Among other things, it contains details on what amphiphiles might actually be present on Titan, a very nice set of diagrams explaining their proposed process, and proposals for lab experiments to verify whether the process is possible. I've had a soft spot for the vesicle-first theory of abiogenesis since I first heard of it, so I hope someone runs the experiments. But as far as I can tell, this is all theoretical so far.
amphiphillic vesicles are a stepping stone for persistent molecular forms.
essentially a reaction vessel, insulating the contents from the extravesicular mayhem.
RNA world is mainstream, but a few scientists have proposed that something like cell membranes, such as these vesicles, came first and provided the environment for more complex chemistry.
I think the idea is that if you have a nice bubbly froth and some proteins/RNA type thing end up inside and help reinforce the bubble wall through electrostatic forces you get a symbiotic relationship. The soup inside reinforces the bubbles around it.
And everything that we hold dear happens after that.
I don't object to this explanation of the world, but I reckon it's an uphill battle convincing people that all of the living natural world, and all of human history, their culture, their religions and their science and all the beliefs in-between had their origin in some electrostatic forces. I'm of the opinion that even well-informed people of science haven't had time to fully adjust their world-view during the handful of decades we have known this much.
Dunno about everyone else, but if that is the origin of everything that lives on this planet, I'd find relief. One less question in an ever increasing sea of questions is better than just an ever increasing sea of questions.
The source code of life is recorded and transmitted using physical matter.
Physics very much matters to matter.
For development of any information storage systems made of molecules, there must be a supportive development environment.
To even start the process of doing anything like what we see happening in a cell, homeostasis must be achieved first, and not inelegantly, its not good enough to have a complete cell wall if it has no ports for entry and exit of nutrients and waste product, thats also known as a coffin.
Both the walls and the gates and the information / physical systems to reliably exploit those features must be present at the same time to enable abiogenesis.
Not necessarily. The primitive cell wall could have used other mechanisms. For example simple protrusion of the membrane does not have to resulr in catastrophic collapse, if done slowly enough membrane allows substances to enter and exit and still remain intact by closing up quickly after wall is broken
If you play around with soap bubbles carefully you can observe phenomena like this.
Congratulations. Now go and read the literature and learn how this might've occurred. You're not the first person to raise these objections. Biologists aren't morons.
I see where you're coming from, but I think you're thinking across too far over the boundary. Quantum mechanics aren't ordinarily affected by non-sentient life, they're just primitive to the environment at the macro level.
Quantum mechanics is a well defined theory and sentience, however you define it, has nothing to do with it. Your reasoning is akin to saying "gravity affects everything so you can't rule out it has some connection to sentience". It's a meaningless statement.
Correct. My apologies that my comment was unclear such that from my comment's content one could not distinguish particle accelerators built by sentient life and woo-woo New Age claims of "The Secret" or manifesting.
Part of what makes RNA world so compelling is the RNA is both code and hardware. Yes, central dogma is not the end all be all. RNA structures can be catalytic just like enzymes.
There are a lot of different opinions on how life on Earth started, even amongst scientists studying it, and none of them are strongly supported by substantial, reproduced evidence.
> It's thought that life on Earth started with RNA mayhem, not with vessels to isolate from it.
They're not mutually exclusive. You could have various kinds of autocatalytic sets of molecules, including RNA, inside and outside lipid vesicles, and some of them might have re-produced better than others. Anything that could have happened in an open ocean of nuleotides and amino acids could also take place within a lipid vesicle, just that within some vesicle maybe the right concentrations of molecules had at some point emerged that could more easily reproduce itself than in the open ocean where the particular autocatalytic set could be washed away by the surrounding molecular chaos.
I like the "vesicle first" theory because planar sheets of reaction can form perturbations, so getting from two surfaces mixing to complex shapes and enclosures feels plausible given any significant vibration or wave.
Once you have an enclosure you have potential for osmosis and other differentials across the boundary. It's not life Jim, but it's one hell of a building block/precursor.
This isn't really a "finding"- it's a theoretical prediction based on observed data, along with a proposed experimental apparatus to detect such items.
I don't really get excited for theoretical predictions like this - I want experimental observations!
I have a clue, and my point is not pedantic, it's clarifying. If they found- using experimental apparatus- some physical evidence, it would be a 'finding'.
GP was rude and out of line, but to be frank with you, it is pedantic to quibble about the definition of the word "finding", a word which doesn't even appear in the article (yes, I did see the title).
If the research doesn't interest or impress you, there's plenty of other articles.
Ah... so you're telling me I should delay my plans for the firepit on the titan lake-side human-alien diplomacy embassy? I feel like I won't be able to show them a great time without s'mores.
Regardless of incentives I think this is some of the most important research they should be doing. As a species we need to get a better understanding of the probability of life on other planets and therefore a better understanding of fermi's paradox in case the dark forest theory is correct. So if NASA has an incentive to discover potential pathways for extraterrestrial life... great!
The problem is that the incentive is biased against scepticism. So the process is more likely to find potential pathways but not notice obstacles or counter arguments.
> a better understanding of fermi's paradox in case the dark forest theory is correct.
We know so little about this, that we can't even begin to estimate the probabilities. It seems like other things are known potential dangers to us, no?
Yes and this helps us make a start. It slightly increases the odds of life elsewhere. And yes there are other dangers.. climate change, nuclear armageddon, bio weapons etc but the existence of another problem doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also attempt to tackle this one. Specially as unlike the others a band aid seems somewhat tractable..
Researcher: “with this new device we think we can attempt to create a gravity wave in the lab”
Professor: “we should consider whether this might violate the 2028 embargo on dark forest beacon technology”
A non-trivial faction of our government has been teasing knowledge of some sort of non-human intelligent lifeform (that word isn't considered precisely accurate) on EARTH.
This isn't some crackpot theory, they've been having congressional hearings about it and congresspeople say it's real. You can think they are or aren't credible or being lied to, but, if congresspeople are part of or victims of some sort of psy-op with vague parameters and goals, our entire system of government is basically forfeit.
I realize this is difficult to deal with but it's a pretty well-established fact at this point.
We don't need to go anywhere for this information.
>our entire system of government is basically forfeit.
<looks at America's current government>
Yep, that seems accurate. Like it or not, the current US government is full of crackpot theories.
The "evidence" of "aliens" inevitably turns out to be blurry footage where people with bias tell you what you're supposed to think it is.
As for the U.S. Congress, you're talking about a body that has been avoiding it's own responsibilities for decades, particularly so right now. Invoking "Congressional hearings" here is an appeal to an unqualified authority. (Congressional representatives presumably has some experience with laws. I do not believe they are qualified for video forensics.)
Have you seen the footage? It isn’t blurry cell phone videos. It is quite clear thermal imagery from aircraft and drones. The most recent video going around shows a reaper drone tracking one of these objects that does not change its vector much after being hit with a kinetic missile.
I have seen that one, as it happens. I am not an expert, but it looks to me like the asserted Hellfire hits a cruise missile and knocks some pieces off as the Hellfire fails to detonate, and the cruise missile then course corrects from getting knocked around.
The best way to determine that would be to have a number of experts independently assess the footage without being primed as to its provenance. A presentation by someone who is already convinced it's aliens to some congresscritters in need of a distraction is hardly that.
If it was merely that, why is it being presented to congress? How would the US military not know the origin of a cruise missile they are tracking? How many cruise missiles out there can take a broadside from a hellfire at 1000mph and continue on its direction of travel?
Did anyone even ask about larger radar tracks for this "UFO"?
A Hellfire masses less than 50kg. A Tomahawk cruise missile, for example, weighs over 1000kg. The impact is clearly glancing - the Hellfire retains much of its own speed.
