TED talks: Freeman Dyson "Let's look for life in the outer solar system."

Invented the hypothetical Dyson Sphere.
Interesting guy, and great talk.

reply to post by bloodline
Good call, Bloodline. I admire Mr Dyson a great deal and enjoyed his talk. He's an inspired thinker. A few ATSers pride themselves on 'thinking out of the box' whilst ignoring the 'box.' Dyson doesn't have this weakness. His ideas are firmly based on existing and accepted principles (the box). From that point he conjures up real possibilities...

Physicist and futurist Freeman Dyson says we should search for extraterrestrial life where it is easiest to find, even if the conditions there are not ideal for life as we know it. Specifically, he says spacecraft should look for flowers – similar to those found in Earth's Arctic regions – on icy moons and comets in the outer solar system. "I would say the strategy in looking for life in the universe [should be] to look for what's detectable, not what's probable," he said on Saturday at a conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Could flowers bloom on icy moon Europa?

If anyone's heard of him, it tends to be for the Dyson Sphere or as a fictional character in Star Trek books. He's been putting out ideas for decades. It's men like him that dream the dreams that inspire scientists in practice. Check his biography and awards. A very bright light indeed

I posted a thread on Dyson's ideas about looking for life a while ago. It didn't set the place on fire, but a couple of the bright lights on ATS had a look...A Different Way to Search for Life?

Originally posted by Kandinsky
reply to post by bloodline

 

Good call, Bloodline. I admire Mr Dyson a great deal and enjoyed his talk. He's an inspired thinker. A few ATSers pride themselves on 'thinking out of the box' whilst ignoring the 'box.' Dyson doesn't have this weakness. His ideas are firmly based on existing and accepted principles (the box). From that point he conjures up real possibilities...

I agree, it's why I can't even really take much of the UFO forum very seriously. It's so much drivel but I get an occasional kick out of it. This forum is much more conducive to real discussion. No one is in here claiming to be an alien at least. There's nothing too outlandish for conventional science at the moment. We are living in a sci-fi age although sadly some posters would like to live in star trek or star wars, and miss the fact that science talks about completely out there topics such as relativity and dark matter cosmology.

Originally posted by Kandinsky

Physicist and futurist Freeman Dyson says we should search for extraterrestrial life where it is easiest to find, even if the conditions there are not ideal for life as we know it. Specifically, he says spacecraft should look for flowers – similar to those found in Earth's Arctic regions – on icy moons and comets in the outer solar system. "I would say the strategy in looking for life in the universe [should be] to look for what's detectable, not what's probable," he said on Saturday at a conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Could flowers bloom on icy moon Europa?

Great excerpt. I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine who is a physicist who works on measuring aspects of neutrinos that pass through the earth. The discussion was about finding a planet with an atmosphere and water and supplanting cold resistant plant life onto the surface to jump start life. If successful it would, in time, create a planet rich in oxygen and habitable by mankind. Mars come to mind?