NASA's Press Conference December 2 To Reveal "Astrobiology" Finding!!

reply to post by MissSmartypants


Or, you know, they found some cells on Martian soil holding onto their niche.

reply to post by WideOpenSpace


And if this is not an 'Astrobiology Discovery', then we should string NASA by the heels from the nearest lamp-post.

Seriously, they haven't exactly shown good form in being 'average man friendly' when it comes to the titles of their press releases.

As you say, hopefully this is the real deal. This will become the crack that bust the dam in my humble opinion.

Watch for all the pseudo-sceptic bar stewards doing a 180 over the next few weeks here on ATS. Futile efforts to say they were 'only being reasonably sceptical' will be pure BS in many cases. Real sceptics are awesome and necessary; pseudo-sceptics are a thorn in the side of Astrobiology / any form of 'alternative' research.

www.dailymail.co.uk...


Nothing exciting at all, waste of time!

It's worth pointing out that one of the speakers is;

Biologist Steven Benner is part of the "Titan Team" at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Another news source..

Link

Is Nasa about to announce it has found alien life on another planet? That was the gist of the headlines last night after the US space agency issued an invitation to a press conference this Thursday promising an 'astrobiology discovery'.

From further gathering from last nights announcement from me - it is highly likely that a discovery on Earth have proved the possible existence of life not just on Titan, but may be other bodies within our Solar System too. This is going to be quite significant - probably among the greatest discoveries from NASA because it will no doubt tell humanity how to find "genesis"

I heard today that the discovery relates to an extremophile they found living in arsenic.Obviously all extremophiles have wider implications in relation to the search for ET life, or how widespread life may be throughout the universe, but if what I've heard today is correct, it's going to be a major disappointment... which is exactly what I expected in the first place.

NASA's findings never live up to the hype that precedes them.

IRM

Originally posted by minkey53
www.dailymail.co.uk...


Nothing exciting at all, waste of time!

i know it
second line

The nature of the press conference has been revealed...

There is a thread on here called 'Details of NASA extra terrestrial life conference revealed'

Sorry but not sure how to do a link to it..

reply to post by InfaRedMan


How is that disappointing? I know some of ATS ( I do not include you in this criticism) think NASA will wheel out an alien from Zeta Reticuli and say "see! look at this...it's ET" *rolls eyes* but finding alternative carbon-based life forms is a BIG discovery.

It means life did not start once, but TWICE on Earth. Our planet is home to not just carbon-based, but arsenic based too. If we locate methane-based, which is HIGHLY probably now - it means Titan has occupants.

If life started twice on Earth, including in the most hostile habitat on Earth - NASA will argue that life could probably exist on Titan and still on remote parts of Mars. Data has been located on activities of potential life on Titan and Mars, but no one understand the potential chemical constitution to confirm. Especially if the only life we know is carbon based, enjoying the luxury of our chemical rich planet.

This is from their website :

WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

www.nasa.gov...

You will notice what they say ?

It is a impact for the search for evidence.....

It's not evidence of......

Life on Titan ?

Despite these biological possibilities, there are formidable obstacles to life on Titan, and any analogy to Earth is inexact. At a vast distance from the Sun, Titan is frigid (a fact exacerbated by the anti-greenhouse effect of its cloud cover), and its atmosphere lacks CO2. Because of these difficulties, scientists such as Jonathan Lunine have viewed Titan less as a likely habitat for life, than as an experiment for examining theories on the conditions that prevailed prior to the appearance of life on Earth.[128] While life itself may not exist, the prebiotic conditions of the Titanian environment and the associated organic chemistry remain of great interest in understanding the early history of the terrestrial biosphere.[117] Using Titan as a prebiotic experiment involves not only observation through spacecraft, but laboratory experiment, and chemical and photochemical modeling on Earth.[119]

An alternate explanation for life's hypothetical existence on Titan has been proposed: if life were to be found on Titan, it would be statistically more likely to have originated from Earth than to have appeared independently, a process known as panspermia. It is theorized that large asteroid and cometary impacts on Earth's surface have caused hundreds of millions of fragments of microbe-laden rock to escape Earth's gravity. Calculations indicate that a number of these would encounter many of the bodies in the solar system, including Titan.[129][130] On the other hand, Jonathan Lunine has argued that any living things in Titan's cryogenic hydrocarbon lakes would need to be so different chemically from Earth life that it would not be possible for one to be the ancestor of the other.[131]

en.wikipedia.org...(moon)

Originally posted by infinite
reply to post by InfaRedMan

 

It means life did not start once, but TWICE on Earth. Our planet is home to not just carbon-based, but arsenic based too. If we locate methane-based, which is HIGHLY probably now - it means Titan has occupants.