Again, why would a hellfire missile ever be launched at a tomahawk cruise missile? Do the Houthis have tomahawks all the sudden? And this still does not answer why the pentagon would not comment or why this detail was not made available to Congress.
The information you claim to want isn't accessible to you. The US government has "platforms" with vast arrays of sensors and data collection capability - redundant, multiplicative platforms measuring things you and I might not even know about - and they use this data to get a pretty good idea of what they're looking at.
You're seeing a grainy video for a reason. It would be trivial for you to have every piece of data related to an incident but if you did, that might be problematic for multiple reasons, one of them being it would expose capability. Usually, multi-million dollar missiles aren't used on unknown targets with unknown capabilities for unknown reasons. Thus, more information is required.
So, where are we left? With you demanding inaccessible information to draw a conclusion. Given that you can't have it, you're essentially just throwing your hands up and saying "well, I guess we can't know". Fine, but untrue, as we can simply demand to know.
That is what people are doing. If you're at all concerned by any of this, you should be in this camp as well.
Regarding "distraction", how is this a "good" distraction if it's not a widely credibly held position and can clearly damage your reputation? This is just a nonsense idea. There's no reason to believe these people are lying.
I think I'd pick this one as being the simplest and most likely explanation if my other options are "psy-op[s] with vague parameters" and non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us. Congress people believing falsehoods is nothing new.
Non-human intelligence sharing the planet with us is a mundane explanation. It's a completely trivial possibility in the vastly expansive fields of biology and physics. Earth is known to host extremely complex life and is the only known planet to do so. To look for unknown forms of life one need only look at their feet. Bacteria was a previously unknown, extremely expansive form of life on Earth.
We unlocked the secrets of the atom and gained within it the capability of ending all life on earth trivially. Other secrets being locked behind physics isn't a radical speculation. In fact, it's surprising that we haven't really seen any since.
Before we had the instruments to observe them directly we could theorize about the existence of bacteria because we could indirectly observe them through their effects on our biology and even their macroscopic effects on populations, effects that had no better explanations. I am not aware of any mysteries that are most simply explained by a hitherto unobserved, technologically advanced (I assume we're not talking about dolphins when we say) "non-human intelligence", whether they supposedly dwell in the depths of the ocean, the Earth's crust, Titan, or anywhere else in the universe. SETI has been listening for ~60 years and hasn't heard a peep from any of the billions (trillions?) exoplanet's worth of radio signals that could have reached us in that time.
The available-to-me evidence suggests that technologically advanced species are exceedingly rare, and the only such species we're aware of emits an overwhelming number of artifacts that would serve as evidence for its existence, so it would be very much not mundane to discover that another one has been living under our noses this whole time.
I am not making a truth claim here, as in "it's definitively untrue that there are non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us," I'm just arguing that it's an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence - grainy footage and hearsay isn't enough for me.
>I am not aware of any mysteries that are most simply explained by a hitherto unobserved, technologically advanced (I assume we're not talking about dolphins when we say) "non-human intelligence"
This is precisely the point. You aren't aware of these mysteries, despite the earnest attempts of many to bring them to your direct attention.
There is no longer any attempt to hide the mysteries categorically, so this lack of information is now on you.
>I am not making a truth claim here, as in "it's definitively untrue that there are non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us," I'm just arguing that it's an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence - grainy footage and hearsay isn't enough for me.
Yes, that's why the correct scenario is wide declassification of the premises that are asserted in this regard, i.e. to make general knowledge of unidentifiable phenomena which have no definitive known cause or origin, communication with these entities, capture of their technology, etc. All of these things could be explained by various competing theories, some of them "simple" (funny how Occam's razor is always just what I prefer), but this information, which has been trickling out from credible sources, needs to be brought into the public space and then we get to decide what it implies or doesn't imply.
Right now there is a deliberate veil of secrecy and serious mysteries that aren't denied by anybody serious. They definitively exist.
The person you're replying to wasn't the one who invoked what you call "partisan thought short circuiting," (which, I have to say, reads a lot like parody). It was me. Occam's razor is not at all about "what I prefer" and is entirely about preferring theories with evidence over those that are lacking (instead of inventing new theories to explain away the lack of evidence).
It sounds to me like you and I see the same expansive hole where the evidence should be. My preference would be to say "show me a claim without a hole or stop wasting my time," you appear to assume that the evidence exists - because someone "credible" said it's so - and demand that the hole be filled immediately.
To claim there exists a grand conspiracy and web of well-kept secrets, ironically, is to try to explain away the first substanceless claim with a new one.
I'm trying to soft-land you on this but this is specifically because you don't know and haven't been curious about it, not because there isn't any evidence.
Nobody denies David Grusch is exactly who he says he is with the access he says he had. His lawyer was the former inspector general of the intelligence community for God's sake.
I find "conspiracies can't be true" a tiresome point. Any secret is a conspiracy and many are kept. Are the technical details of the F-47 or nuclear physics not true because these secrets have been kept? Nuclear physics have been classified and protected for going on 90 years now.
You can transform your claim to accommodate this, but it becomes suspicious.
First, "conspiracies can't be true" was definitely not the point. You're right, conspiracies happen, governments do keep secrets! The point was: if a conspiracy theory with poor evidence were to be a reasonable explanation for another claim's poor evidence, I could claim whatever outlandish thing I wanted, e.g. "Unicorns are real, our puppet masters just don't want you to know about them!" This explanation is hard to falsify, and (in my view) shouldn't be our top choice, it's definitely not enough for me to regard the ultimate unicorn claim as "well-established fact."
If I wanted to make a compelling argument for my conspiracy theory, I would not only want to explain how the government has managed to keep this profound secret about unicorns, I'd want to to explain why it was theirs to keep in the first place. In a world with many sovereign nations with a vast array of publicly and privately-funded research institutions, camera-toting citizens, security cameras, wildlife cameras, etc., why is the U.S. government holding all of the compelling evidence? Or is not just the U.S.? Maybe we explain this with more conspiracies? Or maybe one really big conspiracy? Do you think it's likely that the government could keep narwhals a secret?
I haven't/wouldn't make any claims about David Grusch being who he says is, I haven't intentionally made any truth claims at all here; that said, whatever titles Grusch formerly held, and whatever title his lawyers formerly held, those titles don't, in my view, grant him credibility in perpetuity, maybe one could argue that they didn't grant much in the first place. The same goes for members of Congress. Should we believe Marjorie Taylor Greene if she tells us "The Jews" are starting forest fires with their space lasers to serve their malicious globalist agendas, on the basis that she's a congresswoman?
If you or anyone else has evidence, I'd urge them to be agents of truth and go update Grusch's Wikipedia article, at the time of writing this it states:
> No evidence supporting Grusch's UFO claims has been presented and they have been dismissed by multiple, independent experts.
Or, perhaps we go searching for explanations as to why Wikipedia or the news organizations it accepts citations from are mere puppets of the conspirators, but at that point, who's being tiresome?
1. It is trivial to "falsify" unexplained UAP. Simply provide a credible explanation, or say they're explained. In fact, president Obama did the opposite, and confirmed that they aren't explained or explicable. Our government has been leaking these things for quite some time now.
2. Because you're a fan of Occam's razor, can you take your razor and say "Shucks, this guy Luis Elizondo was confirmed as a legitimate knowledgeable operator by former senate majority leader Harry Reid, a member of gang of eight, privy to the most classified intelligence in the United States, full stop, there isn't a higher position except for the president of the united states. This guy Dave Grusch has as his lawyer the former inspector general of the US intelligence communities. For some reason he's also outlining a scenario where we know about non human intelligences and they pose a serious existential threat to humanity, that's odd. Ah, well, can't be anything!"? The thing is, something deeply, deeply, deeply odd is going on and the shape of the leaks (something you should LOVE if you love Occam and 'debunking', because you've already predicted leaks in your no conspiracies modality) is consistent and absolutely disturbing, concerning, and a clear matter worthy of sustained attention. Why are all of these people at the highest level of our government talking about this? You're not at all concerned or curious, you're merely drifting through life, confident you passively have the answers? I find this incredible.
