NASA Announcement

[ButterflyWoman]

http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-t ... 5963800790

TRUE believers are in a spin after a tantalising press release from NASA that says it has news to share about the search for alien life.

The space agency this week announced a media conference to "discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life".

NASA says astrobiology is "the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe".

[Beekeeper]

I won't hold my breath for this one.

[CFTraveler]

Me neither. It's probably the acknowledgement that life could possibly exist somewhere else, like in the mars rock bacteria hullabaloo of a few years ago.

[okie]

I feel like we have discovered far more about "extraterrestrials" through the use of psychedelic plants alone.

[Neil Templar]

it's got nothing to do with extraterrestrials -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11886943

[CFTraveler]

It does indirectly- it shows that what the scientific establishment considered 'life' is not as limited as what they thought. So that environments as different from the earth as, let's say, Pandora, can have life in it, and it doesn't have to be 'like us'.
Scientists have been operating from a very narrow spectrum as to what they consider life to be, and here's another biochemical formula that they didn't know about.

[Sinera]

yes, life can be different, but that is also a logical assumption to make, nice that "official science" now starts to recognize it, wow, .. still ... just watched the beginning ... it's boooooring

By the way, regarding "real" contact scenarios ... what would we realistically expect from an 'announcement' by the NASA, an agency that has done for decades nothing but negating, concealing, keeping dark, debunking, obscuring, denying, ... ?

[Tutor]

probably off topic as well...

even an atom possesses consciousness, can evolve, becoming additionally conscious. in many, perhaps most atomic structures, hydrogen supplys a connection where otherwise the leap of becoming additionally conscious couldnt be. i find this interesting all the way through to what we'd normally accept as a "lifeform" possessive of at least an instintive reflex, as in an amoeba of paramecium...etc.

oddly we find ourselves at the human juncture of realizing that nature has its own stopgap in the acceptable evolutionary norm itself set by nature alone. by inadvertantly dis-avowing nature's rules and replacing them with our own human reason, we've co-created hyper-sterile environments that have served as super-leaping evolutionary environments for the very lifeforms we'd thought to keep out.

also of interest, is the womans cancer cells, which being to begin with morphed 'immortal cells', have somehow kept on reproducing and even morphing still yet inside the 'laboratory' environment. i forget the approximated number of these cells which have sprung from their orginals taken from this woman several decades ago.

so yeah, micro-biological life, even atomic attractions, are completely relevant, as far as alien life goes. simply because, through our own human curiosity and reasoning ingenuity, we have brought into this nature of ours, many forms of alien life that would not have otherwise been.

makes me remember the old flick called andromeda strain. back in the day, that was scary stuff. but we've moved on to 'aliens vs predators'. but, with that imagination of ours, it is hard to separate fact and fiction, for often it is that fiction, especially science fiction, precedes non-fiction or conscious life as we actually come to experience it.

like the original star trek series, one can only wonder how many actual inventions came to be from the artistry of stage, set and prop designers making it all look so real.

yet, when i hear or see 'nasa', i feel to be way over this 'wagging of a dog' agency and it's mysterious way of handling science. life as it is, is usually preceded by an author like gene roddenberry and isaac asimov, as far as is our human ingenuity to invent from necessity. yet, thank goodness the alien characters are not within our means to co-create into imaginative human nature's reality. like tribbles, they'd have made nice pets, easily cared for, well until they've filled your world full of tribbles.

point being, a dog ought to be allowed to wag its own tail when it is ready to.

tim

[ButterflyWoman]

[heliac]

It does indirectly- it shows that what the scientific establishment considered 'life' is not as limited as what they thought. So that environments as different from the earth as, let's say, Pandora, can have life in it, and it doesn't have to be 'like us'.
Scientists have been operating from a very narrow spectrum as to what they consider life to be, and here's another biochemical formula that they didn't know about.

Very true, partly because of a rigid philosophy behind the scientific establishment and because the scientific establishment reports on mostly observable reality.In time as exploration expands the scope of what gets observed will too. In the end perhaps what everyone already knows-that intelligent life is out there- will be confirmed, but in metered dosages. A bacteria similar to what is found on earth somewhere in our solar system in our generation, maybe some ooze too, early plant life the next generation, a worm or fish a generation after that etc etc..all this leading up to the big one, beings with far more capabilities than ours.

We have no real modern frame of reference(besides star trek) that would tell us how people would react on a global scale to finding out that we are not as smart as we think we are when compared to an " intelligent alien life form", so maybe it is better this way, maybe not though.