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The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it
- likeabbas 4y agoFor those who don't know, there's a very significant movement happening within factions of the US government to push disclosure on potential non-human intelligence visiting earth. This 15 minute guide is worth the read https://www.uap.guide https://www.uap.guide Other significant efforts searching for alien life include the Galileo Project by Dr. Avi Loeb of Harvard https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home Edit: For those who don't know, the 2022 NDAA was passed that included legislation the protect whistleblowers from disclosing to congress about unacknowledged black projects regarding reverse engineering programs that congress was not privy to. https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/uap-related-provisions-of-the-final-proposed-fy-2023-national-defense-authorization-act/ https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/uap-related-provisions-of-th... > ESTABLISHMENT.—The Secretary of Defense, acting through the head of the Office and in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, shall establish a secure mechanism for authorized reporting of— (A) any event relating to unidentified anomalous phe- nomena; and (B) any activity or program by a department or agency of the Federal Government or a contractor of such a depart- ment or agency relating to unidentified anomalous phe- nomena, including with respect to material retrieval, mate- rial analysis, reverse engineering, research and develop- ment, detection and tracking, developmental or operational testing, and security protections and enforcement.
- belter 4y ago"...An UFO has landed in America...the only country UFO's only seem to land in..." - https://youtu.be/HIVZa7c7WZU https://youtu.be/HIVZa7c7WZU
- technothrasher 4y ago> there's a very significant movement happening within factions of the US government to push disclosure on potential non-human intelligence visiting earth. <yawn> Pushing for disclosure is very different than there being anything to disclose. Get back to me when they actually disclose anything worthy of being attributed to non-human intelligence.
- likeabbas 4y agoIn case you're not aware, the 2022 NDAA includes legislation to provide people whistleblower protection to disclose unacknowledged black projects regarding reverse engineering programs to congress. This legislation comes directly from Christopher Mellon and Lue Elizondo's work behind the scenes of getting whistleblowers to testify to the congressional intelligence committees. https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/uap-related-provisions-of-the-final-proposed-fy-2023-national-defense-authorization-act/ https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/uap-related-provisions-of-th...
- sammalloy 4y agoThere is zero consensus that there is a "non-human intelligence visiting Earth". There is, one could argue, a phenomenon of some kind, either real or imagined, but nobody seems to know what it is. And yes, I’m familiar with the subject, and I’ve been following it for decades. Also, I think "disclosure" is somewhat of a misnomer. If people don’t know what it is, there’s nothing to disclose. People have been beating the disclosure drum for years. Nothing really has happened except some people made a bit of money selling people on the idea. And for all intents and purposes, our world-spanning civilization is much too primitive to even begin to disclose something like this if it were true. 85% of the people on this planet believe in superstitious nonsense. We aren’t ready to accept the existence of aliens on other worlds or parallel universes, let alone accept our own brothers and sisters who have a different skin color. Given what I’ve seen of humanity, the zoo hypothesis is the best thing we can hope for. We just are incredibly stupid as a species at this time and place. I can’t imagine why any alien would want to have anything to do with us.
- cactusplant7374 4y agoThe novelty factor is one reason. I can’t imagine being so advanced but not interested in other life forms.
- sammalloy 4y agoSure, the "show me what you got" factor, but what if it is only interesting to higher order primates? Maybe the aliens are too busy playing in infinite fun space or just have sublimed out of biology? https://youtu.be/m1fZ7Ap6ebs https://youtu.be/m1fZ7Ap6ebs
- likeabbas 4y agoThere's zero consensus, but there's enough evidence that congress decided to include some interesting legislation in the latest NDAA https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/uap-related-provisions-of-the-final-proposed-fy-2023-national-defense-authorization-act/ https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/uap-related-provisions-of-th...
- bsder 4y agoFunny how both UFO and Angel/Devil sightings went down just as ubiquitous personal video recording devices became commonplace...
- Arrath 4y agoBeen too long since we've had a nice grainy photo of bigfoot.
- pohl 4y agoJust 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.
- bsder 4y agoBecause 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.
- actionfromafar 4y agoRegular criminal gangs are more afraid of their peers than the police most of the time, so it might be a long wait.
