a civilization capable of traveling across inter-stellar distances, they very likely have got a very different sort of life-span that people on earth. Because of this, their language (if they have something we would recognize as language) could be dramatically different than ours.
Honestly their brains, or "mechanism of creativity" as I guess you could call it, could be something that we would never be able to communicate with.
There are biochemical reasons why extra-terrestrial life would probably be similar to ours, but I can think of no reason why they would be neurologically or psychologically anything like us.
Think about the ants again. Ants have communications, sure, but it's not language, at least not in the human sense. Ants very probably don't have thoughts, and because they don't have thoughts, they don't have a reason to abstract them to words.
This hasn't prevented ants (or bees) from building incredibly interesting and complicated physical and organizational structures.
We've contacted bees. Do you suppose that they realize it?
Re: NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery
#46Does God count? I don't see the big fuss.
Re: NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery
#47mars is the result of an oxygen catastrophe where, unlike the earth, life did not survive.
Re: NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery
#48Perhaps a good moment to re-read this: Why I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Finds Nothing: http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf tl;dr: "Because it means life is not incredibly unlikely (after all, it occurred on two planets in our own solar system); ergo what must instead be incredibly unlikely is the ability for life to progress to the point where it can spread across the galaxy (after all, no…
"two planets"? Is he is writing from the perspective of a future event of life being discovered on another planet besides Earth, or is there some underground news about life being discovered on another planet besides Earth?
Re: NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery
#49Re: NASA to Hold News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery
#50Would the discovery of microbial extraterrestrial life have any significant impact on your life?
A lot of people are simply curious, and like to increase their understanding of the world/universe we live in.
Do you only care about things that directly and immediately impact your life? Why are you on a news site at all?