This might just be funding/ego hype.......but there is an announcement in a few minutes.

https://www.space.com/40792-nasa-mars-rover-curiosity-announcement-june-2018.html

 

This might just be funding/ego hype.......but there is an announcement in a few minutes.

https://www.space.com/40792-nasa-mars-rover-curiosity-announcement-june-2018.html

Finding methane is a big deal. It means there is a thermodynamic source of of both energy and carbon to drive life. Where such conditions exist, life tends to show up.

 

How many times are they going to make the 'important' announcement that life may be/have been possible on Mars. We are all convinced it is/may have been possible. Make an announcement when you find the little buggers.

 

I can't wait to learn what the organic molecules found were. Little surprised they used such a high temperature (as reported in the news media) rather than ramping up the temp for pyrolysis. Maybe the full report will include mass spectra vs. temp.

 

From what I can gather......it's hopeful/wishful hype. We have at least one moon full of these compounds.

It also depends on how much Reverence....you give to carbon.

 

It also depends on how much Reverence....you give to carbon.

A lot. Alicyclic carbon compounds, e.g, tetraphenylanthracene, are known to be in space, as well as some small heterocyclic and straight chain compounds with nitrogen and/or oxygen. But, if the compounds included an unsaturated fatty acid, a ubiquinone-like molecule, or a thermally degraded nucleic acid, that would be impressive.

 

Where such conditions exist, life tends to show up.

Wow. Do you have statistical evidence of this besides the single anecdote of Earth?

 

How many times are they going to make the 'important' announcement that life may be/have been possible on Mars. We are all convinced it is/may have been possible. Make an announcement when you find the little buggers.

As expected, even though the article goes out of its way to NOT claim this as evidence of life on Mars, the mainstream new coverage (that I've been hearing on the national top-of-the-hour news on the radio) have only been talking about how NASA may finally have proof of life on Mars.

Once again, you can't assume that the new media are capable of reporting ANY story accurately.

 

Wow. Do you have statistical evidence of this besides the single anecdote of Earth?

Not yet! But the smoker vents on the ocean bottom are almost otherworldly.

 

Not yet! But the smoker vents on the ocean bottom are almost otherworldly.

It is well established that life exists nearly everywhere on earth -- even in environments under incredibly hostile and unusual conditions.

The questions is: did that life spontaneously generate in those environments? Or did other species evolve to survive there?

There is no question that life -- somewhere, sometime -- popped into existence in the last 14 billion years or so. But did it happen once in one location here on earth? Or in multiple places?

Did it also happen elsewhere in the universe? Or did it only happen elsewhere in the universe and was somehow transported here (and possibly to other planets)?

These are the questions that keep me awake at night.

I like to imagine that there was highly intelligent life on Mars eons ago when the planet was more hospitable. Perhaps they recognized that their planet was dying and as a last gasp effort decided to colonize their nearest neighbor planet.

Why they sent their hair dressers, lawyers, telephone sanitizers -- instead of their best and brightest -- the world may never know.

It would explain much. But it still doesn't answer the question: where (and why) did life arise first?

 

Once again, you can't assume that the new media are capable of reporting ANY story accurately.

True, particularly if the story has any science content.

 

True, particularly if the story has any science content.

While I would agree that that is an extra guarantee, it is by no means necessary. At one point in high school I read a story in the newspaper about an something that happened that I was involved in and I was amazed at how wrong the story was in meaningful ways. So I started paying attention. Since then, every single piece of reporting I have ever heard, seen, or read for which I've had a basis, either because of sufficient knowledge about the subject in general or because of specific knowledge of the about the particular event in question, there have been major flaws in the reporting. Every... single... one. Zero exceptions to date (in something like 37 years now).