- zirgs 4y agoIt 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- infradig 4y agoDisclosure == Rapture for the #ufotwitter crowd. It's basically a religious cult.
- likeabbas 4y agoThere are significant people involved with this. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon. Dr. Avi Loebb - Astrophysicist at Harvard. Dr. Gary Nolan - Pathologist at Stanford
- e_i_pi_2 4y ago> (when they really, really love one another) can mix and meld to form a new organism that can replicate itself in turn I know it's a bit tongue-in-cheek but I kinda wish they'd go with something more realistic that also explains our perspective, something like "when two organisms feel compelled to have sex". Even in humans it's a big stretch to say that deep love is a prerequisite and I think adds some harmful personification to the natural world
- e_i_pi_2 4y agoThe mention of silicon as a potential carbon replacement is also explored a bit in the movie "Ecolution" from 2001 - the half-life for replication is way short and (spoiler) they use an analog of cyanide to destroy the silicon-based aliens
- Tagbert 4y agoIt’s a reference to some old fashioned language used in older sex education materials.
- alasdair_ 4y agoThe first alien intelligence we humans will encounter is likely to be one created by ourselves.
- belter 4y ago"V'Ger": https://youtu.be/kHUZCVl28lg https://youtu.be/kHUZCVl28lg
- dogma1138 4y agoV’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.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y agoHmm, 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 remember anyone being able to trace the history of V'Ger with any certainty beyond finding its original inscriptions.
- dogma1138 4y agoNo 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- babelfish 4y agoThe book Solaris by Stanislaw Lem is a really great read, describing something alien that is obviously alive, yet too foreign for humans to comprehend or interact with.
- kposehn 4y agoI'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.
- zokier 4y agoQuestion 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.
- willis936 4y agoIt 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 https://youtu.be/469chceiiUQ Life inside of stars does enable different options.
- api 4y agoI wrote a little blog about this many years ago that’s still online on my basically unupdated site: https://adamierymenko.com/titan/ https://adamierymenko.com/titan/ In this I’m at least speculating that Titan might be likely to host alien life in its steamy cryotropical environment. I’d love to see NASA sink a submersible in those methane seas and look for cryowhales. (Or more likely cryobacteria but cryowhales would rule.) I’d expect life there to be wholly biochemically alien, probably based on methane or ammonia as solvents, and probably very metabolically “slow” compared to most life here. We might miss even macroscopic Titan life without time lapse photography. To any intelligent Titanians we would look like the Balrogs from Lord of the Rings: burning lava monsters with blood of molten water.
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- perihelions 4y agoQuestion 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 keywords!
- TastyDucks 4y ago"Shadow biosphere" may be a useful search term.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y agoSearching this term I found an article with an amusingly similar title: > Life on Earth... but not as we know it https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/apr/14/shadow-biosphere-alien-life-on-earth https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/apr/14/shadow-biosp...
- akiselev 4y agoVery, 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 disposal. 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. We'd (theoretically) eventually notice them on electron microscopy slides though, which is how we know there's many unculturable microbes, but whether we'd recognize them as alien is a completely different matter. The microbial world is very diverse and there's nothing I can think of that'd set something apart as alien since we can analyze the chemistry with an electron microscope.
- narag 4y ago
- bsder 4y agoLife may not look like us, but it sure seems like it's going to have nucleic acids just like us. The building blocks are extremely common, they seem to have fairly broad initial conditions, and it seems like they are practically inevitable once those conditions exist.
- pfdietz 4y ago> it seems like they are practically inevitable once those conditions exist Given that we have exactly one occurrence of Origin of Life, how did you conclude this? From life originating quickly on Earth once it had cooled enough? That could be explained by the conditions in which life might originate not persisting for very long after a planet forms.
- bsder 4y agoMy comment is about the building blocks. We seem to find amino acids everywhere. It seems like once conditions exist that they can form, they DO form. We don't have any equivalent building block which is anywhere nearly so ubiquitous. In addition, these building blocks are reversible within 3kcal/mol. Life requires reversibility. http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2008/10/unbearable-heat-capacity-of-being.html http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2008/10/unbearable-he... We have no other building blocks with this kind of versatility. None. So, life may not be based on DNA/RNA, but it's almost certain to be based around amino acids.
