DailyDirt: Searching For Life Forms
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Discovering an alien life form would be quite an achievement, but we’ve been burned before by over-eager press releases that claimed to find evidence of life from beyond our planet. NASA might be more careful about making any announcements about life based on peculiar and potentially extra-terrestrial-based life, but NASA seemed to have forgotten about the extraordinary claims over ALH84001. Overall, though, it’s probably good that NASA hasn’t given up on searching for aliens, so here are a few links on looking for life from outer space.
- Recently, some UK scientists claimed to find evidence of alien life in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, suggesting that alien life is just raining down from space all the time. The concept of panspermia is interesting, but the evidence for it isn’t quite convincing yet. [url]
- There are a bunch of ways to look for aliens, such as a search for extraterrestrial technology (SETT) to find non-natural shapes in space. Looking for alien crop circles on exoplanets ain’t easy, though. [url]
- Some astronomers are looking for evidence of Dyson Spheres — a massive array solar panels that advanced alien civilizations might use for sustaining enormous energy needs. This search is actually being funded by a grant from the Templeton Foundation. [url]
- NASA’s Curiosity rover hasn’t detected much methane in the Martian atmosphere, so the odds of finding familiar living organisms seems a bit more distant. Mars was most likely suitable for Earth-like life at some point, but it’s looking pretty dead right now. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: alh84001, aliens, astrobiology, biology, curiosity, dyson sphere, et, extraterrestrial, life, mars, nasa, seti, sett, templeton foundation
Comments on “DailyDirt: Searching For Life Forms”
Cue “Life on Uranus” jokes in 3, 2, 1…
Re: Re:
Guess it is subsurface then!
Re: Response to: Pixelation on Sep 24th, 2013 @ 6:01pm
I hear it’s a shitty place to live
Re: Re: Response to: Pixelation on Sep 24th, 2013 @ 6:01pm
the next NSA headquarters location
Life maybe, but intelligent life? Doubtful.
Looking for microbes of extraterrestrial origin in the upper-atmosphere is one thing- or looking evidence of life having existed on Mars at some point.
However, whenever I think about the sheer number of unknowable variables potentially involved in the existence of an advanced civilization, the prospect seems mind boggling, and the endeavor like maybe a waste of time.
What is their life-cycle like?
What intervals of time do they relate?
Why do we suppose their energy needs would be comparable to our own?
What benefit would they get from contacting us?
What detriment might they suffer for contacting us?
What detriment might we suffer if they contact us? Might they consider this?
I know that the purpose of science is to seek out answers to these questions, but they just feel beyond the scope of our capacity at the moment. I just don’t know that we have any credible evidence for the conditions of the possible existence of extraterrestrial life. At what point is the search for intelligent life like the search for ghosts?
The article on Dyson spheres sums it up nicely… the search for intelligent extra-terrestrial civilization involves too much wild speculation.
Re: Life maybe, but intelligent life? Doubtful.
“Life maybe, but intelligent life? Doubtful.”
Intelligence maybe sparse, including this planet.
Waste of time? Compared to what … Rape and pillage? Pollute the planet? Or other generally mischievous behaviors
Re: Life maybe, but intelligent life? Doubtful.
Intelligent Life
I’m still looking for “intelligent life” in Washington, DC, Phoenix, AZ, Austin, TX …