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Does anyone else think that if news of underwater life on Europa being found is announced someday the reaction from the general public will be something like “M
by xwdv 3y ago
Does anyone else think that if news of underwater life on Europa being found is announced someday the reaction from the general public will be something like “Meh, cool. Now what about the economy or who is dating who?”
New creatures being discovered in Earth’s deepest oceans don’t really even make most news. Europa is just a deeper ocean.
- diogenes4 3y agoIs it really surprising to you that people are more interested in things relevant to their lives? Whitey On The Moon is as relevant now as it was in 1970, hell arguably even more relevant.
- postmodest 3y agoDinosaurs are still around. Everyone got used to it. The only people to be affected will be people like Ken Ham, and literally NOTHING is getting through to them at this point.
- nvy 3y agoI think if we actually found irrefutable evidence of life on Europa (or some other celestial body) and that life was definitively non-terrestrial in origin, it would make global headlines. Even if it's just microbes and not, like, some exotic whale- or octopus-type creature, it would be a momentous event.
- XorNot 3y agoIt'd have a huge impact on the Drake equation. Life in Europa is very much a different set of conditions too Earth. If we found abiogenesis happened twice in one solar system, I'd start to think it must happen pretty much everywhere.
- f6v 3y agoThe religious leaders will probably have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to explain why this isn’t really a big deal.
- mock-possum 3y agoNah. It’s easy. “The Bible is god’s word, for mankind, on earth. It wasn’t written to exhaustively document everything in existence. It didn’t mention extraterrestrial life because that was not relevant to the creation and salvation of mankind.”
- saiya-jin 3y ago"There are 517 currently known species to have higher intelligence than humans, but you my fellows are the chosen race"
- arwineap 3y agoWhat would we even do if we found life on Europa? Would we try to send a rover down and risk contaminating? Would we be willing to risk leaving our earth junk on the planet, have we ever brought something back off a foreign body? Would we try to study from orbit? Could we rely on countries of earth to adhere to star treks' prime directive?
- phillc73 3y ago> ...have we ever brought something back off a foreign body? Yes. Last week. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/22/nasas-osiris-rex-mission-asteroid-sample-plummets-towards-earth https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/22/nasas-osiris...
- fragmede 3y agoshrug Different people have different priorities. They're judging you just as harshly for not caring more about the economy or socially relevent-for-them news. I'm glad someone's engaged with the economy and politics more than I, those things are important, and there are only so many hours in the day to doom scroll.
- egeozcan 3y ago> the reaction from the general public will be something like “Meh, cool. Now what about the economy or who is dating who?” That wouldn't be annoying me much, if at all. The possibly infinite conspiracy theories and misinformation making it probably impossible to follow the developments without getting confused on the other hand...
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoTBH if life is there or anywhere in our solar system it'd 99% chance be single-celled bacteria/archaea type life.. because that's what like 80% of Earth's history has been... and yes... I think you'll find most of the population would probably give it a shrug. If you found multicellular crawly life "like us", sure, people would be excited. I also think that's exceedingly unlikely. If life itself here is a "fluke", eukaryotic life is wayyyyy more of a fluke.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI think if you judge the general public by TikTok views, probably. But science isn’t a general public topic. That’s ok, there’s a few hundred million of us science fans which is enough for me to feel thoroughly socialized.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoScience WAS a general public topic, what changed?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- darreninthenet 3y agoReality TV, celebrity obsession, Simon Cowell's rubbish... where do I begin?
- napier 3y agoFractal balkanization of general public attention context windows via social media simclusters and engagement maxxing feed algos.
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoFinally, somebody that speaks English!
- xbmcuser 3y agoIt was never a general public topic. I don't get where you think that it was. The only point where it was a general public topic when a science topic crossed politics. Like the us space program against ussr space program that was what got the publics imagination not the science.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoRevisionist af. 40 years ago advancements in everything from particle physics to biology (and yes the space program too) were a staple of nightly news broadcasts. Hell there was an entire broadcast TV channel that featured programming on everything from cosmology to plate tectonics. The 80s were a thing my friend, don't discount them.
- jl6 3y agoThe most likely scenario is that it would be microbes, but even microbes would be pretty amazing if they turned out to be based on something other than DNA/RNA or proved sufficiently distinct from Earth life to suggest a second abiogenesis event.
- tessierashpool 3y agoit's more interesting if they're not that different from Earth life. many species of fungi, bacteria, and lichen can survive in space. it's not just tardigrades. they're not a fluke; they're part of a pattern. I think it's extremely likely that we'll not only find life is very common, but that many species found on earth are also found on other planets.
- jvm___ 3y agoRocks and dust, from what we've seen so far are governed by the same rules of physics for their size and composition. Will life obey the same rules?
- empyrrhicist 3y agoSpecies? Surely they would diverge over the timescales involved...
- tessierashpool 3y agospecies is probably the wrong word. maybe genus or phylum. apologies for the rusty biology. but sharks have been sharks for 400 to 450 million years. I'm sure sharks are terrestrial in origin, but that's an intergalactic timescale during which very little evolutionary change occurred, or was necessary, for a particular category of creature. maybe tardigrades have been tardigrades for 450 million years too.
- keepamovin 3y agoAnd maybe evolve into the dominant life or civilization. It may turn out that upright bipedal “5 star” form is very conserved in advanced civilizations. So maybe you have the Lion people planet, the lizard people planet, the wolf people planet. We are the chimp people planet haha :)
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoWhen i was young we didn't know for sure that planets outside the solar system even existed. There were even some theories that planets could be extremely rare and our solar system was special. I think life is in the same category as extra solar planets once were. So yes.
- nico 3y agoThat’s pretty much the whole plot of the movie Don’t look up The Extrapolations series on Apple TV also touches on this
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoOof. I forgot how ham fisted nonsense that movie was. Truly garbage and just so popular for a week.
- BurningFrog 3y agoIf it's not intelligent life we can talk to, that seems about right. Not sure what else we would do?
- RHSman2 3y agoIs TikTok content ‘intelligent’?