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The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it

scientificamerican.com

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Re: The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it

#91

Post by actionfromafar »

bsder wrote: post #74
pohl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just yesterday I was wondering why — with the ubiquity of surveillance, phones, and body cams — we haven’t yet seen footage of good cops intervening to stop people like Tyre Nichols from being beaten to death.

Because they don't exist. Cops that intervene wind up ostracized by the rest of the force. Until more cops are more afraid of winding up like Chauvin and landing in an actual jail than they are afraid of other police, this will not change.

Regular criminal gangs are more afraid of their peers than the police most of the time, so it might be a long wait.

Re: The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it

#92

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #30
jcfrei wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: Alien life will probably look very similar to life on earth. If you look at evolution then countless species have evolved into something crab-like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvfR3XLXPvw Turns out that their form is pretty good for survival. While biology can take on a myriad of forms, the competitive nature of life will weed out a lot of them. And since the rules for biochemistry are the same acro…

I agree with this but would the intelligent beings on other planets be the same size as humans? Could there be giant creatures that are just as intelligent as us?

There's no reason to believe other sentient life will be in any way relatable to us. Most significantly, there's no reason their perception of time is on the same order as ours. We could be glacially slow or impossibly fast for them to engage in any meaningful way.

Re: The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it

#93

Post by zokier »

kposehn wrote: post #11

I've always found the framework we use to search for extraterrestrial life to be too based on our own experience. It could take countless forms, most of which we could never recognize or understand, and might be present everywhere without us knowing. I'm glad that more of the science community is pushing to broaden our horizons.

Question is how does this broadening of horizons actually help with anything? When we are heavily constrained on both our ability to collect data and analyze that data, exploding the search space seems counter-productive.

We need some way of prioritizing the search work and for that purpose looking first for life as we know it makes sense as that is where we are most likely to be able to identify life.

If searching for life as we know it does not produce results then of course it makes sense to broaden the search. But that is more relevant debate for our children than for us.

Re: The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it

#94

Post by willis936 »

kposehn wrote: post #11

I've always found the framework we use to search for extraterrestrial life to be too based on our own experience. It could take countless forms, most of which we could never recognize or understand, and might be present everywhere without us knowing. I'm glad that more of the science community is pushing to broaden our horizons.

It is a fun thought, but chemistry is not infinitely complex. Much like the Fermi paradox, once you start applying real world qualifiers on chemistry of complex life the search space becomes quite small.

https://youtu.be/469chceiiUQ

Life inside of stars does enable different options.

Re: The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it

#95

Post by 4gotunameagain »

tayo42 wrote: post #86
pciexpgpu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all familiar with biochemistry but octopuses are aliens on earth with very different evolutionary track having developed ‘brains’ before our ancestors did independently! It’s crazy we don’t study things like cephalopods like we do SETI etc…

When ever people talk about terraforming planets I just think they sound insane. Like we don't know how a majority of our own planet even works yet you think we can recreate it? If someone told me that we know more about space then our own oceans I wouldn't be surprised.

it's not an either-or. we can do both, in fact we should do both.

Re: The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it

#96

Post by gizmo686 »

narag wrote: post #31
akiselev wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very, very unlikely like astronomically so. Most microorganisms are so small they're practically transparent so we have to exploit biochemistry to "stain" them - hence why you'll often hear of bacteria classified as either Gram positive or negative, because of the Gram stain. If the biochemistry is unique or even slightly different i.e. right handed chirality, we'd basically have zero of our usual tools at our dispos…

There's already a whole world of terrestrial microbes that we expect or even know for certain to exist but can't culture, let alone stain, which means we can't really study them. I'm going to bookmark this for the case someone asks: what piece of information that seems basic did you ignore until very recently? A question that often arises is: if current life evolved from chemistry that's simpler than DNA, why has tha…

> A question that often arises is: if current life evolved from chemistry that's simpler than DNA, why has that one disappeared? Maybe it hasn't.

The general thinking is that DNA evolved from RNA, which has certainly not dissappeared.

As to pre RNA chemistry, there is a good chance that the relevent chemicals still exist and are well studied. The issue is more that we have not worked out the specific proccess that led to the development of abundant RNA.

Re: The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it

#97

Post by Zigurd »

gumby wrote: post #62
Zigurd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatives to the biochemistry of Earth life are hard to imagine. Silicon replacing carbon is one possibility but, as yet, despite silicon being vastly more common than carbon, we know there is no silicon life on Earth. It's just at too much of an inherent disadvantage, if it is even possible. I would bet on panspermia over silicon life.

Conceiving an alien intelligence is pretty impossible too.

Imagining an alien intelligence is easier than imagining alternative biochemistry. Odds are looking relatively good that we may meet an alien intelligence by building one.

Re: The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it

#98

Post by zirgs »

bsder wrote: post #74
pohl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just yesterday I was wondering why — with the ubiquity of surveillance, phones, and body cams — we haven’t yet seen footage of good cops intervening to stop people like Tyre Nichols from being beaten to death.

Because they don't exist. Cops that intervene wind up ostracized by the rest of the force. Until more cops are more afraid of winding up like Chauvin and landing in an actual jail than they are afraid of other police, this will not change.

It took massive riots to bring him to justice though.

Daniel Shaver's case was even more fucked up imo. The cop forced him to play "Simon says" at gunpoint and walked free after that.

Re: The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it

#99

Post by KineticLensman »

pciexpgpu wrote: post #76
perihelions wrote: post #13

Question for people up to date with modern biochemistry: if there were extraterrestrial microbes on Earth right now, with totally unique chemical origins unrelated to proteins, nucleic acids, saccharides, etc., how likely would we be to notice them? And which analytic method would find them first? Is there a systemic search for this kind of crazy stuff, and where are the review papers for them? I don't know the keywo…

Not at all familiar with biochemistry but octopuses are aliens on earth with very different evolutionary track having developed ‘brains’ before our ancestors did independently! It’s crazy we don’t study things like cephalopods like we do SETI etc…

> octopuses are aliens on earth with very different evolutionary track having developed ‘brains’ before our ancestors did independently

IIRC octopuses appeared in the Jurassic era by which time 'brains' were well established amongst our ancestors, notably the earliest proto-mammals.

I agree that they are an interesting form of alternative intelligence and parallel evolution, but biochemically they have numerous things in common with us, including many gene systems that are highly conserved across a variety of different clades, including our own.

Re: The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it

#100

Post by dogma1138 »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #57
dogma1138 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

V’Ger wasn’t built by humanity it was built around a fictional Voyager spacecraft, who built it was never disclosed by the common fandom theory is that this might have been the progenitor idea to what eventually became the Borg in TNG.

Hmm, Memory Alpha does confirm your facts. I never realized that the remainder of V'Ger had been "constructed" by someone else. I had just assumed that it had ... spontaneously grown and developed out of the Voyager VI core built by humans. Where did this backstory come from? Certainly it was not treated in the original theatrical cut, where Kirk only finds its true nature toward the very end. I certainly don't remem…

No idea in the movie the original voyager is there almost as an altar I don’t even recall if it was operational or not.

As to whom built it im guessing the theories came form fans and the writing crew Star Trek has had a lot of notes being collected over the years it’s not uncommon for future shows to pick up on ideas that were thrown around the writing rooms from GR’s own notes and short stories and I’m guessing trough the years there been enough interviews for this to leak.

I’m not a big Trekkie so I don’t recall if anything other than that was in the movie I just remember it for all the butt jokes around the space anus and that voyager was at the heart of w/e vger was.

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