Posted on 07/31/2015 11:20:25 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Suddenly, space is getting interesting again. After decades of going boldly nowhere in low Earth orbit, Man, or rather his robotic emissaries, have made some startling discoveries in our Solar System.
Cold, distant Pluto is – who would have thought it? – turning out to be one of the most interesting planets (yes, it is a planet) in the Solar System. Before the New Horizons probe turned up earlier this month, astronomers assumed it would be a dull, grey cratered rock.
[SNIP]
If we find life of any kind out there – whether it be Martian microbes (we have several probes prodding the Martian surface and observing it from orbit) or a signal from super-intelligent (or even mildly brainy) aliens – it will change everything. ET will force us to confront a deep truth; that humans are not the only game in town, that we live in a possibly crowded (and quite probably threatening) universe.
But here’s the thing. What if they don’t find anything? What if, 10 years, a 100 years, a 1,000 years hence, endless sky-surveys, proddings and pokings of Mars and elsewhere, turn up nothing, save rocks, gas, ice and vacuum. We had better be prepared for this because, I am beginning to believe, this seems to be the most likely result.
ET should be out there. As the physicist Enrico Fermi famously pointed out more than 60 years ago, in a universe of great antiquity and size such as ours, there ought to be many, many civilisations in space, some of which will be far in advance of our own. It is, he said, a paradox that we have not seen any evidence of this.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
What about Mars resembling 1970s Manchester?
all your planets are belong to us?
My kids tell me I’m not allowed to ask their contempories the same question if I am in doubt.
And, little intelligent life on earth.......
"And, of course, there are the aliens. Most rocket scientists are too po-faced to admit it, but the reality is that space exploration is almost entirely prevaricated on the quest to discover whether or not we are alone."
No, I will admit that I am getting old, and may not be keeping up with all of the changes in the English language - but when I was growing up, the word "prevaricated" meant "lied". What the author INTENDED to say was that space exploration is predicated on the quest to discover whether or not we are alone...
“But here’s the thing. What if they don’t find anything? What if, 10 years, a 100 years, a 1,000 years hence, endless sky-surveys, proddings and pokings of Mars and elsewhere, turn up nothing, save rocks, gas, ice and vacuum. We had better be prepared for this because, I am beginning to believe, this seems to be the most likely result. “
This has been my view for years. We haven’t found life anywhere else that we’ve looked, and we’ve detected no signs of it. It makes no logical sense to assume it MUST be out there, as many do, because we have no evidence that life can just randomly arise from nothing.
God so loved the earth he gave it Life
Could be. Or it is possible that the evolution of even the simplest microbe requires the coincidental occurrence of so many trillions of different conditions that there is no other life in the galaxy, possibly the universe.
Formation of life could be like the old adage that if you had an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time eventually one of them would recreate all of the works of William Shakespeare.
Until we find life anywhere else we have no way of knowing whether life is everywhere, only here, or something in between. Even if we find evidence of past or current microbial life somewhere else in our solar system, it is possible that it was all seeded from Earth or some other point in the solar system during the late heavy bombardment 4 billion years ago.
BTW, if you believe in intelligent design (which I happen to believe in), then it does not change the analysis. God could have chosen to create life everywhere or just here.
Reminds me of an old Star Trek episode, on which they discovered silicon based life on a planet they visited.
The main storyline was that the living creature they discovered was silicon based and not carbon based, as the assumption had been that life as we know it is carbon based.
So, while life as we know it is carbon based, what if there is life as we don’t know it out there somewhere????
My guess is that if there are intelligent species out there (and I’m not convinced that there are), that they would be as interested in us as a liberal would be in reasoned discourse.
Nobody likes social climbers.
I suspect this author does not know God.
Ah, “Devil in the Dark” - one of the good ones!
My pet theory answers that concern from the other end: scientific progress happens roughly the same way in all forms of life, culminating a little past discovery of nuclear fusion and before serious interstellar travel, when some “scientist” thinks the equivalent of “what happens when I try _this_...” and the entire planet ceases to exist.
Articles like this should cause people to ask themselves profound philosophical questions. There’s only concrete evidence of life existing on a single planet in all the universe.
Even the most “simple” of single-celled organisms is stupendously complex. Darwin didn’t know any better. We now do. We haven’t come within light-years of creating even a single protein via random processes, much less a living cell that requires dozens of such proteins, cytoplasm, a variably permeable membrane, organelles and the most complex code in the universe: DNA.
You really need an atomic super freighter to do it right. Plant a colony with reactor and earthmoving equipment first swing, start building underground.
Once Freeman Dyson thought it could be done for the price of a nuclear ballistic submarine and a bit of radioactive pollution. But that’s an old estimate.
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