3. The US government hasn't kept the secret, as explicated. Just like the nuclear program, certain things have leaked.
4. If you continue to see mounting credible operators repeating the same story with absolutely no curiosity, no desire to know more, certainty that the entire thing is impossible or somehow debunked due to your meager cognitive abilities and patterns of thought that you don't even own, I don't know what to tell you. It's literally impossible for you to come across this information because you've immunized yourself to it. The fact that it's here and we're facing an overwhelming, nauseating story from the highest levels of government is worthy of serious consideration and we do not require your assessment to make that basic, obvious determination.
>If you or anyone else has evidence, I'd urge them to be agents of truth and go update Grusch's Wikipedia article, at the time of writing this it states: > No evidence supporting Grusch's UFO claims has been presented and they have been dismissed by multiple, independent experts.
I'd love to collect on this debt somehow when you're proven wrong in our lifetimes.
> I'd love to collect on this debt somehow when you're proven wrong in our lifetimes.
Sorry, this is a thread on an internet forum, I'm afraid I don't owe you anything.
If you want to engage with the actual points I've endeavored to make, in good faith, instead of telling me how ignorant you think I am and doubling down on appeals to authority, I would gladly continue this conversation. For what it's worth: I'd love to see proof that you're right, sneaky non-human intelligences living and crashing known-physics defying spaceships in the shadows would be beyond interesting! However, I don't really feel like I can be "proven wrong" because I'm not really making claims here. You asserted something to be "basically fact", and I haven't told you that you're wrong, my argument was that your theories seem implausible, though possible.
Credible non-politicians, people in sensitive CIA or senior military leadership have consistently made these claims. They may all be liars, but none seem particularly stupid.
One problem is that we haven't gotten a "UAP Snowden". Such a person has seen a serious chilling effect.
Note that my post was designed to be agnostic. Leaking a psy-op, or leaking the extensive, close-up details of UAP phenomena which we do have (president Obama himself said there are confirmed unknown phenomena, taking him at his word on this topic), is still a Snowden style leak, especially if they continue to do this dog and pony show in congress and elsewhere.
There's also not a nuclear physics Snowden, or F-47 Snowden, do you think there's nothing to leak?
> There's also not a nuclear physics Snowden, or F-47 Snowden, do you think there's nothing to leak?
There might be, but even if there was, a leak in those fields would still have no bearing on whether or not there are actual things to leak regarding UAPs.
Maybe the info is simply not public because publishing it would let the very likely other humans responsible for said UAPs know that we do and don't know what they're up to.
And it could also be that that info on UAPs isn't leaked because (unlike the Snowden leaks), they aren't actually relevant to Americans and to their liberties, and so the people who have access to that info see no point in leaking it.
I'm going to address your hypothesis of "unknown technologies". It's something that widely seems credible but really isn't.
These phenomena have been documented, in-depth, for many, many decades. Credible sources note that certain materials and devices (I don't want to use the term 'craft') have been in government possession for going on 90 years, since the end of WW2. The notion that some country had achieved technical supremacy such that we still find their technology unidentifiable for 90 years isn't tenable.
Everyone involved in what the public knows about this are largely credible people who have undergone a classification briefing of what information they have, carefully vetting what they're able to share. They seem to feel that this topic is relevant to Americans and their civil liberties, they simply don't want to go to jail. I would tend to agree with these people.
Now, the government can actually just say whatever Dave Grusch knows about these entities can be declassified. Just say, "Dave is not bound by classification for any claims relating to contact with entities, deals with entities, specific information about entities, etc." This would instantly discredit his claims, because he'd be free to make outlandish and absurd claims without being able to hide behind the veil of "it's classified, we have to discuss this in a SCIF".
If they don't exist, what's the problem? This is a man we know was at the highest levels of the actual stuff he's talking about. He's a credible source. If he's making outlandish claims, just lift the veil of secrecy.
Of course they don't do that because it is classified.
> (president Obama himself said there are confirmed unknown phenomena, taking him at his word on this topic),
So, by one POTUS admitting that we don't already know everything about everything, that proves aliens are here and they look like little grayskinned ET's?
Where do you draw the line for sufficient evidence? Are congressional hearings on recordings from US armed forces insufficient? It isn’t like the videos lack provenance like something random from youtube.
I draw the line at "we have conclusive evidence that it is extra terrestrial", not at "we don't know what it is", and I would say they are categorically not the same.
Nobody definitively says it's extra-terrestrial. In fact, the common thread seems to be that the entities are from Earth or from a dimensional space where that concept is potentially invalid. Other people speculate that they may come from the ocean. Regardless, I don't see much interest in the "they came from outer space" hypothesis, which makes sense, as it is very big out there and we already know a planet/region that sustains life and it's the closest planet of them all.
What isn't in contention is that there are unexplained phenomena to varying levels of description (president Obama confirmed the lowest level of description, i.e. that they exist and that they cannot be definitively explained).
A common additive to this contention is that these phenomena have intelligence and motives. You needent accept this, in fact I encourage you to not trivially accept it, but there is growing evidence that it is true. Is this a complete mind-fuck? Yes. Does that 'matter' in any real sense of the term? No, not really.
An additionally common follow-on from here is that the motives of the aforementioned intelligence aren't good and we cannot counter them using our technology, and this justifies the veil of secrecy. A lot of people seem very convinced by this. I can plausibly come up with some scenarios where this might be true, i.e. scenarios where knowledge would completely collapse the government, but I still think I'd prefer to have the information than not.
Anyways, the very concept you're highlighting is actually what is in the accepted UAP record. Theories, inconclusive evidence as to origin.
I have a feeling that the actual phenomenon relates to physics and the mystery of dark matter, and it's also probably a still very very small part of an even infinitely more complex, "higher" noumenal world, but I'm just speculating.
> A common additive to this contention is that these phenomena have intelligence and motives. You needent accept this, in fact I encourage you to not trivially accept it, but there is growing evidence that it is true. Is this a complete mind-fuck? Yes.
Why would "things that are most likely drones" moving with intent be a "mind fuck"? We see it every day in the trenches of Ukraine.
No, I'm just asserting that I don't find that theory tenable.
I'd love to know more (even your mundane explanation of "there's a psy-op on congresspeople for some reason" - if so, why?) but it's been decided that we're not allowed.
If we take "psy-ops exist"(In my head, "propaganda" is a type of psy-op, but I would not disagree if you drew the circle tighter than that) as a prior, I would have to ask why in the world congresspeople would not be subject to them, both to those that target a broader population, which they are still undeniably part of, and to those that target policy-makers specifically, because if you had the power to influence people, it seems obvious to me that you would target those that gave you great leverage.
We already know major GOP leaders court votes by pushing absurd ideas that are rejected by the scientific establishment. "Injecting bleach can cure Covid" is one from the highest-ranking GOP elected official. "No vaccines are safe" is from a top health official.
This is a point I keep making: every one of NASA’s Mars missions has very carefully excluded any scientific instrument that could conclusively eliminate the presence of life... and hence future missions to find life.
I.e.: they don’t carry high power microscopes because apparently there’s no room for one on a 900kg rover the size of a car.
