NASA Sending Probe to Saturn

Plissken writes "Nasa along with the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency have launched a towards Saturn in hopes of obtaining vital data to help understand the mysterious, vast region. The Cassini-Huygens mission is composed of two elements: The Cassini orbiter that will orbit Saturn and it's moons for four years, and the Huygens probe will dive into the depths of Titan and land on it's surface. If all goes well, more than 200 scientists worldwide will study the data collected."

Comments

Re:Why all the fuss over finding primordial life?

[WegianWarrior]

But if we found life on Titan, it would likely be in the very early stages and it wouldn't be particularly interesting. So I don't see why we're making a huge fuss over it.

Taking this logic to the extreme, we should only bother to look for not just life, but actuall civilications at least as advanced as our own.. right?

Wrong! By looking somewhere close and looking for something roughtly simular to the various forms of life we know from earth we can learn a lot. First and foremost, we'll learn that the earth isn't anything special. There is life out there, not just in our imagination, not just around distant stars, but basicly right out there in our own back yard. True, there could exist siliconbased life in the volcanoes on Venus - possible with a life-chemestry analog to the one we find in creatures here on earth that lives near black smokers - but it's a good idea to go look places where we and our probes can surive first, isn't it?

And maybe we are looking in the right place for the right thing. You never know before you actually takes a look...

Whoa dude

[madmarcel]

Like dude...you can assume "there's guaranteed to be more life *somewhere* in the galaxy" all you want, nobody is gonna believe you until we actually find some (proof of) life on/in a place other than earth.

Let's start by looking in the obvious places first.
It doesn't matter so much WHAT we find, as long as we find something. Then we can see whether [we|life on earth] is a fluke or not. (And we can see whether or not there are/have been paralllellls in the development of either - or whether one is the origin of the other...etc etc :)

And obviously, by looking in obvious (and familiar) places, we increase the probability that we will actually recognize the life-forms that we find!

e.g.
Silicon life-forms? Sure...eh..ok...how do you know it's alive? What might be a hundred years to carbon-based life-forms might be 1 second of comparative time to a silicon based-lifeform (or even the inverse of that :) How does either one see/know that the other is alive? How does a silicon-based lifeform perceive the world? Does it actually have senses? Do those senses overlap our own?

Let's start by finding alien bacteria and stuff like that....much easier :)

Oh, just a thought:

** If NASA *DO* find signs of life on another planet then I think the same thing will happen as what happened with the so-called 'martian' bacteria that supposedly arrived on earth by hopping on a comet/asteroid/rock -> We will end up with endless arguments over cross-contamination and whether or not we put those bugs there in the first place.
Space might be freakin' cold and a very convenient vacuum, but it doesn't stop pollen and bacteria and god knows what else from happily travelling along with our space-probes :o
(And I need someone to confirm this: Was there stuff growing on the outside of ol' MIR? or is that a myth?)

I was going to add another bit on how religious groups might get upset when the scientific community announces they've found life on other planets....but that's just asking for a troll-rating (:o (Hmm...some cults/sects would be ecstatic I'd imagine ;)