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NASA's LCROSS Spacecraft Discovers Life On Earth
Matt_dk writes "On Saturday, Aug. 1, 2009, the LCROSS spacecraft successfully completed its first Earth-look calibration of its science payload. 'The Earth-look was very successful' said Tony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist. 'The instruments are all healthy and the science teams was able to collect additional data that will help refine our calibrations of the instruments.' During the Earth observations, the spacecraft's spectrometers were able to detect the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and possibly vegetation."
Apparently there world be no baseline metric for finding intelligent life on Slashdot these days.
Turns out they were just over Detroit.
I almost fell out of my chair when I read this
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
We should mount a robotic mission to this place right away.
-
At the same time, we're still waiting from the SETI's calibration and observation to discover any trace of *Intelligence* on earth.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Fail...
If intelligent life forms do exist on earth then why haven't they contacted me?
Unexpect the expected!
And I, for one, welcome our new vegetation overlords.
The search for intelligent life continues...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
... none of it was intelligent.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
It's life, Jim, just as we know it, just as we know it, Jim.
Beam me sideways, Scotty, nobody on this planet knows which way is up.
2 predictions:
* Lots of slashdot users trying to post something witty about why this is a new story
* trolls saying how this is everything we should expect and therefore should ignore.
to all those who disengaged their brain I ask, what would you do in their position? Hope your instruments work as designed without testing them? Either way, please devise a better test for life as we know it than life as we know it.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Theres no intelligent live down here!!
Doesn't it suffer from a serious risk of overfitting?
I really thought it was an Onion article...
A far more interesting result would have been if they hadn't been able to detect life on Earth as the inability to do so from such a close distance would make detecting Earth-like life elsewhere in the galaxy a laughable prospect.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
.. that if our machine can identify life on Earth all by itself, then we can possibly send it somewhere and it might be able to detect another planet or moon which has Earth-like life.
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
Clearly this planet has many forms of life that must be feared for their religions and copyright laws! We must sterilize this place for peace and stability!
It should be: NASA' LCROSS Spacecraft Discovers Earth-Like Life On Earth
-- How many sigs are as useless as this one?
They must have detected the huge tree in my front yard, it's the only vegetation on the planet besides a few trillion other plants.
- Intriguing.
NASA discovers light from the sun, and no atmosphere on the moon.
Could the summary be any more vacuous? It could have been a bit more explanatory about the nature of the satellite. (i.e. to find water on the moon - source: http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/mission.htm)
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
They're outside of the faraday cage basement you're living in.
The spacecraft Galileo, on its way to Jupiter, performed a related experiment back in 1990. Details were published in Nature
Isn't there a big difference between detecting water, methane, oxygen, ozone, and so on, on the earth, where they are conveniently in the atmosphere, and on the moon?
Note to spacefellowship:
I'm going to save google some bandwidth and expand the acronym:
LCrOSS=lunar crater observation & sensing satellite
Pointless calibration.
So, they just calibrated their instruments to detect massive urbanization, a huge population, and massive amounts of water?!
They should be calibrating for FAR weaker readings, unless they expect to find a civilization just as obvious as ours.
Heck, all they would have needed to do is walk outside, or at least calibrate their instruments to detect far FAR less of what they are looking for.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
.' During the Earth observations, the spacecraft's spectrometers were able to detect the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and possibly vegetation."
Just to see a Fart-in-a-jar.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
A experiment to detect intellegent life couldn't be tested before sending into space.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Looking for intelligent life on earth. Scanning. Scanning. Scanning...
Segmentation fault. Core dumped.
detect the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and possibly vegetation
What? No oil detector? This thing is useless!
Probably because, you know, they are girls and they are intelligent? That would probably explain it pretty well.
Meanwhile, we necromancers remain hidden and oblivious...
"FIRST comPOST" ....would have been more like it. see you're now modded as offtopic!
...if it had found "intelligent life" that would have been a false positive.
wwwwwAAAAAAAAlllllllll----------eeeeeeeeeeeeee
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
So it mentions that they detect levels of methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide, etc. etc.
In an uninhabited planet, methane and oxygen are two completely incompatible chemicals (over a time period which is considered tiny on astronomical scales, these two chemicals to react to form carbon dioxide.) Therefore, the coexistence of methane and oxygen implies that a process is actively forming these two molecules, so that an equilibrium is reached between production and decay. This process, in other words, is photosynthesis, which in turn, implies life.
The idea is that if we can detect incompatible chemicals in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets, then we have a strong clue that life is on that planet, and what better way to calibrate our sensors than by pointing it at ourselves?
Obvious cat is obvious
And what does say that life has to have the form that we know here on Earth?
What if there is life on a planet that actually uses Fluorine or Chlorine instead of Oxygen? It may not be life as we know it, but the environment may have forced that kind of life to evolve.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The satellite discovered life on Earth. Fine, we all knew that there is some. Now, if we were only able to positively establish an existence of the intelligent life, that would be even better.
Life is defined as something you can have sex with. I don't think creatures eating chlorine fits the definition, unless you want to bleach your...
Lacroix! Sweetie - Lacroix!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As you said, they are intelligent life forms.
This was a test to be sure everything is working properly before being launched.
So the only forms of life on Earth are female humans?
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Funny thing about the environment is that every (chemical) environment has been created by the same process : a supernova. This is a rather specific nuclear reaction that collapses at a specific point. The ratios between the resulting elements is quite well known, and it's more-or-less the same across the universe (it is these ratios we use to detect the distance to faraway stars (their redshift), and to determine the age of those stars).
