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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.
For a 10-hour workweek to be productive enough to support a "leisure society with resources for all" will require significant advances in materials, economics, physics, engineering, and especially politics.
I think politics is the largest impediment to a leisure society. We already have the productive capacity. Our needs could be met if people weren't constantly being convinced to buy stuff they don't need. But our economic system requires constant growth and profits. I have said before on this site that I think Capitalism is holding us back. And politics is the only way to change that.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Good question. NASA seems to be on a search obsessively focused on the concept "liquid water touching bedrock equals life, anywhere without liquid water touching bedrock equals no life". There's so many things wrong with this concept I don't even know where to start. We don't even know if the first forms of life on our own planet developed that way, let alone whether it's common or rare and whether other possibilities are common or rare.
It bothers me because it causes them to obsess over certain bodies (Mars, Europa) while ignoring others. Personally, if I was hunting for life, of all the places in the solar system outside of Earth, I'd pick Titan (which usually gets ignored because it's so cold).
* It's bigger (although not heavier) than Mercury, and has a predominantly nitrogen atmosphere denser than Earth, with a full meteorological cycle.
* We know that there's complex organic chemistry going on en masse there. Today.
* We've detected dozens of types of complex organic chemicals already even with our limited study and we know we're only scratching the surface. Unidentified chemicals around 10000 daltons have been detected in the atmosphere. There's probably even more complex chemicals on the surface. There's so much complex organics there that it blankets the surface in places.
* There's not one type of liquid on Titan but multiple - an underground sea (which reaches the surface through cryovolcanoes, we're pretty certain) and surface seas of hydrocarbons of what appear to be significantly varying compositions.
* Titan's methane is regenerating itself. We don't know why. On Mars they treat the presence of unexpected methane as an incredible sign of possible life, on Titan it's treated just as a "Huh, weird" thing
* Before the details of what was going on on Titan it was theorized in peer-reviewed research that if life existed on Titan, it would most likely consume ethane and acetylene as fuel, burn it with hydrogen instead of oxygen, and produce methane instead of CO2. Subsequent measurements revealed that Titan's surface is unexpectedly ethane-poor, highly acetlyene poor versus how much is being produced in the atmosphere, and one tenative study reveals that hydrogen is disappearing at the surface too.
* A recent study shows that if it reached sufficient concentration, any acrylonitrile dissolved in Titan's hydrocarbon lakes would naturally form membranes with properties almost identical to the properties of phospholipid membranes on Earth. It just so happens that we've already detected acrylonitrile in Titan's atmosphere.
And on and on. Does any of this mean that there "is" life on Titan? No, not at all. But it's orders of magnitude more evidence than we have for life being at any of the other "popular" places like Mars with its peroxide-rich regolith that destroys organics on contact or Europa's undersea ocean that we know virtually zilch about. And there's an awful lot of mysteries about Titan that warrant solving, life or not. For example, even if there was some non-organic catalyst on Titan breaking down acetylene on the surface, it'd sure be amazing and potentially quite useful to know what sort of natural inorganic catalyst could do that at 100K. And even if Titan turns out to be the worst case - a "frozen early Earth" - well, geez, the knowledge we'd gain toward understanding where we came from in studying the organic chemistry there would be amazing.
Trump's plan to get rid of Mueller appears to be 'be so guilty of so many things that Mueller works himself to death.'
When the next "cometary visitor" from the Oort Cloud comes knocking - whether it is 100 years in the future or 10,000, you had better hope for humanity's sake that there are Space Nutters out there, because humanity would be toast.
You personally may have no long term plans, but if mankind wants to live as long enough to speciate, we have to clean up our act - with resource usage and population control here on earth, and branching out beyond earth. If we don't radically change our economic model, then the latter choice is the only choice for survival our our species.
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
Nonsense - the vast majority of current production goes to disposable novelties. To take cars as an example: if we instead built only a handful of different models, all of which relied on standardized, easily replaceable/repairable parts, and were designed for easy maintenance with a design life of several decades, we could radically reduce the number of cars produced with no loss in functionality, rather than selling enough new cars to replace every car in the country every 12 years. Reduce virtually all of them to sturdy golf carts instead and the savings would be even more dramatic. Would it require a cultural shift? Absolutely, but nothing substantial would be lost.
Something like 50-75% of global food production gets discarded in landfills thanks to cosmetic defects - lumpy potatoes, bread crusts from sandwich factories, spoilage at the store, etc - all a complete waste thanks to inefficiencies that aren't worth fixing because production so radically outstrips demand.
And don't even get me started on pretty much everything sold by Walmart and the like - designed to be as cheap as possible, despite the fact that doing so tends to raise the per-annum ownership costs dramatically.
In the US worker productivity has increased 3-5x over the last century - reducing work hours by 75% and the per-capita productivity will be roughly the same as it was a century ago, when it was obviously sufficient. Would it mean a reduction in material wealth? Possibly, but that's a whole separate conversation. All we *need* is food, water, and shelter from the elements, all of which can be provided at extremely low cost. Even most modern medical care is relatively inexpensive pretty much everywhere in the civilized world, at least so long as we stay away from end-of-life drastic measures. Everything else is cultural expectation, and many studies have shown it has minimal impact on happiness or quality of life.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.