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veexx103 8 hours ago [-]
If life really exists there, it implies that life is everywhere in the universe.
That was absolutely terrifying.
karmakurtisaani 11 minutes ago [-]
I find it fairly plausible that life exists anywhere the conditions are even slightly favorable. All you need is just enough time for some atoms to form a self-replicating configuration and that pretty much kick starts it.
It might not evolve into something very complex, though.
adrian_b 3 hours ago [-]
It is likely that conditions for the appearance of life exist in many places in the universe, though probably not in every stellar system.
However, it is also likely that the places where living beings can evolve into something more complex than bacteria are only a very small fraction of those where life exists.
There are chances that life might exist on one or more of the satellites of Jupiter or Saturn, but it is pretty certain that it cannot be more complex than bacteria or at most protozoa, because on Earth the evolution of big multicellular living beings was conditioned by the development of the ability to extract energy from solar light.
Without solar light, the maximum rate of energy production is from methanogenesis, which would not sustain any big living being.
Solar light is too weak at that distance anyway, and life, if it exists, is burrowed at depths where the temperature is high enough, where any light is likely to be completely attenuated.
bpodgursky 7 hours ago [-]
Not really, there has been a lot of crossover of organic-carrying meteors within our own solar system, it's pretty plausible that multiple bodies in our solar system have life from a single origin event, which doesn't say anything about the rest of the universe.
sage981 8 hours ago [-]
Bet their civilization's 'Hello World' is still stuck in an infinite loop. Fascinating possibilities though.
I_dream_of_Geni 10 hours ago [-]
OK... Serious question here: we find "life" (algae?) on one of Saturn's moons or one of Jupiter's moons. So, we spend ~$50 Billion (arguably much more) and find "life". So? Why is this important to people? There isn't one chance in (place your own word here) that we can do anything about it or even send humans there. Seriously want to know what people really think...
dzink 10 hours ago [-]
Because of statistics. If we can find life, potentially started independently or pollinated in a couple of planets close to each-other, then life is everywhere and we may be in a dark forest of intelligent or hidden native predatory beings waiting to wipe us out if we squeak or show up elsewhere. If it's not as frequent, then we can keep exploring to look for it and more human-habitable spots.
semi-extrinsic 1 hours ago [-]
Or maybe it's so boring that the math of the universe (practically achieavable time to travel to another solar system) makes the galaxy a set of distinct systems, where 1 in X has an intelligent species which has achieved orbit, but with no transit in between.
It's not a cool concept to write scifi books about, but it may still be the reality we live in.
The most likely situation (by many orders of magnitude) is that the only practical way of getting to another star system, even in the far far future, is a generation ship travelling 50+ years one way with a significant risk of people dying from organ failure or cancer along the route. This would represent a 1000x speed improvement over current tech and is only a factor of 10x slower than lightspeed.
It is entirely unfeasible for any company or even government to spend money on such a project. Even if the ground on the other planet is strewn with diamonds and gold and the elixir of eternal life, you are looking at ~200 years before any ROI can be realised.
BoxOfRain 45 minutes ago [-]
I've always felt radical human life extension and sublight speeds was a more realistic shot at interstellar travel than thinking relativity is amenable to shithousery.
rafram 9 hours ago [-]
I have a premonition that even if extraterrestrial life is discovered, and even if intelligent, hostile extraterrestrial life is somehow discovered, humans are not going to leave it alone.
After all, everyone involved can just say it's inevitable! If we don't do it, someone else will.
lazyasciiart 2 hours ago [-]
No, but you might explore differently once you know there are other people everywhere and they might be stronger than you.
flyinglizard 2 hours ago [-]
Having an external common enemy might do us good.
LightBug1 19 minutes ago [-]
In the movies.
In reality the existential crisis will be used as a means for control, exploitation, and corruption ...
c.f. USA, Israel, UAE as spring-to-mind obvious examples for hints and tips as to how this plays out.
It's also interesting that your mind goes immediately to common enemy instead of some alternative.
tombert 8 hours ago [-]
My honest reason (and this is coming from a guy with no stake in the game or significant physics or biology knowledge) is that it would just be cool as fuck, and that exploration is valuable in itself.
I'll acknowledge that that is wishy-washy language, but that's kind of my point. I'm not sure I can point to an objective "good" that comes out of it, but I also don't know that that's the norm for these kinds of things either. It might have been hard to say that going to the moon was an objective "good" outside of one-upping the Russians, but I do think it's good that we did it, even if I don't really know how to quantify why.
Teever 8 hours ago [-]
Benjamin Franklin is said to have replied, "What use is a new-born baby?" in response to a skeptic of the utility of some of the first balloon launches.
I suspect that you won't be swayed by the abstract benefits of intelligent life on Earth finding not just proof of life on another body in our solar system but actual life that we could perhaps even launch retrieval missions to return to Earth for analysis so I won't talk about Darwin and his voyages and the theory of evolution that it resulted in as people often do in these conversations.