> they don’t carry high power microscopes because apparently there’s no room for one on a 900kg rover the size of a car
They do though:
"The WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) is a reflight of the MAHLI (MArs Hand Lens Imager) that is a part of the Curiosity rover (Edgett et al., 2012). WATSON obtains full-color images from microscopic scales (∼13 μm/pixel) to infinity and is used for initial textural analysis of rock and regolith targets, as well as to assess potential proximity science targets and the safety of robotic arm activities (Edgett et al., 2012). The ACI (Autofocus Contextual Imager) is a fixed field, 10.1 μm/pixel resolution grayscale imager used to obtain best-focus and colocate laser spots with surface feature analyzed during SHERLOC spectroscopic investigations (Bhartia et al., 2021)."
They do not, because that's not high power microscope. I chose my words carefully.
10-13 μm per pixel is nowhere near good enough when a typical bacterium is 0.5 - 5.0 μm in size!
I remember the discussions around the mission plan for both Opportunity and Curiosity where NASA kept making "mumbly" noises about why they can't ship decent optics with these things.
Anything that would definitely eliminate (not just "potentially find") the presence of either life or water is never included. It's always omitted, for "reasons".
Water and life must forever remain possible things for the funding to keep flowing.
Individual bacteria are also generally not visible in optical microscopes without staining. If there was life on the surface of mars, you probably wouldn't need a microscope to see it. Just like you don't need a microscope to observe your bread it's moldy.
Water isn't an abstract possibility on Mars. It's a reality. They've found minerals that only form in water, they've found ice, they've observed erosion. We don't understand the hydrology of Mars but it isn't some kind of conspiracy. It's a laborious process, which they continue to chug away at.
Looking for life isn't the primary mission of Mars rovers. They're remote controlled geologists. The search for life really has nothing to do with funding for Mars missions. No one expects to find it.
Anything that can return a sample. Notice that Curiosity collects samples, but omits the sample return rocket.
A good enough microscope can easily tell the difference between life and non-life, especially in the presence of water. If it moves on its own, it is almost certainly alive!
Certain kinds of chromatographs can conclusively determine that no complex chemicals are present, the kind essential to life. I.e.: if only simple metal oxides and the like are present, then you have only a rock.
> Anything that can return a sample. Notice that Curiosity collects samples, but omits the sample return rocket.
NASA (and also the Soviet Union and ESA) have repeatedly designed Mars sample return missions, but have not done them for budgetary reasons; it would be tremendously difficult and expensive.
Here's the current one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA-ESA_Mars_Sample_Return - however, given that it was hitting funding problems even _before_ ol' minihands gutted NASA funding, it seems destined to become yet another NASA/ESA canceled program (there's a bit of a history of ambitious NASA/ESA collaborations which die when one side or the other pulls the budgetary plug; JWST was likely lucky to escape this fate, say).
This puts it in a particularly weird place, as the earth return section is already built and due to launch on an Ariane 6 in two years (it will then proceed, slowly, to Mars using an ion drive, and await the lander and Mars launcher, which will presumably never arrive because budgets).
You're suggesting we can state "Mars has no life" based on a single sample?
If that's so, I can produce a sample of material from the center of the Amazon rain forest that will conclusively prove to you that Earth is also lifeless.
" Inorganic precipitation processes are capable of producing a wide range of morphological outputs. This range includes shapes with both crystallographic and non-crystallographic symmetry elements. Among the latter, morphologies that mimic primitive living organisms are easily obtained under different physico-chemical conditions including those that are geochemically plausible. The application of this information to the problem of deciphering primitive life on the early Earth and Mars is discussed. It is concluded that morphology cannot be used unambiguously as a tool for primitive life detection. "
you should go work for spacex and show them how to do the sample return. they've thought about it for at least a decade now and haven't yet. so you can go there and show them how since it's so easy. you'll be millionaire real quick i promise.
Erm, just no. I have an old book lying around about Viking, the first mission to the surface of Mars and written before it reached Mars. The book is full of the expectation that they will find life and are rather curious what kind of life. (And the book describes all the instruments and methology)
But no traces of life were found ever.
If there is life on Mars, it is hidden underground in vulcanic active areas and alike and no mission we can do today, could conclude with certainty that there is no life on Mars. But we have been looking real hard.
Within the Solar System we are the only life, look further, much much further. What's the probability of life developing on TWO bodies within one planetary system? Looking for another life within Solar System is exceptionalism similar to geocentrism.
If all life starts at the microscopic scale, then the most common life in the universe will be microscopic.
Does that mean the most common forms of intelligent life in the universe may be very small too? Or is there a minimum body size required for "intelligence"?
This article is a wonderfull fever dream of genisis.Though it's starting point is mundane.
The whole vesicle theory is built on a physical/mechanical process ubiquitous in nature,that so far has no connection with life.
Wildly suggestive and so so close, but when you look at the actual way vesicles are made, and cell walls are made, they are not the same, but have the same properties, as it lkely that physics and chemistry only allow for tiny bubbles(cue track), to form in a limited number of ways, one is an accident, and the other a mystery.
> The whole vesicle theory is built on a physical/mechanical process ubiquitous in nature,that so far has no connection with life.
To be fair, the conditions that were ubiquitous on Earth when life first formed are now extraordinarily rare, if they exist anywhere at all on the planet.
yes, and many experiments have shown.that analigs of those conditions have yielded various amino acids usedby life forms, but never amino acids inside vesicles.
foams/vesicles are ubiquitous positing there existance and conflating that with life on Titan is a big ask, if, IF they has included a statement
along the lines that "vesicles are certain to be found anywhere in the universe where liquid water exists" then it would be completly acceptable and could be viewed as an exercise in creative chemical theory to be investigated, but as is, it's a fever dream
The linked paper is open access: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...
Among other things, it contains details on what amphiphiles might actually be present on Titan, a very nice set of diagrams explaining their proposed process, and proposals for lab experiments to verify whether the process is possible. I've had a soft spot for the vesicle-first theory of abiogenesis since I first heard of it, so I hope someone runs the experiments. But as far as I can tell, this is all theoretical so far.
amphiphillic vesicles are a stepping stone for persistent molecular forms. essentially a reaction vessel, insulating the contents from the extravesicular mayhem.
It's thought that life on Earth started with RNA mayhem, not with vessels to isolate from it.
RNA world is mainstream, but a few scientists have proposed that something like cell membranes, such as these vesicles, came first and provided the environment for more complex chemistry.
Life exists at the boundaries of density changes.
It makes absolutely no sense that the code would precede the hardware, and the hardware needs shielding.
It doesn’t have to make sense.
It’s all a case of dynamic equilibrium in complex systems and emergence. Finality doesn’t really come into it.
I think the idea is that if you have a nice bubbly froth and some proteins/RNA type thing end up inside and help reinforce the bubble wall through electrostatic forces you get a symbiotic relationship. The soup inside reinforces the bubbles around it.
And everything that we hold dear happens after that.
I don't object to this explanation of the world, but I reckon it's an uphill battle convincing people that all of the living natural world, and all of human history, their culture, their religions and their science and all the beliefs in-between had their origin in some electrostatic forces. I'm of the opinion that even well-informed people of science haven't had time to fully adjust their world-view during the handful of decades we have known this much.
Dunno about everyone else, but if that is the origin of everything that lives on this planet, I'd find relief. One less question in an ever increasing sea of questions is better than just an ever increasing sea of questions.
but actual code preceded the hardware!
indeed, people like Dijkstra wrote quire a bit of code on paper before the hardware to run that code existed.
Well, there existed ware, the code ran on wetware
This. Ada Lovelace wrote programs for Babbage's analytical engine long before anyone succeeded at constructing one.
In defense of RNA: you know about ribozymes, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribozyme Life does not really respect a code/hardware divide.
The source code of life is recorded and transmitted using physical matter.
Physics very much matters to matter.
For development of any information storage systems made of molecules, there must be a supportive development environment.
To even start the process of doing anything like what we see happening in a cell, homeostasis must be achieved first, and not inelegantly, its not good enough to have a complete cell wall if it has no ports for entry and exit of nutrients and waste product, thats also known as a coffin.
