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Hopefully you spelled out the conditions and confidence required for life being found, because I can see it being debatable. We might detect compounds on other
by suby 4y ago
Hopefully you spelled out the conditions and confidence required for life being found, because I can see it being debatable. We might detect compounds on other planets which to our knowledge can only come about through industrial civilization, but one can argue that there's some other process that is currently unknown to us which could give rise to these compounds.
It's similar to the phosphine discovery on Venus, which is indicative of life but certainly debatable. Though in the phosphine case I think there's debate over whether or not they actually detected phosphine? Regardless, I too am excited about the possibility of detecting signs of intelligent life soon.
- ksaj 4y agoLikewise, if/when we find life, how would we recognize it? We have some understood rule sets for life here, yet we have life forms that don't 100% conform to any one of them. There is no guarantee life on another planet will even have the same DNA structure we have, let alone adhere to the model we've come to agree on for Earthen life. We only have LUCA to understand our own life forms, and zero idea what became and begat LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). The word "Common" is important there, because we know there was a lot of life before LUCA. I took an Origins of Life course that really opened my eyes about how complicated things get when looking for life at different scales.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoIt would be astounding if alien life had terrestrial DNA. A lot of scifi movies get this hopelessly wrong. It's reasonable to expect some kind of DNA-analog: a system, not necessarily using familiar amino acids, that does a similar job. We live in a relatively cold and squishy regime. I suspect the range of possible DNA-analogs is much wider than we think it is. Many will exist in not-at-all-Earth-like conditions.