Instead I'll ask you what you think the dollar value of studying and reverse engineering an alternate or similar biochemical system survives in a world totally different than our own. What sort of applications could this have in materials science? What kind of new materials could we discover from alien life? What kind of novel bio-mimetic applications could we derive from this?
I look around the room I'm in and I see a hardwood floor, I see a differnet species tree making up woodpaneling on the walls. My clothes are made of cotton and rayon, there's some sort of grass woven lampshade above me. books made of paper, paintings with linseed oil paint -- what's the commercial and cultural value of all that stuff to our species?
conception 8 hours ago [-]
A majority of the planet thinks life started here. Finding it elsewhere would culturally be a cosmic (puns) shift of before alien life existed verifiably and after.
wrecked_em 4 hours ago [-]
I right there when you on this. With so much inequality and pain in our own neighborhoods, why does the search for extraterrestrial life even matter? I used to really enjoy it. Now I view it as a sad sort of distraction theater.
gosub100 2 hours ago [-]
> we spend ~$50 Billion (arguably much more)
Thanks to the 2nd most hated man alive, it doesn't cost nearly this much to get to space anymore.
hermitcrab 2 hours ago [-]
And the thousands of people that actually did the work.
torben-friis 10 hours ago [-]
>So? Why is this important to people?
Because it could then tell us if it's related to us or not, potentially we could get to see how life unrelated to us looks like, how life in general is originally formed, how likely in the universe it is...
I honestly struggle to imagine how it can be considered unimportant, unless your stating position is that said life is completely unreachable to current and future tech, which I don't find likely.
I_dream_of_Geni 10 hours ago [-]
Maybe only possibly unimportant based upon the staggering costs involved. Is it really really worth that?? Is finding life worth $10 Trillion dollars?
booty 9 hours ago [-]
Strictly from an economic standpoint: The $10T goes right back into the economy. That's $10T worth of STEM jobs and manufacturing and so on. Arguably, it should be spent more directly on schools and universal healthcare and so on, but $10T also creates a lot of jobs and healthcare benefits and funds public schools and so on so it's a tricky comparison to make.
From a non-economic standpoint: Aside from ensuring we don't destroy this planet, what is more important than finding out if we're alone in the universe? Not much, if you ask me.
(I realize finding algae on Saturn's moon doesn't definitively answer that question but it's certainly a uh... pretty big data point)
refactor_master 9 hours ago [-]
Look up the staggering amount of everyday conveniences invented by space exploration. Theoretically the private market would’ve filled this gap, but in practice we know the market will never be willing to spend the first few trillions on foundational research.
tombert 8 hours ago [-]
I am all for space exploration, but just in the interest of fairness, I would be surprise if the innovations for the entirety of space exploration approaches even 10% of what the US military has developed.
randochatter 10 hours ago [-]
The $10 trillion will be spent regardless. Whether it's on luxury yachts, private islands, and political capital or health care, education, and exploring the solar system are choices.
inkyoto 7 hours ago [-]
For the very same reason why the wisest of the ancient and medieval rulers were patrons of science, even if the value of scientific discoveries was not immediately apparent at the time.
It is called enlightenment and the discovery of knowledge. Otherwise, we would still have been running around with pitchforks and flaming torches, waging crusades in the name of one deity or another.
Besides, humans spend $50 billion or – equally arguably much more – killing or trying to kill each other. If that gets spent on new discoveries and knowledge, it becomes apparent that the $50 billion investment into science is a substantially better value proposition.
jiggawatts 6 hours ago [-]
Serious answer: because an entirely distinct biosphere would be a veritably goldmine for biochemistry research! We could discover enzymes that work under extreme conditions like high pressure, low temperature, all while bathed in a soup of chemicals toxic to terrestrial life. For all we know, we could discover a simple way to catalyse ammonia production at low temperatures and feed the world with cheap fertiliser! Or… who knows!? We won’t know until we go looking!
andrekandre 9 hours ago [-]
> Seriously want to know what people really think...
(in a vacuum) i think we would all be saying thats amazing and fundamentally change the way we see ourselves and place in the universe (science fiction becomes science fact) and open new possibilities for research and discoveries
> find "life". So? Why is this important to people?
when there are more down-to-earth problems right in front of us, i get this as well; why not use that money to fund free college for a couple years for all citizens etc etc
pestatije 2 hours ago [-]
we find life... that wouldn't be the end of it... we'd want to know what it is, how it got there, can it be useful, etc etc...so in the end half of Earth's population is eating potatoes and we have no more famine for 5 centuries... seriously i can't believe a HN reader doesn't understand curiosity and its benefits
ransom1538 8 hours ago [-]
"~$50 Billion"
Are you saying people would rather have an apartment? It would house 250,000 people for 10 years. But the slime is cooler.
jibal 1 days ago [-]
> In fact, spacecrafts already in planning could be used to identify evidence of life there much easier than previously thought, should it exist.
But there's no reason to think that it does.