Both the walls and the gates and the information / physical systems to reliably exploit those features must be present at the same time to enable abiogenesis.
Not necessarily. The primitive cell wall could have used other mechanisms. For example simple protrusion of the membrane does not have to resulr in catastrophic collapse, if done slowly enough membrane allows substances to enter and exit and still remain intact by closing up quickly after wall is broken
If you play around with soap bubbles carefully you can observe phenomena like this.
Congratulations. Now go and read the literature and learn how this might've occurred. You're not the first person to raise these objections. Biologists aren't morons.
Having read a fair amount of the literature, it's not that compelling.
I would encourage people to stake their life on it, let's put it that way.
I see where you're coming from, but I think you're thinking across too far over the boundary. Quantum mechanics aren't ordinarily affected by non-sentient life, they're just primitive to the environment at the macro level.
Quantum mechanics has no relationship to sentience.
That's a pretty strong statement considering both facts that quantum mechanics affects everything and sentience is not understood.
Quantum mechanics is a well defined theory and sentience, however you define it, has nothing to do with it. Your reasoning is akin to saying "gravity affects everything so you can't rule out it has some connection to sentience". It's a meaningless statement.
Correct. My apologies that my comment was unclear such that from my comment's content one could not distinguish particle accelerators built by sentient life and woo-woo New Age claims of "The Secret" or manifesting.
Funny that code did predate hardware.
transmembrane proteins are complex hardware of their own…
Part of what makes RNA world so compelling is the RNA is both code and hardware. Yes, central dogma is not the end all be all. RNA structures can be catalytic just like enzymes.
There are a lot of different opinions on how life on Earth started, even amongst scientists studying it, and none of them are strongly supported by substantial, reproduced evidence.
> It's thought that life on Earth started with RNA mayhem, not with vessels to isolate from it.
They're not mutually exclusive. You could have various kinds of autocatalytic sets of molecules, including RNA, inside and outside lipid vesicles, and some of them might have re-produced better than others. Anything that could have happened in an open ocean of nuleotides and amino acids could also take place within a lipid vesicle, just that within some vesicle maybe the right concentrations of molecules had at some point emerged that could more easily reproduce itself than in the open ocean where the particular autocatalytic set could be washed away by the surrounding molecular chaos.
I like the "vesicle first" theory because planar sheets of reaction can form perturbations, so getting from two surfaces mixing to complex shapes and enclosures feels plausible given any significant vibration or wave.
Once you have an enclosure you have potential for osmosis and other differentials across the boundary. It's not life Jim, but it's one hell of a building block/precursor.
This is very similar to Nick Lane's theory of the origins of life.
Just want to link his book exploring this idea and give it my recommendations, FWIW: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26530386-the-vital-quest....
It's a good read, and I still think about the concept of origin of life in these terms every now and then.
https://youtu.be/niIZVU-0fZg
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem on the topic of Ocean is Conscious.
This isn't really a "finding"- it's a theoretical prediction based on observed data, along with a proposed experimental apparatus to detect such items.
I don't really get excited for theoretical predictions like this - I want experimental observations!
[flagged]
I have a clue, and my point is not pedantic, it's clarifying. If they found- using experimental apparatus- some physical evidence, it would be a 'finding'.
GP was rude and out of line, but to be frank with you, it is pedantic to quibble about the definition of the word "finding", a word which doesn't even appear in the article (yes, I did see the title).
If the research doesn't interest or impress you, there's plenty of other articles.
*methane and ethane lakes
Thought it could be a useful precision.
Ah... so you're telling me I should delay my plans for the firepit on the titan lake-side human-alien diplomacy embassy? I feel like I won't be able to show them a great time without s'mores.
This feels very cynical, but what incentive does NASA have to do research showing alien life is not very likely in our solar system?
Regardless of incentives I think this is some of the most important research they should be doing. As a species we need to get a better understanding of the probability of life on other planets and therefore a better understanding of fermi's paradox in case the dark forest theory is correct. So if NASA has an incentive to discover potential pathways for extraterrestrial life... great!
The problem is that the incentive is biased against scepticism. So the process is more likely to find potential pathways but not notice obstacles or counter arguments.
> a better understanding of fermi's paradox in case the dark forest theory is correct.
We know so little about this, that we can't even begin to estimate the probabilities. It seems like other things are known potential dangers to us, no?
Yes and this helps us make a start. It slightly increases the odds of life elsewhere. And yes there are other dangers.. climate change, nuclear armageddon, bio weapons etc but the existence of another problem doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also attempt to tackle this one. Specially as unlike the others a band aid seems somewhat tractable..
Researcher: “with this new device we think we can attempt to create a gravity wave in the lab” Professor: “we should consider whether this might violate the 2028 embargo on dark forest beacon technology”
A non-trivial faction of our government has been teasing knowledge of some sort of non-human intelligent lifeform (that word isn't considered precisely accurate) on EARTH.
This isn't some crackpot theory, they've been having congressional hearings about it and congresspeople say it's real. You can think they are or aren't credible or being lied to, but, if congresspeople are part of or victims of some sort of psy-op with vague parameters and goals, our entire system of government is basically forfeit.
I realize this is difficult to deal with but it's a pretty well-established fact at this point.
We don't need to go anywhere for this information.
>our entire system of government is basically forfeit.
<looks at America's current government>
Yep, that seems accurate. Like it or not, the current US government is full of crackpot theories.
The "evidence" of "aliens" inevitably turns out to be blurry footage where people with bias tell you what you're supposed to think it is.
As for the U.S. Congress, you're talking about a body that has been avoiding it's own responsibilities for decades, particularly so right now. Invoking "Congressional hearings" here is an appeal to an unqualified authority. (Congressional representatives presumably has some experience with laws. I do not believe they are qualified for video forensics.)
Have you seen the footage? It isn’t blurry cell phone videos. It is quite clear thermal imagery from aircraft and drones. The most recent video going around shows a reaper drone tracking one of these objects that does not change its vector much after being hit with a kinetic missile.
>thermal imagery
I have seen that one, as it happens. I am not an expert, but it looks to me like the asserted Hellfire hits a cruise missile and knocks some pieces off as the Hellfire fails to detonate, and the cruise missile then course corrects from getting knocked around.
The best way to determine that would be to have a number of experts independently assess the footage without being primed as to its provenance. A presentation by someone who is already convinced it's aliens to some congresscritters in need of a distraction is hardly that.
If it was merely that, why is it being presented to congress? How would the US military not know the origin of a cruise missile they are tracking? How many cruise missiles out there can take a broadside from a hellfire at 1000mph and continue on its direction of travel?
Congress decides what gets presented to it.
Did anyone even ask about larger radar tracks for this "UFO"?
A Hellfire masses less than 50kg. A Tomahawk cruise missile, for example, weighs over 1000kg. The impact is clearly glancing - the Hellfire retains much of its own speed.
Again, why would a hellfire missile ever be launched at a tomahawk cruise missile? Do the Houthis have tomahawks all the sudden? And this still does not answer why the pentagon would not comment or why this detail was not made available to Congress.
The information you claim to want isn't accessible to you. The US government has "platforms" with vast arrays of sensors and data collection capability - redundant, multiplicative platforms measuring things you and I might not even know about - and they use this data to get a pretty good idea of what they're looking at.
You're seeing a grainy video for a reason. It would be trivial for you to have every piece of data related to an incident but if you did, that might be problematic for multiple reasons, one of them being it would expose capability. Usually, multi-million dollar missiles aren't used on unknown targets with unknown capabilities for unknown reasons. Thus, more information is required.
So, where are we left? With you demanding inaccessible information to draw a conclusion. Given that you can't have it, you're essentially just throwing your hands up and saying "well, I guess we can't know". Fine, but untrue, as we can simply demand to know.
