
Scientists Debate Signatures of Alien Life - elorant
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160202-scientists-debate-signatures-of-alien-life/
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EwanG
For those who are wondering before reading - article looks at the issue of
what is considered a "highly likely" indication in an alien planet's
atmosphere that would indicate life. Oxygen used to be considered that, but
other processes have been found that can lead to significant O2 without life.

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rogeryu
How about life without oxygen? I always wonder why alien life or any other
life cannot happen without it.

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themartorana
I think this is finally being considered. Just because we're carbon based
doesn't mean all life must be.

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jerf
I don't know where this myth comes from that scientists have some sort of
strong belief that no other form of life is possible, but it's not true. What
we have is a lot of ignorance, so many scientists will often concentrate only
on those _forms_ of life (plural) we know exist because we share a planet with
them, because those are the forms of life we can actually discuss with
confidence, but I doubt you can find a serious scientist who will confidently
proclaim no alternatives are possible.

There are good reasons to believe that ours is quite likely and good reason to
be _skeptical_ of alternatives, in the proper scientific sense, but certainly
not _disproved_ or something.

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delazeur
> I doubt you can find a serious scientist who will confidently proclaim no
> alternatives are possible.

Undoubtedly. The problem is that very few people, even among the well-educated
and technically proficient, actually form their views about the state of
science by talking to scientists.

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jerf
A lot of people seem to be so ready to read a different article that they
aren't noticing what this one is about. This is not an article about "If a
given planet holds life, how could we detect it?" This article is about "If a
given signal is detected from a planet, what characteristics of the signal
would allow us to conclude it could only be from life?" It's a completely
different question. It's not about avoiding false negatives, it's about
avoiding false positives. It is obvious that a planet could hold life, and we
could fail to detect it; we're still arguing about whether _Mars_ has or had
life, after all! And we've actually landed probes on it.

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dave_sullivan
Any time I see this discussed, I feel compelled to post the transcension
hypothesis:
[http://accelerating.org/articles/Smart-2011-TranscensionHypo...](http://accelerating.org/articles/Smart-2011-TranscensionHypothesis-
ActaAstronautica\(Author%27sReformat\).pdf)

In short: Life is common in the universe, black holes are better than Dyson
spheres, and eventually everyone uploads their brains to computers.

Far fetched or not, really interesting reading!

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hodwik
It's sad "scientists" are wasting their time on this close-proximity alien
fantasy when they could be working on real problems.

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gndjcjndnd
Sad? I don't see anyone crying.

It's not as if the entire scientific community is just dropping whatever
they're doing to work on this. The value of an endeavor is its likelihood of
success times its potential reward. So while the probability that these people
will succeed is very, very low, the potentially incalculable rewards of
discovering alien life offset that.

~~~
EC1
This is no different than my Father coming home every night without food
telling us the same thing, that when he wins big we'll have all the bread in
the world. He never won, then he died.

People wasting time on things that have an extremely low probability is still
a waste of time at the expense of everyone else currently living on the
planet.

If anything, discovering alien life will probably end us.

~~~
lazypenguin
How short-sighted and small minded. In the pursuit of answering these
questions the people involved develop new techniques and new knowledge that
ultimately aid in our overall scientific progress.

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EC1
Yes but you haven't said anything tangible. This does nothing for people
suffering from lack of fundamental necessities. How much hubris do you need to
completely skip our planet and get right to fantasy? I'd get it if we were all
so smart we solved everything we needed to but we _can 't even solve our own
planet_.

Your casual philandering with space exploration doesn't put anything on
anyone's table but your own, much like how lots of minds are wasted crunching
pointless numbers for data startups.

~~~
xenophonf

      casual philandering with space exploration
    

Pure research is such a critical part of scientific advancement. Where would
we be today without all of the work done by military rocketry and civilian
space programs? Without various nations' space programs, scientists working on
diseases including malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis would not have had
access over the last twenty years to high-bandwidth communications services
via communications satellites at hospitals, clinics, laboratories, and schools
scattered across some of the most remote areas of the African continent---to
name just one region with which I have direct involvement. I cannot even begin
to stress how important that kind of access is even in this modern age of
relatively good 2G/3G coverage (there are still plenty of locations in which
we work to cure disease where satellite communications are still a necessity).
It made it possible for our scientists to not only train their colleagues in
country and raise up new generations of skilled doctors, nurses, and
scientists, but also to access the sum total of scientific knowledge from
places where good people frequently suffer and die from the kinds of endemic
disease rarely seen in the West. Maybe searching web sites or holding
conference calls seems droll and ordinary to you, but to our scientists and
their colleagues, getting Internet access via satellite in the middle of sub-
Saharan Africa during the late 90s and early 00s was revolutionary. So much
good work---the fruit of which we see bearing now, like not just one but
several effective malaria vaccines as well as mosquito population control
programs---became possible, all because fifty years ago, people started
"philandering" with space exploration.

How much hubris do you need to think that you alone know how best to allocate
not only the scarce resources of this planet but also the lives of every
single human being on this planet, and to sit in judgment of what work is
worthy and what isn't? To transcend the current boundaries of human knowledge
and engineering skill has a direct impact on our (collective) lives, and for
the better. This world is not zero-sum; it is not in thermodynamic
equilibrium. For some people to work in space for the eventual benefit of
mankind as a whole does not require other people to suffer and die of want and
neglect (quite the opposite, in fact).

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EC1
> How much hubris do you need to think that you alone know how best to
> allocate not only the scarce resources of this planet but also the lives of
> every single human being on this planet, and to sit in judgment of what work
> is worthy and what isn't?

By looking at their merits? Giving a sandwich to a guy sleeping on the street
does infinitely more for them than us reaching Mars.

Are video games worthy? Anything consumer for the sake of consumption is
arrogance in its purest most refined form.

You must have grown up with a Mommy and Daddy that got along well and always
provided for you, so you think space exploration is something noble, when in
reality its a rich elitists nationalistic jerkoff game, where you engineers
are the pawns fueled by childish and selfish ideals. Yes, you _might_ discover
something that helps elsewhere, but coincidence is hardly synonymous with
intention.

Repeat to yourself how silly it is to look for aliens. "I am looking for
aliens." Repeat that 1000 times to yourself until you realize how stupid of a
goal that actually is.

~~~
xenophonf
I think that our fundamental point of disagreement has to do with investment.
Given a field full of wheat, you want to eat it all. I think you have to
reserve some of it, because even when the winter is bad and some people are
starving, come springtime you have to be able to plant _something_ or else
everybody will starve. This difference manifests in our approaches to social
problems. You want to meet someone's immediate need, like adding oil to a car
with leaky seals, while I want to address the underlying problem---fixing the
broken engine, or even better, replacing the broken engine with something that
works a thousand times better.

That's OK, because in reality, we need both short-term (just feed the guy!)
and long-term (fix the engine!) solutions to the problems that beset our
world.