Possibly. We may also be looking at an organism that simply evolved to live/thrive in arsenic. Nature has given them ample time to mutate into such. I think it's possible than many moons in our solar system have some form of life on them. The Martian aqueducts also carry a high possibility.

Where most of my disappointment lays is in the way NASA has handled the media surrounding this event... and the embarrassing internet frenzy in reaction to this news conference is testament to this. It just feels like media whoring infinite. I'm sure they were well aware that the reaction would be as such. They just could have done it in a more sensible fashion. That's my opinion in any case.

IRM

reply to post by InfaRedMan


Well, that's the media for you.

It will be a bizarre set of affairs if sensationalism was divorced from the mainstream media.

reply to post by MissSmartypants


Foxnews at noon, megan kelly, is doing a segment on the Nasa Announcement. She will have an astronaut on as well for the segment. She used the term extraterretrial life, but we know how that goes.

Noon time US Central Time zone, 1 Eastern.

The journalistic leak stating that the NASA announcement tomorrow will be about Earth organisms that use arsenic in place of phosphorus, metabolically, may well be correct. I see that one of the participants is Dr.Felisa Wolfe-Simon. Dr. Wolf-Simon has been working to find what she calls 'Arsenolife' in California's Mono Lake, which has a high concentration of arsenic. Her work is funded by the NASA Astrobiological Institute. The question of the moment appears to be this: Will such organisms merely be 'extremophiles', highly adapted organisms from the same tree of life that gave rise to human beings, or are they representatives of a wholly independent kind of life? As poster 'Infinite' has observed, the latter possibility is a remarkable one. Life beginning in two separate instances on Earth is very close to being as significant as finding life on another planet. If life is so prone to begin that it does so repeatedly on a single planet, and under notably different conditions, the ubiquity of life in this solar system and others is virtually assured. Many biologists have been quite conservative on this point, tending to think that the beginning of life is quite rare. The Times of London had an article on Dr. Felisa Wolf-Simon and her work, some months ago:www.timesonline.co.uk...

I get fed up with people complaining that it's NASA misleading people, or NASA making it sound more exciting then it is. The NASA PRESS RELEASE does nothing of the sort, it's the media and some individuals with wild imaginations that build it all up into some sort of fantastic expectation, just so everyone is disappointed when the 'dull' announcement is made.
The announcements are not 'dull' or a 'let down' to serious scientists, they are anything but. The problem is people want to be kept 'in the loop' with things like this, things are which are quite frankly beyond the majority of the general public, but cry when it isn't 'exciting' enough. It annoys me even more when people whine that it shouldn't even be in the news, then settle down to see what the latest is on their crappy football team, or what some 'celebrity' did at the weekend.
There are actually millions of people around the world that are interested in this news, so if you don't like it don't bother reading it! Stop hijacking our stories and then ripping them up in a temper because it didn't meet the expectations the MEDIA set up for you.
The stupid thing is, if NASA and every other scientific organisation doesn't bother 'boring' you with this stuff, you start whimpering that you're kept in the dark and they're hiding something.
GROW UP.

reply to post by MissSmartypants

I've just posted a thread regarding DARPA's X37B and its due back.
Here's a funny thing what if it went up empty and is returning with passengers.

Early christmas present for all.

Seriously though, the timing is good for your thread.

reply to post by AgentSmith


Yeah, the media doesn't help with their hyping. Fox just said they'd be talking about it next, and before going to commercial what did they do? Of course they played the music from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Originally posted by jazz10
reply to post by MissSmartypants

 

I've just posted a thread regarding DARPA's X37B and its due back.
Here's a funny thing what if it went up empty and is returning with passengers.

Early christmas present for all.

Seriously though, the timing is good for your thread.

If it talks in some monotone garbled female with a bald head talking about V'ger, i say we relaunch it back into space, turn off the telescopes, and place a quarantined beacon at the edge of our solar system.

reply to post by Ross 54


I saw a special program on her and the lake in California, and I remember saying that, to me, her searching sounded like the most likely way of finding other life beside ourselves in the near future. I always thought we would find something in the ocean, but her work is not far off that idea. So that would be exciting, still, I think anyway. But then my first thought when I heard this was about Cassini and Saturn's moons.

don't get your hopes up people. it could turn out to be nothing at all. i just saw this on fox news, and from what i can tell it doesn't sound like nasa has found our neighbours in green lol. from my guess it sounds like nasa have just found the right chemistry in the universe for life to evolve.