To find aliens, we must think of life as we don’t know it

Aeon ^ | Ramin Skibba

[Wuli]

You are not going to explore “mircobial life” on some planet billions of miles away, WITH TELESCOPES.

[Noamie]

If you are having difficulty seeing that I am simply messing with you then it must be my fault (look for the smiley face).

The internet is no place for serious discussion of anything larger than a donut.

Which reminds me: I’ll bet your rolly pollys haven’t even invented donuts, have they? Inferior, backwards species.

[bruin66]

I remember (decades ago) a Disney piece on TV that theorized life on other planets might be based on some other element, eg, silicon, vice carbon. I’ve always wondered why we humans imagine alien life to be analogous to ours, only different: green skin, big eyes. etc.

[jjotto]

Because human actors can only be made up into beings that at least vaguely resemble humans.

[LibWhacker]

You almost certainly can. Microbial life created the lion’s share of earth’s oxygen and along with other forms of life altered the atmosphere in many other ways. So you can study planetary atmospheres to learn about the different kinds of life that are present on a given planet, even from hundreds of light years away.

[Seruzawa]

Want aliens? Just visit Burning Man.

[sparklite2]

All you need is the ability to slip over into another universe. I can’t believe it’s taking so long.

[Wuli]

“You almost certainly can. Microbial life created the lion’s share of earth’s oxygen and along with other forms of life altered the atmosphere in many other ways.”

Correlation is not causation. Why the earth’s atmosphere has oxygen is not proof of why another planet’s atmosphere has oxygen. In fact the theories of from where earth’s atmosphere got its oxygen is not “settled science”.

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-oxygen-from-carbon-dioxide-20141001-story.html

When and if we can actually travel beyond this solar system - 100, 200, 300,+ years - there will be plenty of time to “look for alien life” outside our solar system. Right now it’s a giant guessing game with adults given plenty of expensive toys to engage in what I call “scientific crystal ball gazing”. Government funding should be no where near these soothsayers.

[sparklite2]

Then again, we Earthlings could be unique in the whole universe

---

If by unique, you mean alone, that’s a sad thought.
If by unique, you mean uniquely human, well yeah, it’s just us. Intelligent extraterrestrials could still be all over the place, and are, in my judgement. What limits contact is the vast distance between stars.

[LibWhacker]

Yes, but what you are proposing is essentially 300 years of naval gazing. Telescopes are on the drawing board right now that can study these planetary atmospheres in some detail. Why wait? You are not going to halt the continued development and use of them. In fact, now that I mention it, when exactly would you be okay with studying exoplanet atmospheres remotely? Or do you want us to wait until we can jump into the Starship Enterprise and fly off to sample these planets firsthand for life? Luddism comes in many forms, one of which is interminable delay.

And, OF COURSE, it's not just about oxygen, but about everything life pumps into the atmosphere. The atmosphere is practically a living organism itself. Why not study it and learn what you can? To say that you can't learn anything about life by studying atmospheres is pure rubbish.

[right way right]

Horta! It’s that reoccurring nightmare about mom’s meatloaf!

[adorno]

You can mess around all you wish, and I don’t care. I can mess around just as much, in case you hadn’t noticed in my responses. But, I can also be serious with the content in my posts, in case you hadn’t noticed that either.

And, rolly polys are only inferior to those that don’t understand their purpose in the bigger picture of life on the entire planet.

BTW, they were still designed to roll up into a wheel-like form, for whatever purpose(s). The wheel is not a human invention, btw. For technical purposes, and for the engineering purposes that humans have, the wheel is a relatively new “invention”.

Just about everything in the universe can be seen as taking the shape of “wheels”. Whether you care or not, some things can’t be denied.

[adorno]

“Earthlings” is not strictly about “humans”, but about every living organism on the planet; that’s the way I interpret the word.

And, we may be unique as the most intelligent species in the entire universe, and we are uniquely human.

Extraterrestrials might exist, but to have evolved in the same fashion as “us”, would have taken mathematically prohibitive statistical challenges.

If “those” extraterrestrials do exist, they probably have or had the same origins; iow, we didn’t originate on this planet or on this sun’s region or on this galaxy. We might just be the accidental castaways from a different galaxy that merged with what we call the Milky Way. IN that sense, we might not be unique, but we might have the same origins and in that sense, we would be unique in that, we and those others in our “original home” are just about “the same”.

BTW, “distance between stars” does not mean that there was not contact in the past few billion years. We, as life, are relatively new to the universe, and it might be that life did start before it came to this region of the Milky Way. But, that life would still be “comparatively” the same as us.

[Wuli]

Go ahead, spend YOUR money on it. For the near forseeable future it is not worthy of human endeavor other than to pay people with too much idle speculation time on their hands and expensive toys, paid for by someone else, to do it with.

[Wuli]

“And, OF COURSE, it’s not just about oxygen, but about everything life pumps into the atmosphere. The atmosphere is practically a living organism itself.”

A very earth-centric view, as if every planet with an atmosphere has life. Total nonsense.

[Bellflower]

Haven’t paid attention to ST for years and years. I renounce it as a vehicle of evolutionary propaganda (and other “progressive” ideology). I do remember it’s episode about silicon based life, though. It was called “The Devil in The Dark”.

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/S/siliconlife.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_Dark

[LibWhacker]

That sentence WAS about earth’s atmosphere, not about every planet’s atmosphere, sheesh.

[LibWhacker]

Go ahead, spend YOUR money on it.

You're paying. If you're Mexican, you're paying for the wall. If you're American, you'll be paying for these new telescopes, particle accelerators, and all manner of basic scientific research projects. If there's waste, ferret it out, by all means, I'm with you. But this is not it.

[Wuli]

Telescopes and particle accelerators have their good scientific purposes; looking for ET is not one of them.

[LibWhacker]

There are a lot of reasons to study planetary atmospheres having nothing to do with ET.

Now... If an enterprising young SETI researcher wants to look at that data with something else in mind, I’m assuming you’d be okay with that? We could study exo-atmospheres for what you would call legitimate scientific reasons, while giving those scientists interested in ET a way to pursue that line of inquiry. Two birds with one stone, everyone’s happy.

That’s what I like about FR: Everyone working together to solve what seem to be intractable problems.