That is what people are doing. If you're at all concerned by any of this, you should be in this camp as well.
Regarding "distraction", how is this a "good" distraction if it's not a widely credibly held position and can clearly damage your reputation? This is just a nonsense idea. There's no reason to believe these people are lying.
> You can think they [...] aren't credible
I think I'd pick this one as being the simplest and most likely explanation if my other options are "psy-op[s] with vague parameters" and non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us. Congress people believing falsehoods is nothing new.
Non-human intelligence sharing the planet with us is a mundane explanation. It's a completely trivial possibility in the vastly expansive fields of biology and physics. Earth is known to host extremely complex life and is the only known planet to do so. To look for unknown forms of life one need only look at their feet. Bacteria was a previously unknown, extremely expansive form of life on Earth.
We unlocked the secrets of the atom and gained within it the capability of ending all life on earth trivially. Other secrets being locked behind physics isn't a radical speculation. In fact, it's surprising that we haven't really seen any since.
Before we had the instruments to observe them directly we could theorize about the existence of bacteria because we could indirectly observe them through their effects on our biology and even their macroscopic effects on populations, effects that had no better explanations. I am not aware of any mysteries that are most simply explained by a hitherto unobserved, technologically advanced (I assume we're not talking about dolphins when we say) "non-human intelligence", whether they supposedly dwell in the depths of the ocean, the Earth's crust, Titan, or anywhere else in the universe. SETI has been listening for ~60 years and hasn't heard a peep from any of the billions (trillions?) exoplanet's worth of radio signals that could have reached us in that time.
The available-to-me evidence suggests that technologically advanced species are exceedingly rare, and the only such species we're aware of emits an overwhelming number of artifacts that would serve as evidence for its existence, so it would be very much not mundane to discover that another one has been living under our noses this whole time.
I am not making a truth claim here, as in "it's definitively untrue that there are non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us," I'm just arguing that it's an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence - grainy footage and hearsay isn't enough for me.
>I am not aware of any mysteries that are most simply explained by a hitherto unobserved, technologically advanced (I assume we're not talking about dolphins when we say) "non-human intelligence"
This is precisely the point. You aren't aware of these mysteries, despite the earnest attempts of many to bring them to your direct attention.
There is no longer any attempt to hide the mysteries categorically, so this lack of information is now on you.
>I am not making a truth claim here, as in "it's definitively untrue that there are non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us," I'm just arguing that it's an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence - grainy footage and hearsay isn't enough for me.
Yes, that's why the correct scenario is wide declassification of the premises that are asserted in this regard, i.e. to make general knowledge of unidentifiable phenomena which have no definitive known cause or origin, communication with these entities, capture of their technology, etc. All of these things could be explained by various competing theories, some of them "simple" (funny how Occam's razor is always just what I prefer), but this information, which has been trickling out from credible sources, needs to be brought into the public space and then we get to decide what it implies or doesn't imply.
Right now there is a deliberate veil of secrecy and serious mysteries that aren't denied by anybody serious. They definitively exist.
> Right now there is a deliberate veil of secrecy and serious mysteries that aren't denied by anybody serious. They definitively exist.
OK, I get that you're a cryptozoology/"aliens walk among us!" kinda person, but...
A lack of evidence against a theory is never evidence for the theory. It's very hard to prove a negative.
Curious that you immediately descend into partisan thought short-circuiting and now that that didn't work, you come up with a new angle.
The person you're replying to wasn't the one who invoked what you call "partisan thought short circuiting," (which, I have to say, reads a lot like parody). It was me. Occam's razor is not at all about "what I prefer" and is entirely about preferring theories with evidence over those that are lacking (instead of inventing new theories to explain away the lack of evidence).
Sorry, dumb thing to write. That's not at all Occam's razor is and I clearly need to get educated.
> the correct scenario is wide declassification
It sounds to me like you and I see the same expansive hole where the evidence should be. My preference would be to say "show me a claim without a hole or stop wasting my time," you appear to assume that the evidence exists - because someone "credible" said it's so - and demand that the hole be filled immediately.
To claim there exists a grand conspiracy and web of well-kept secrets, ironically, is to try to explain away the first substanceless claim with a new one.
I'm trying to soft-land you on this but this is specifically because you don't know and haven't been curious about it, not because there isn't any evidence.
Nobody denies David Grusch is exactly who he says he is with the access he says he had. His lawyer was the former inspector general of the intelligence community for God's sake.
I find "conspiracies can't be true" a tiresome point. Any secret is a conspiracy and many are kept. Are the technical details of the F-47 or nuclear physics not true because these secrets have been kept? Nuclear physics have been classified and protected for going on 90 years now.
You can transform your claim to accommodate this, but it becomes suspicious.
First, "conspiracies can't be true" was definitely not the point. You're right, conspiracies happen, governments do keep secrets! The point was: if a conspiracy theory with poor evidence were to be a reasonable explanation for another claim's poor evidence, I could claim whatever outlandish thing I wanted, e.g. "Unicorns are real, our puppet masters just don't want you to know about them!" This explanation is hard to falsify, and (in my view) shouldn't be our top choice, it's definitely not enough for me to regard the ultimate unicorn claim as "well-established fact."
If I wanted to make a compelling argument for my conspiracy theory, I would not only want to explain how the government has managed to keep this profound secret about unicorns, I'd want to to explain why it was theirs to keep in the first place. In a world with many sovereign nations with a vast array of publicly and privately-funded research institutions, camera-toting citizens, security cameras, wildlife cameras, etc., why is the U.S. government holding all of the compelling evidence? Or is not just the U.S.? Maybe we explain this with more conspiracies? Or maybe one really big conspiracy? Do you think it's likely that the government could keep narwhals a secret?
I haven't/wouldn't make any claims about David Grusch being who he says is, I haven't intentionally made any truth claims at all here; that said, whatever titles Grusch formerly held, and whatever title his lawyers formerly held, those titles don't, in my view, grant him credibility in perpetuity, maybe one could argue that they didn't grant much in the first place. The same goes for members of Congress. Should we believe Marjorie Taylor Greene if she tells us "The Jews" are starting forest fires with their space lasers to serve their malicious globalist agendas, on the basis that she's a congresswoman?
If you or anyone else has evidence, I'd urge them to be agents of truth and go update Grusch's Wikipedia article, at the time of writing this it states: > No evidence supporting Grusch's UFO claims has been presented and they have been dismissed by multiple, independent experts.
Or, perhaps we go searching for explanations as to why Wikipedia or the news organizations it accepts citations from are mere puppets of the conspirators, but at that point, who's being tiresome?
1. It is trivial to "falsify" unexplained UAP. Simply provide a credible explanation, or say they're explained. In fact, president Obama did the opposite, and confirmed that they aren't explained or explicable. Our government has been leaking these things for quite some time now.
2. Because you're a fan of Occam's razor, can you take your razor and say "Shucks, this guy Luis Elizondo was confirmed as a legitimate knowledgeable operator by former senate majority leader Harry Reid, a member of gang of eight, privy to the most classified intelligence in the United States, full stop, there isn't a higher position except for the president of the united states. This guy Dave Grusch has as his lawyer the former inspector general of the US intelligence communities. For some reason he's also outlining a scenario where we know about non human intelligences and they pose a serious existential threat to humanity, that's odd. Ah, well, can't be anything!"? The thing is, something deeply, deeply, deeply odd is going on and the shape of the leaks (something you should LOVE if you love Occam and 'debunking', because you've already predicted leaks in your no conspiracies modality) is consistent and absolutely disturbing, concerning, and a clear matter worthy of sustained attention. Why are all of these people at the highest level of our government talking about this? You're not at all concerned or curious, you're merely drifting through life, confident you passively have the answers? I find this incredible.