Of course, with this track record, there is absolutely no reason for me to have any faith in any reporting I see even when, as is true in the overwhelming majority of cases, I don't have the needed information to spot the flaws. But I can pretty safely assume that they are almost certainly there. What's probably most troubling is that, despite knowing this, it is very difficult not to still go ahead and accept the reporting at face value simply because it is the ONLY version of the story I have. That's one service that the plethora of information sources available today provides -- as soon as you try to find out anything more about a story you almost invariably find strongly contradicting reporting which at least makes it easy to keep in mind that you really don't know what the story really is.

 

Amen.

 

But it still doesn't answer the question: where (and why) did life arise first?

For the why part, I've been following Jeremy England's work (https://www.englandlab.com/). He hypothesizes that life is thermodynamically expedient, the universe's way of maximizing entropy as best it can. If true, it suggests that life is probable, if not certain.

 

For the why part, I've been following Jeremy England's work (https://www.englandlab.com/). He hypothesizes that life is thermodynamically expedient, the universe's way of maximizing entropy as best it can. If true, it suggests that life is probable, if not certain.

This theory jives well with the undisputed truth that Hell is exothermic.

 

For the why part, I've been following Jeremy England's work (https://www.englandlab.com/). He hypothesizes that life is thermodynamically expedient, the universe's way of maximizing entropy as best it can. If true, it suggests that life is probable, if not certain.

I agree that life is essentially a catalyst, one that causes a more rapid approach to thermodynamic equilibrium than would otherwise be seen without the catalyst. Life is a process that has figured out how to live off dis-equilibria, and I think that may explain how life is sustained. But I don't see how that gives any insight on the why question. Nickel-palladium catalyst doesn't just pop into existence everywhere you find hydrogen, so why should life appear in places where it can?

 

What is the probability that life evolved on this one planet of this one solar system? We have a 14 billion year EM record...........and no signs of life. No modulation....no spectra.....no MTV. 14 billion years in a multitude of galaxies.......no synthetic/artificial signals. And very few unknown EM events. One would think if there is life out there......we would have many puzzling/uni-regional signals.

How can one consider life natural? Why is that the official assumption?

So a natural process causes a unique condition?

Life IS the only unique condition detected so far.

All other conditions have cosmos density. Life is the only singularity that has been detected.

 

I agree that life is essentially a catalyst, one that causes a more rapid approach to thermodynamic equilibrium than would otherwise be seen without the catalyst. Life is a process that has figured out how to live off dis-equilibria, and I think that may explain how life is sustained. But I don't see how that gives any insight on the why question. Nickel-palladium catalyst doesn't just pop into existence everywhere you find hydrogen, so why should life appear in places where it can?

He looks at molecular formation from the perspective of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics (before he was a physicist, he was a molecular biologist working on protein folding). His idea is that, given some external source of energy -- e.g., solar radiation -- certain otherwise statistically rare molecular arrangements appear with much higher probability than would be expected. These arrangements tend to be the ones that maximize the dissipation of work/energy. I recommend watching some of the videos in the link I gave above; they're very accessible, deep but not requiring specialist's knowledge.

 

What is the probability that life evolved on this one planet of this one solar system? We have a 14 billion year EM record...........and no signs of life. No modulation....no spectra.....no MTV. 14 billion years in a multitude of galaxies.......no synthetic/artificial signals. And very few unknown EM events. One would think if there is life out there......we would have many puzzling/uni-regional signals.

It's hard enough for us to resolve individual stars in our closest neighbor galaxy, so it's not surprising that we're not picking up TV channels from distant galaxies. Furthermore, the EM spectrum is really wide, the universe is really noisy, and we tend to transmit at the lowest power possible for the task at hand (as might other civilizations).

Even if the majority of galaxies had dozens of civilizations, I'd expect we'd have to be extremely lucky to detect it. Needle in a haystack doesn't begin to describe the problem space.

Life IS the only unique condition detected so far.

All other conditions have cosmos density. Life is the only singularity that has been detected.

This reflects the limits of our tools. We're biased to think that Earth is special because we have a first-hand perspective on it, but we can't assume uniqueness for our little patch, simply because we haven't seen nearly enough of the other patches.