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NASA's Chief Scientist Predicts Evidence For Life Beyond Earth By 2025
An anonymous reader writes: Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA, predicts we're not far off from finding evidence for alien life. At a panel discussion yesterday, she said, "I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years." She added, "We know where to look. We know how to look. In most cases we have the technology, and we're on a path to implementing it." Stofan thinks putting astronauts on Mars will be a big part of that goal. As efficient as robot missions are, she thinks it'll take humans digging and cracking rocks to find definitive evidence for life on other worlds.
Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA, made a wildly speculative, headline-grabbing claim in an attempt to gain more funding.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Much worse than space nutters are you miserable bean counters. Let's not do anything or go anywhere because "my God the expense!". Let's carry on with pointless resource ears to enrich the already insanely wealthy even further.
I think it's less " anywhere without liquid water touching bedrock equals no life" than we, at present, have have no direct evidence to suggest life is definitely possible elsewhere, and if it is we will likely have a much more difficult time recognizing it, as well as guessing where, specifically, it might be located (Titan is a big place after all). Basically it's the sort of work that would almost certainly require boots on the ground - its not worth even seriously attempting such a search without a proper laboratory - unless you stumble on a macroscopic colony of something that has experienced convergent evolution to resemble Earth-life, you're unlikely to be able to recognize it with the limited mechanisms available to a probe.
Plus there's the whole factor that we're still uncertain just how likely biogenesis is, while panspermia is almost certainly possible within a star system, and there's a pretty good chance that Earth life or, at the very least, DNA, has littered the surface of the other planets, where it might be able to take root if conditions were similar enough to Earth to support the chemistry.
And of course, finally, there's the fact that we don't yet have the technology to meaningfully explore an ice-world like Titan, or even Europa. Some ideas, sure, but nothing within decades of deployment on current budgets. Plus the time and energy cost of getting a probe there is much greater than to Mars.
Yes, there a certain "I'm looking for my dropped keys under the streetlight, because that's where I can see" aspect to it all, but since we don't actually know where the "keys" might have been "dropped", that's an eminently logical place to start the search.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Humans operate it either way, the only major difference between a robot and a physical presence is higher latency for robots, and orders of magnitude greater cost for humans.
That is not the only major difference. Humans can create new tools and are vastly more flexible in what they can do than any robot. It's more than mere latency. Furthermore there are some bits of information that simply cannot be obtained by a robot. There is a huge difference between looking through a webcam at an ocean and actually standing at the shore yourself. There is information about humans that can only be obtained by sending humans. There are economic benefits to developing the technology to send humans that go far beyond the mission itself.
Going to other planets isn't just a geology project. There are some things we will only learn if we are there ourselves.