3. The US government hasn't kept the secret, as explicated. Just like the nuclear program, certain things have leaked.
4. If you continue to see mounting credible operators repeating the same story with absolutely no curiosity, no desire to know more, certainty that the entire thing is impossible or somehow debunked due to your meager cognitive abilities and patterns of thought that you don't even own, I don't know what to tell you. It's literally impossible for you to come across this information because you've immunized yourself to it. The fact that it's here and we're facing an overwhelming, nauseating story from the highest levels of government is worthy of serious consideration and we do not require your assessment to make that basic, obvious determination.
>If you or anyone else has evidence, I'd urge them to be agents of truth and go update Grusch's Wikipedia article, at the time of writing this it states: > No evidence supporting Grusch's UFO claims has been presented and they have been dismissed by multiple, independent experts.
I'd love to collect on this debt somehow when you're proven wrong in our lifetimes.
> I'd love to collect on this debt somehow when you're proven wrong in our lifetimes.
Sorry, this is a thread on an internet forum, I'm afraid I don't owe you anything.
If you want to engage with the actual points I've endeavored to make, in good faith, instead of telling me how ignorant you think I am and doubling down on appeals to authority, I would gladly continue this conversation. For what it's worth: I'd love to see proof that you're right, sneaky non-human intelligences living and crashing known-physics defying spaceships in the shadows would be beyond interesting! However, I don't really feel like I can be "proven wrong" because I'm not really making claims here. You asserted something to be "basically fact", and I haven't told you that you're wrong, my argument was that your theories seem implausible, though possible.
Making the analysis harder is the fact that those politicians are either exceedingly stupid or brazen liars, or both.
Credible non-politicians, people in sensitive CIA or senior military leadership have consistently made these claims. They may all be liars, but none seem particularly stupid.
One problem is that we haven't gotten a "UAP Snowden". Such a person has seen a serious chilling effect.
Or maybe there's been "no UAP Snowden" because there's actually nothing to leak.
No, that isn't possible.
Note that my post was designed to be agnostic. Leaking a psy-op, or leaking the extensive, close-up details of UAP phenomena which we do have (president Obama himself said there are confirmed unknown phenomena, taking him at his word on this topic), is still a Snowden style leak, especially if they continue to do this dog and pony show in congress and elsewhere.
There's also not a nuclear physics Snowden, or F-47 Snowden, do you think there's nothing to leak?
> There's also not a nuclear physics Snowden, or F-47 Snowden, do you think there's nothing to leak?
There might be, but even if there was, a leak in those fields would still have no bearing on whether or not there are actual things to leak regarding UAPs.
Maybe the info is simply not public because publishing it would let the very likely other humans responsible for said UAPs know that we do and don't know what they're up to.
And it could also be that that info on UAPs isn't leaked because (unlike the Snowden leaks), they aren't actually relevant to Americans and to their liberties, and so the people who have access to that info see no point in leaking it.
I'm going to address your hypothesis of "unknown technologies". It's something that widely seems credible but really isn't.
These phenomena have been documented, in-depth, for many, many decades. Credible sources note that certain materials and devices (I don't want to use the term 'craft') have been in government possession for going on 90 years, since the end of WW2. The notion that some country had achieved technical supremacy such that we still find their technology unidentifiable for 90 years isn't tenable.
Everyone involved in what the public knows about this are largely credible people who have undergone a classification briefing of what information they have, carefully vetting what they're able to share. They seem to feel that this topic is relevant to Americans and their civil liberties, they simply don't want to go to jail. I would tend to agree with these people.
Now, the government can actually just say whatever Dave Grusch knows about these entities can be declassified. Just say, "Dave is not bound by classification for any claims relating to contact with entities, deals with entities, specific information about entities, etc." This would instantly discredit his claims, because he'd be free to make outlandish and absurd claims without being able to hide behind the veil of "it's classified, we have to discuss this in a SCIF".
If they don't exist, what's the problem? This is a man we know was at the highest levels of the actual stuff he's talking about. He's a credible source. If he's making outlandish claims, just lift the veil of secrecy.
Of course they don't do that because it is classified.
> (president Obama himself said there are confirmed unknown phenomena, taking him at his word on this topic),
So, by one POTUS admitting that we don't already know everything about everything, that proves aliens are here and they look like little grayskinned ET's?
By that logic there was nothing to leak before snowden
By that logic, you're also hiding the truth that you are actually seven sentient potatoes in a wetsuit. It just hasn't been revealed yet.
Except there is no "logic" to thinking a leak just hasn't happened "yet".
There's no "logic" to thinking that the absence of a leak implies there is information to be leaked.
Isn’t David Grusch just that?
> This isn't some crackpot theory, they've been having congressional hearings about it and congresspeople say it's real.
Congresspeople also say Jewish space lasers are a thing.
> You can think they are or aren't credible or being lied to
Yes, I do. The current GOP party is not interested in any way in scientific fact.
You've immunized yourself from any possibility of entertaining this information. Many people sharing it aren't republicans, including senators.
Senators are humans, and the selection process prioritizes charm over knowledge. Many people share all sorts of silly ideas.
I'm very prepared to look at evidence of aliens visiting Earth, but it better be damned good evidence.
Where do you draw the line for sufficient evidence? Are congressional hearings on recordings from US armed forces insufficient? It isn’t like the videos lack provenance like something random from youtube.
> Are congressional hearings on recordings from US armed forces insufficient?
Have you watched a congressional hearing? They serve primarily as evidence that politicians like to hear themselves speak.
I draw the line at "we have conclusive evidence that it is extra terrestrial", not at "we don't know what it is", and I would say they are categorically not the same.
Nobody definitively says it's extra-terrestrial. In fact, the common thread seems to be that the entities are from Earth or from a dimensional space where that concept is potentially invalid. Other people speculate that they may come from the ocean. Regardless, I don't see much interest in the "they came from outer space" hypothesis, which makes sense, as it is very big out there and we already know a planet/region that sustains life and it's the closest planet of them all.
What isn't in contention is that there are unexplained phenomena to varying levels of description (president Obama confirmed the lowest level of description, i.e. that they exist and that they cannot be definitively explained).
A common additive to this contention is that these phenomena have intelligence and motives. You needent accept this, in fact I encourage you to not trivially accept it, but there is growing evidence that it is true. Is this a complete mind-fuck? Yes. Does that 'matter' in any real sense of the term? No, not really.
An additionally common follow-on from here is that the motives of the aforementioned intelligence aren't good and we cannot counter them using our technology, and this justifies the veil of secrecy. A lot of people seem very convinced by this. I can plausibly come up with some scenarios where this might be true, i.e. scenarios where knowledge would completely collapse the government, but I still think I'd prefer to have the information than not.
Anyways, the very concept you're highlighting is actually what is in the accepted UAP record. Theories, inconclusive evidence as to origin.
I have a feeling that the actual phenomenon relates to physics and the mystery of dark matter, and it's also probably a still very very small part of an even infinitely more complex, "higher" noumenal world, but I'm just speculating.
> A common additive to this contention is that these phenomena have intelligence and motives. You needent accept this, in fact I encourage you to not trivially accept it, but there is growing evidence that it is true. Is this a complete mind-fuck? Yes.
Why would "things that are most likely drones" moving with intent be a "mind fuck"? We see it every day in the trenches of Ukraine.
Aside from the deliberate obtusity it bears emphasizing that you aren't in the trenches of Ukraine.
>if congresspeople are part of or victims of some sort of psy-op [...] our entire system of government is basically forfeit.
And you're asserting that this cannot possibly be the case? "For that which must not be, cannot be"?
No, I'm just asserting that I don't find that theory tenable.
I'd love to know more (even your mundane explanation of "there's a psy-op on congresspeople for some reason" - if so, why?) but it's been decided that we're not allowed.