Sharlin 10 hours ago [-]
Oh, but there is. One reason is that life on Earth seems to have appeared almost immediately after the crust cooled enough and the primordial ocean formed.
gmueckl 11 hours ago [-]
Why not? Friction from tidal forces keeps the moon got enough to contain liquid water under its ice cover. This makes it similar to Europa in some ways.
moron4hire 11 hours ago [-]
What Makes Enceladus so Attractive in the Search for Life in Space?
Enceladus is considered to be one of the most promising places to search for extraterrestrial life in our solar system. Researchers suspect that under the moon’s icy crust there is a global ocean of liquid water and a rocky core further below. Due to cryovolcanic activity, gigantic plumes break through cracks in the crust at the moon’s south pole, ejecting ice particles hundreds of kilometers into space.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft passed through these plumes multiple times to analyze its composition. Enceladus’s ocean is the only extraterrestrial “body of water” from which scientists have been able to directly analyze samples. The samples revealed traces of various salts and organic compounds. Furthermore, previous analyses conducted by Cassini gave indications of hydrothermal processes on the seafloor and other conditions that are significant in supporting life.
So it seems the people whose job it is to study these things do have reason to think it might exist.
That was absolutely terrifying.
It might not evolve into something very complex, though.
However, it is also likely that the places where living beings can evolve into something more complex than bacteria are only a very small fraction of those where life exists.
There are chances that life might exist on one or more of the satellites of Jupiter or Saturn, but it is pretty certain that it cannot be more complex than bacteria or at most protozoa, because on Earth the evolution of big multicellular living beings was conditioned by the development of the ability to extract energy from solar light.
Without solar light, the maximum rate of energy production is from methanogenesis, which would not sustain any big living being.
Solar light is too weak at that distance anyway, and life, if it exists, is burrowed at depths where the temperature is high enough, where any light is likely to be completely attenuated.
It's not a cool concept to write scifi books about, but it may still be the reality we live in.
The most likely situation (by many orders of magnitude) is that the only practical way of getting to another star system, even in the far far future, is a generation ship travelling 50+ years one way with a significant risk of people dying from organ failure or cancer along the route. This would represent a 1000x speed improvement over current tech and is only a factor of 10x slower than lightspeed.
It is entirely unfeasible for any company or even government to spend money on such a project. Even if the ground on the other planet is strewn with diamonds and gold and the elixir of eternal life, you are looking at ~200 years before any ROI can be realised.
After all, everyone involved can just say it's inevitable! If we don't do it, someone else will.
In reality the existential crisis will be used as a means for control, exploitation, and corruption ...
c.f. USA, Israel, UAE as spring-to-mind obvious examples for hints and tips as to how this plays out.
It's also interesting that your mind goes immediately to common enemy instead of some alternative.
I'll acknowledge that that is wishy-washy language, but that's kind of my point. I'm not sure I can point to an objective "good" that comes out of it, but I also don't know that that's the norm for these kinds of things either. It might have been hard to say that going to the moon was an objective "good" outside of one-upping the Russians, but I do think it's good that we did it, even if I don't really know how to quantify why.
I suspect that you won't be swayed by the abstract benefits of intelligent life on Earth finding not just proof of life on another body in our solar system but actual life that we could perhaps even launch retrieval missions to return to Earth for analysis so I won't talk about Darwin and his voyages and the theory of evolution that it resulted in as people often do in these conversations.
Instead I'll ask you what you think the dollar value of studying and reverse engineering an alternate or similar biochemical system survives in a world totally different than our own. What sort of applications could this have in materials science? What kind of new materials could we discover from alien life? What kind of novel bio-mimetic applications could we derive from this?
I look around the room I'm in and I see a hardwood floor, I see a differnet species tree making up woodpaneling on the walls. My clothes are made of cotton and rayon, there's some sort of grass woven lampshade above me. books made of paper, paintings with linseed oil paint -- what's the commercial and cultural value of all that stuff to our species?
Thanks to the 2nd most hated man alive, it doesn't cost nearly this much to get to space anymore.
Because it could then tell us if it's related to us or not, potentially we could get to see how life unrelated to us looks like, how life in general is originally formed, how likely in the universe it is...
I honestly struggle to imagine how it can be considered unimportant, unless your stating position is that said life is completely unreachable to current and future tech, which I don't find likely.
From a non-economic standpoint: Aside from ensuring we don't destroy this planet, what is more important than finding out if we're alone in the universe? Not much, if you ask me.
(I realize finding algae on Saturn's moon doesn't definitively answer that question but it's certainly a uh... pretty big data point)
It is called enlightenment and the discovery of knowledge. Otherwise, we would still have been running around with pitchforks and flaming torches, waging crusades in the name of one deity or another.
Besides, humans spend $50 billion or – equally arguably much more – killing or trying to kill each other. If that gets spent on new discoveries and knowledge, it becomes apparent that the $50 billion investment into science is a substantially better value proposition.
Are you saying people would rather have an apartment? It would house 250,000 people for 10 years. But the slime is cooler.
But there's no reason to think that it does.