Extrasolar Planet Could Harbor Life

BlueMorpho writes with a link to a Space.com article about a recently discovered extrasolar planet that may be able to harbor 'life as we know it.' Orbiting around the star Gliese 581 is a small rocky ball that might have the same liquid ocean and drifting continent configuration we're familiar with. The find may be unique in all of space exploration as this planet appears to be within a habitable band of temperatures for life, and is categorically not a gas giant. "The bottom line is exciting ...The conditions for life could be there, but is life itself? As yet, there's no way to know unless the planet has spawned beings that are at least as clever as we are. As part of the SETI Institute's Project Phoenix, we twice aimed large antennas in the direction of Gliese 581, hoping to pick up a signal that would bespeak technology ... Neither search turned up a signal."

Comments

Trivial or retarded, either way yes you're boring

[Chris Burke]

i am not a neocon,

Oh please. Save me the bullshit. I don't care what your social beliefs are, because I'm not an idiot who can only think in one-dimension. The neo-cons grew within the Republican aparatus, and thus share their social stances for largely political reasons, but that's not relevent to what they are.

Neo-cons are the combination of the worst aspects of the Liberals and the Conservatives.

Like the Libearls, they believe that they can change the world for the better without having any understanding of what it is they're trying to solve.
Like the Conservatives, they believe that the best tool for executing foreign policy is military force.

Thus "spreading Democracy" by invading Iraq. You may not self-identify as a neo-con, but you don't self-identify as an idiot either, and you are clearly both. I'm not referring to what club you're a part of, I'm referring to the nature of your reality-deficient philosophy, and it's 100% neo-con.

"liberal warhawk" == "neo-con who supports gay marriage". Big deal. If the neo-con philosophy hadn't turned out to be such a flop in reality I'm sure we'd be seeing them start to pop up on the Democratic side of the

But it is funny hearing you all-caps screaming "respond to me not a caricature", Captain Straw Man. Keep it up, the ironing is delicious.

i am saying that if it is starkly clear there are no other choices, then the little green men get wiped out, adios, hasta la vista baby

In an absolutely trivial and meaningless case where all humans are in a box and all aliens are in another and in the human box there's a button that kills all the aliens and a timer that if it expires before the button is pushed kills all the humans, sure, anyone would agree what to do. Like all such trivial statements, it's irrelevent and extremely boring because reality is never going to be like that. Do you get it? Reality will never be like that.

So the problem is that in any real situation your interpretation of "starkly clear" is highly suspect. Your previous assessments of this nature are -- how shall I say this generously -- retarded. The fact that you didn't even mention an alternative to genocide until after you had rhetorically wiped out a whole planet and had moved on to another just demonstrates how deeply ingrained your warmonger thinking goes. Along with the assumption that any choices must have already been tried, so if nothing is being tried that leaves only war. As if the existence of alternatives is the hypothetical, rather than the black-and-white decision which will never appear in reality. Which is an extremely frightening way to think, because it deliberately avoids thinking.

Your simplistic binary "us-or-them" thinking is fine and dandy up until the very second it collides with reality, at which point it becomes not just irrelevent, but also foolish and dangerous.