If we take "psy-ops exist"(In my head, "propaganda" is a type of psy-op, but I would not disagree if you drew the circle tighter than that) as a prior, I would have to ask why in the world congresspeople would not be subject to them, both to those that target a broader population, which they are still undeniably part of, and to those that target policy-makers specifically, because if you had the power to influence people, it seems obvious to me that you would target those that gave you great leverage.
One needn't posit a "psy-op".
We already know major GOP leaders court votes by pushing absurd ideas that are rejected by the scientific establishment. "Injecting bleach can cure Covid" is one from the highest-ranking GOP elected official. "No vaccines are safe" is from a top health official.
That's just a null result from attempting to prove that life elsewhere does exist.
This is a point I keep making: every one of NASA’s Mars missions has very carefully excluded any scientific instrument that could conclusively eliminate the presence of life... and hence future missions to find life.
I.e.: they don’t carry high power microscopes because apparently there’s no room for one on a 900kg rover the size of a car.
> they don’t carry high power microscopes because apparently there’s no room for one on a 900kg rover the size of a car
They do though:
"The WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) is a reflight of the MAHLI (MArs Hand Lens Imager) that is a part of the Curiosity rover (Edgett et al., 2012). WATSON obtains full-color images from microscopic scales (∼13 μm/pixel) to infinity and is used for initial textural analysis of rock and regolith targets, as well as to assess potential proximity science targets and the safety of robotic arm activities (Edgett et al., 2012). The ACI (Autofocus Contextual Imager) is a fixed field, 10.1 μm/pixel resolution grayscale imager used to obtain best-focus and colocate laser spots with surface feature analyzed during SHERLOC spectroscopic investigations (Bhartia et al., 2021)."
From: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022EA00...
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseverance_(rover)#Instrumen...
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/scie...
They do not, because that's not high power microscope. I chose my words carefully.
10-13 μm per pixel is nowhere near good enough when a typical bacterium is 0.5 - 5.0 μm in size!
I remember the discussions around the mission plan for both Opportunity and Curiosity where NASA kept making "mumbly" noises about why they can't ship decent optics with these things.
Anything that would definitely eliminate (not just "potentially find") the presence of either life or water is never included. It's always omitted, for "reasons".
Water and life must forever remain possible things for the funding to keep flowing.
Individual bacteria are also generally not visible in optical microscopes without staining. If there was life on the surface of mars, you probably wouldn't need a microscope to see it. Just like you don't need a microscope to observe your bread it's moldy.
Water isn't an abstract possibility on Mars. It's a reality. They've found minerals that only form in water, they've found ice, they've observed erosion. We don't understand the hydrology of Mars but it isn't some kind of conspiracy. It's a laborious process, which they continue to chug away at.
Looking for life isn't the primary mission of Mars rovers. They're remote controlled geologists. The search for life really has nothing to do with funding for Mars missions. No one expects to find it.
> 10-13 μm per pixel is nowhere near good enough when a typical bacterium is 0.5 - 5.0 μm in size!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrombolite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spongiostromata
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncolite
You're nitpicking. They said "typical"; they did not say "all".
Technically, a one-foot diameter dog's vomit slime mold is a single cell.
What kind of instrument could conclusively eliminate presence of life?
One that goes boom.
Some bacteria survives hard radiation of deep space in stasis mode.
Anything that can return a sample. Notice that Curiosity collects samples, but omits the sample return rocket.
A good enough microscope can easily tell the difference between life and non-life, especially in the presence of water. If it moves on its own, it is almost certainly alive!
Certain kinds of chromatographs can conclusively determine that no complex chemicals are present, the kind essential to life. I.e.: if only simple metal oxides and the like are present, then you have only a rock.
> Anything that can return a sample. Notice that Curiosity collects samples, but omits the sample return rocket.
NASA (and also the Soviet Union and ESA) have repeatedly designed Mars sample return missions, but have not done them for budgetary reasons; it would be tremendously difficult and expensive.
Here's the current one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA-ESA_Mars_Sample_Return - however, given that it was hitting funding problems even _before_ ol' minihands gutted NASA funding, it seems destined to become yet another NASA/ESA canceled program (there's a bit of a history of ambitious NASA/ESA collaborations which die when one side or the other pulls the budgetary plug; JWST was likely lucky to escape this fate, say).
This puts it in a particularly weird place, as the earth return section is already built and due to launch on an Ariane 6 in two years (it will then proceed, slowly, to Mars using an ion drive, and await the lander and Mars launcher, which will presumably never arrive because budgets).
You're suggesting we can state "Mars has no life" based on a single sample?
If that's so, I can produce a sample of material from the center of the Amazon rain forest that will conclusively prove to you that Earth is also lifeless.
> A good enough microscope can easily tell the difference between life and non-life, especially in the presence of water.
They are still arguing over this one three decades later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7905
" Inorganic precipitation processes are capable of producing a wide range of morphological outputs. This range includes shapes with both crystallographic and non-crystallographic symmetry elements. Among the latter, morphologies that mimic primitive living organisms are easily obtained under different physico-chemical conditions including those that are geochemically plausible. The application of this information to the problem of deciphering primitive life on the early Earth and Mars is discussed. It is concluded that morphology cannot be used unambiguously as a tool for primitive life detection. "
https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of...
this guy is just nasa conspiracy bs repeater
you should go work for spacex and show them how to do the sample return. they've thought about it for at least a decade now and haven't yet. so you can go there and show them how since it's so easy. you'll be millionaire real quick i promise.
Erm, just no. I have an old book lying around about Viking, the first mission to the surface of Mars and written before it reached Mars. The book is full of the expectation that they will find life and are rather curious what kind of life. (And the book describes all the instruments and methology)
But no traces of life were found ever.
If there is life on Mars, it is hidden underground in vulcanic active areas and alike and no mission we can do today, could conclude with certainty that there is no life on Mars. But we have been looking real hard.
What's the name of the book?
Projekt Viking by Ernst Stuhlinger.
But in german and no idea if it was ever translated, but I assume similar books exist in english.
Within the Solar System we are the only life, look further, much much further. What's the probability of life developing on TWO bodies within one planetary system? Looking for another life within Solar System is exceptionalism similar to geocentrism.
If all life starts at the microscopic scale, then the most common life in the universe will be microscopic.
Does that mean the most common forms of intelligent life in the universe may be very small too? Or is there a minimum body size required for "intelligence"?
This article is a wonderfull fever dream of genisis.Though it's starting point is mundane. The whole vesicle theory is built on a physical/mechanical process ubiquitous in nature,that so far has no connection with life. Wildly suggestive and so so close, but when you look at the actual way vesicles are made, and cell walls are made, they are not the same, but have the same properties, as it lkely that physics and chemistry only allow for tiny bubbles(cue track), to form in a limited number of ways, one is an accident, and the other a mystery.
> The whole vesicle theory is built on a physical/mechanical process ubiquitous in nature,that so far has no connection with life.
To be fair, the conditions that were ubiquitous on Earth when life first formed are now extraordinarily rare, if they exist anywhere at all on the planet.
yes, and many experiments have shown.that analigs of those conditions have yielded various amino acids usedby life forms, but never amino acids inside vesicles. foams/vesicles are ubiquitous positing there existance and conflating that with life on Titan is a big ask, if, IF they has included a statement along the lines that "vesicles are certain to be found anywhere in the universe where liquid water exists" then it would be completly acceptable and could be viewed as an exercise in creative chemical theory to be investigated, but as is, it's a fever dream
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OK so maybe they should drop a monolith there instead.
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Titan is completely dead, you can bet on that.
I would bet on that, but not with absolute certainty.
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But I saw a movie where some tentacled thing ate the first astronaut to go there!