- pfdietz 4y agoAh, ok. You were talking about the small molecules, not life. That seems ok, although realize that the amino acids formed are a large superset of the ones life has ended up settling on. So it's conceivable another OoL event would settle on a different (if not disjoint) set.
- ph3414a 4y agoWe'll make lousy pets.
- swayvil 4y agoA hallucinogen is like a telescope. Many users of hallucinogens report meeting "machine elves". Maybe we should be looking there.
- CyberDildonics 4y agoThat's like saying studying ambien will unlock the secrets to time travel.
- Jerrrry 4y agono, common hallucinogenic tropes are just remnants of our evolved collective unconscious; not any proto-communications from other dimensions. i am plenty familiar with them and other characters, and their lessons always seemed terrestrial, subconsciously familiar.
- gumby 4y agoThe issue of "if you lose your keys at night, the first place you look is under the lamppost" problem with searching for alien life has bothered me too, since I was about the age of this professor's trip to Hawaii. But unlike her my musing never resulted in anything useful. I'm so glad someone is thinking about this and that that person sounds like a broad thinker!
- Zigurd 4y agoAlternatives 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.
- cletus 4y agoI'm not sure what the point of this is. In the last 60+ years we've obviously learned a lot and widened our definition of where life on Earth can live (eg subsea volcanic vents, in rocks in Antarctica). We obviously don't know the limits of biochemistry and thus in what environments life can evolve and where it can continue to live where it exists. We're certainly not going to be detecting a world full of microbes from light years away. What we're primarily interested in is detecting tecnological life. At stellar distances this really means detecting evidence of spacefaring civilization. This means practially the same thing because the gap between initial technology and spacefaring technology is a cosmic blink of an eye. And those signatures will transcend biochemistry and what type of world you originate on barring some major glaring error in our understanding of physics (eg thermodynamics being violated). The reason is that life will ultimately come down to energy and mass. Both of these mean there is pressure to expand and to expand is to become visible. You can argue that expansion isn't inevitable in all cases and you might be correct but it doesn't matter. It matters only if all civilizations remain small and/or hidden. And the odds of that go down as the number of civilizations go up. I am of course talking about Dyson Swarms, a cloud of orbitals around a star. To put this in perspective, a full Dyson Swarm around our Sun would give each of the 8 billion people on EArth living area roughly equivalent in size to Africa and each person would have a million times more energy than the entire of humanity currently uses. Such megastructures would be very obvious from a great distance too (ie due to the IR signature of dissipating heat). Likewise, there would be no hiding from such a civilization.
- analog31 4y agoI think we're quickly moving towards living in a sort of poor man's Dyson sphere. More and more of our communications are being enclosed in optical fibers that leak virtually no radiation. Our free space comms are increasingly designed to operate on diminishing amounts of power, and to be practically indistinguishable from noise. We may be a dark planet by a couple centuries from the invention of radio. Chemical changes to our atmosphere might be detectable from afar.
- Zigurd 4y agoThat "We're certainly not going to be detecting a world full of microbes from light years away" is debatable. Changes that are not geological, like Earth's great oxygenation event could be vivid enough to be detectable among exoplanets.
- smitty1e 4y agoI will assume the curmudgeonly pose and offer that humanity will branch out and explore and...realize a deep lonliness when the quantum mechanical accidents that led to "life" on Earth are not quite duplicated anywhere else. Sorry.
- andsoitis 4y agoDoes life really have to be based in chemistry? Is it more effective to search for phenotypical effects of life than life itself? Do we care about life elsewhere unless it as advanced or more advanced than us? Even if we could find in “space”, can we find it in “time”?
- thanatos519 4y agoI think we should stop looking and start sending extremophiles to everywhere life could possibly take hold.
- sph 4y agoWe inadvertently did something similar when we discovered the New World. Didn't work out so well for the natives. That time was an honest mistake, but maybe we should stop trying to play God for a while. At least until we are advanced enough to create our own universe to experiment with.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago>That time was an honest mistake, yeah, but once people worked out how it was killing the natives they went a more systematic route.
- bufferoverflow 4y agoMight be illegal, against some interstellar law.