That means that you're actually quite sure what the concentrations are of different chemical elements, even in other starsystems. Then you acknowledge their relative weight, and that planets start out as totally melted : basically Iron sinks, and so large quantities will not be readily avaible in the sunlight once the surface hardens. The element that will be abundantly available is Carbon (athmosphere of young earth was something like 60-80% co and co2). Availability of elements in the athmosphere is a BIG plus for procurement. Another element that will be present in large quantities, and especially in the athmosphere is Hydrogen.
The only real option for life to be based on other than Carbon is Silicium. But it's heavier than Carbon, and thus will tend to be buried, or at least more of it will be buried compared to Carbon.
OTOH earth based life is also quite dependant on a relatively rare element : Nitrogen. However any farmer can tell you the consequences of this, and how it makes large pieces of land totally dead if you're not careful about Nitrogen management. Even the bible clearly states the necessity of allowing soil nitrogenation (not in those words obviously), so perhaps life on other planets could similarly use very rare elements.
But whatever elements life that's fed by sunlight uses, they have to be relatively abundant, and light, they have to be solid in pure form and have to have lots of chemical possibilities (and the elements with the most possibilities you will find under column IV on the periodic table). Perhaps there are more options than C or Si, but there aren't many.
Apparently you've never been made it to the South.
Does this probe send back its data "in the clear", I mean, in an easily readable format ? Or is it heavily encrypted and in some obscure NASA-proprietary format ?
The reason I ask, are those Apollo landing site photos released a few weeks ago. If any HAM amateur or whatever would have happened to receive these images while they were being sent to Earth, before anybody at NASA had a chance to "touch them up", I'd be mighty interested in seeing those.
Not to discount their achievement...
and I do understand that this is a really
great stride in technology here.
However, is this not the equivalent of,
"New NASA probe declares Earth's sun HOT"
I am not trying to be a smartass here.
However, if the technology simply determines of the planet COULD support life, then assumes there IS life, that wouldn't be a very big stride...
Just another comment from the Pundit Panel over here.
**Disclaimer: I have absolutely no sources for this besides my own thoughts, and am just trying to encourage people to think about this**
**P.S.: I reserve the right to be absolutely DEAD WRONG**
This comment was laboriously planned and extremely well thought out by Mike Donaghy @ http://mikedonaghy.org
Really makes you wonder if it makes sense to go searching for ET life with such methods at this point...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator (EVE)
Watch out for the plasma cannon!
Late last year the planned UHCD (Unrefined HydroCarbon Detector) unit was ditched for a PGMCD (Potentially Generous Media Corporation Detector) unit.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you can't discern a sarcastic remark without visual assistance, I think it's *you* that shouldn't be here.
Don't worry I alerted them about the typo under the picture. It should be 360,000 km not 360,00.
Your definition of "relatively rare" is a bit off. And I quote: "Nitrogen is the largest single constituent of the Earth's atmosphere (78.082% by volume of dry air, 75.3% by weight in dry air). It is created by fusion processes in stars, and is estimated to be the 7th most abundant chemical element by mass in the universe." But sure, if you wanna go with 'rare'. And I hate to tell you this, not all environments, chemical or otherwise, were created by supernovae. Do you really believe that our sun went nova in order to create our solar system? Please, take an astronomy class that covers the life cycle of stars and the effects of their creation.
The key is the nucleogenesis. Fluorine is orders of magnitude rarer than oxygen, and chlorine too. Silicon and Sulphur may be better candidates to substitute carbon and oxygen.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
> During the Earth observations, the spacecraft's spectrometers were able to detect
> the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and
> possibly vegetation.
I recall the Viking landings on Mars. They ran their life detection kits and wow! Life. Maybe. Here are a bunch of other theories that account for it but not requiring life.
Repeat ad nauseam with other spacecraft.
So instead of pointing it at Earth and saying, hey, it detects life! why not pretend it was pointed at Venus and say, hey, got all the same readings. But is it life?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...bow to our new Earthling overlords... wait a minute...
To clarify : Nitrogen is relatively rare in soil (certainly compared to either water or carbon), but absolutely necessary for plant growth.
Furthermore, the ratio of Nitrogen to Carbon or Oxygen, for example, is dismal (less than 80 gr nitrogen for every kilogram carbon). There is much more carbon, much more oxygen, on the earth "as a whole". The first life forms must have been confronted with an atmosphere that contained little or no nitrogen, but almost exclusively hydrogen and carbon oxide (mono or di), much like Venus's and Mars's atmospheres are today.
Relative amounts of elements on earth (and elsewhere)
And yes "relatively rare" means rare relative to other things. Carbon is just about the most abundant element you touch, but it is "relatively rare" compared to water, for example.
That's like saying this 20 year old car is "relatively new"......as compared to the Model T. To say that it is 'relatively rare' is to suggest that it actually IS, in some fashion, rare. It's not. You'll find it in every active star in the Universe. You'll find it in every (known) living organism. Explain how it's in any way 'rare'. Its ratio to Carbon is only 3:1 (favor Carbon), that's not rare. But yes, compared to the most abundant elements in the universe (Hydrogen and Helium), it's "relatively rare". However on EARTH Helium, the second most abundant element in the universe, is 'relatively rare' compared to Nitrogen.
That is assuming an even distribution of the elements.
There is still a potential of different types of life.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Good news, everyone!
"And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth." -- Monty Python
Put down the PS2 controller and go outside.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
because intelligent life only contact other intelligent life.
anybody who hasn't been contacted yet is a moron.