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.

Comments

We don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

We have no idea how far off we are from finding life on another planet, and we won't know until we actually find it. Miss Stofan should stick to gazing at the stars rather rhan into a crystal ball.

Re:We don't know

[fisted]

Came here to say this.

Re:We don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

People in high level government and academia positions have to say stuff like this to keep the funding flowing. It's an unwritten part of the job description.

Re:We don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

All this is based on the assumption that there was alien life on Mars

Re:We don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

But Ted Cruz is here NOW

Re:We don't know

[NotDrWho]

Also note that she said "strong indications of life" not actually finding definitive proof of life. I think she's probably talking something along the lines of a spectrum analysis finding a chemical in the atmosphere of a foreign body that's associated with life, or finding some microbes on Europa or something. But if we're going to do it by 2025, we'll need some pretty huge leaps forward, and very fast. And the idea that we'll be putting anyone on Mars by 2025 is laughable. Maybe 2125, and even that's unlikely given the current funding levels of most space programs.

Re:We don't know

[PolygamousRanchKid]

We have no idea how far off we are from finding life on another planet, and we won't know until we actually find it.

Will we even be able to recognize it as life, when we do find it . . . ?

Re:We don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

> Will we even be able to recognize it as life, when we do find it . . . ?

You mean like when 'we discovered' America?

Re:We don't know

[Holi]

No, she's talking about Mars, hence the "digging and cracking rocks" remark. She's grandstanding, and lets be honest she works at NASA, and it takes a certain kind of crackpot to thrive there. A brilliant crackpot, but a crackpot nonetheless.

Re:We don't know

[itzly]

Yes, when we do find live, it means we've recognized it. We may, of course, overlook life much earlier.

Re:We don't know

[Crashmarik]

Absolutely, this kind of advocacy undermines science.

Re:We don't know

[kilfarsnar]

If this life has any intelligence, it may hide form us.

Re:We don't know

[Rei]

The 'needing humans for digging and cracking rocks' remark is particularly stupid in light of the fact that the current probes already dig and crack rocks to some extent, and NASA's about to launch a probe that takes digging and rock cracking to a whole new level (although for a different purpose). The concept that humans are some sort of ideal digging, rock cracking system is crazy.

The ability to conduct science using human physical and sensory capabilities is highly limited. Science is conducted using scientific equipment. 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. Given the length of time between missions anyway due to budget constraints, the latency issue is borderline irrelevant.

Re:We don't know

[LifesABeach]

Which is easier to re-program? Also, a grad student with a bucket and a shovel could find out more about a rock then all the information of all the probes ever sent. The problem is that humans have a short shelf life, we need to get places faster.

Re:We don't know

[Rei]

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.

Re:We don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

And a fleet of probes for the same cost of sending a single grad student could map out far more varied data than a single person could find at a single site. And what exactly can a single person with just a shovel figure out that a machine with a shovel and camera could not? I'm not denying that the person could learn more, but exactly how much more and how much is that extra data worth compared to what the probe got? How much more important data would be gathered instead by a variety of instrumentation like spectrometers, which work pretty well automated?

Re:We don't know

[itzly]

In addition to looking for water, NASA also looks for anything out of the ordinary. I don't know what more you could do to find life.

Re:We don't know

[Rei]

What I really want to see is a single ambitious Titan mission that could answer nearly all of the questions we have today (while undoubtedly making tons of new ones... ah, the beauty of science ;) ):

* The craft would consist of (beyond its initial boost) a propulsion/communication module, an exploration module, and an ascent module.
* The propulsion module would use its RTG power, plus the power from the RTG of the attached exploration module, to run the ion engine, draining its tank to near empty to get into a low Titan orbit through the ionosphere.
* The explorer and attached ascent module would be released, to slowly have their orbits decay to capture, while the propulsion module would remain in low orbit acting as a communications relay (thus keeping down the weight and power requirements for the explorer).
* During its time in orbit, the propulsion module would be acting as an electrostatic "scoop" through Titan's ionosphere. Its orbit being about 1500m/s but its exhaust velocity being tens to hundreds of thousands of meters per second, it should be able to scoop up gas to use as propellant without being overcome by drag (most ion engines are propellant flexible). Over the course of a year or so it should be able to fill up its tank.
* Apart from this feature, the propulsion stage (now an orbiter) is kept simple - for example, no radar or other power hungry, heavy scientific equipment.
* After a couple weeks of losing velocity and altitude, the explorer and ascent stage's orbit will fully decay. The explorer would be a tilt-rotor aircraft with pontoons. Autorotation of the props would slow down the stage during descent, and then active powered thrust at high throttle would reduce the landing velocity.
* The ascent stage, a couple hundred kilograms, would significantly outweigh the explorer, at a several dozen kilograms. The explorer would disconnect from it before roaming the planet, an activity which would be done as a series of daily hops: 1) The craft climbs straight up like a helicopter, then 2) tilts its wings forward to fly as an airplane, in order to get maximum range out of minimum power - a few hundred kilometers per flight. 3) It flies to the location decided the day before while collecting aerial imagery, then 4) does a vertical descent. 5) On the surface it rests for about a day while it does surface science, transmits data, and waits for the next day's instructions while its RTG recharges its flight batteries.
* Small samples (a few grams each) are collected from each location, whether solid or liquid, and individually chambered in a honeycomb-like storage bay.
* With that sort of range capability and about a year of exploration time, the probe could probably explore pretty much every major interesting feature on the planet (while identifying no shortage of future targets, no doubt).
* At the end of its mission it returns to the ascent stage and docks with it. If the probe is capable of lifting the ascent stage (most likely the best option), it achieves the maximum altitude and delta-V it is capable of with its flight batteries before firing the stage; the stage would thus require somewhere around 1,7k m/s delta-V. If the ascent stage has to be launched from the surface, then it needs an additional 0,5-1k.
* In orbit it moves to an intercept orbit with the now-full propulsion stage and ejects the ascent stage. The propulsion stage docks with it and begins spiraling away from Titan to an Earth-return trajectory using the combined power of the two RTGs.
* Any of several possible recovery methods are used at Earth to recover not just the sample pack from the explorer, but any residual propellant (aka, Titan's atmosphere) from the propulsion stage tanks. If the propulsion stage uses multiple tanks then different tanks could be filled from different areas of Titan's outer atmosphere.

Sample return and detailed imagery from every interesting portio

Re:We don't know

[Immerman]

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.

Re:We don't know

[Immerman]

Really? I don't see it - science is as much about the thrill of discovery, and anticipation therof (aka speculation) as it is about the long hours of tedious work and final conclusions. Remove the former and the latter will virtually vanish.

What is does potentially undermine is scientific *authority* among the ignorant, but thanks to the concerted efforts of the Koch brothers and other anti-science campaigns, not to mention decades of science so heavily polluted by politics as to be unrecognizable (food pyramid anyone?), there is very little authority to undermine. At least in the US. Science has become just another "belief" that people feel free to ignore whenever inconvenient.

Re:We don't know

[Crashmarik]

Did Someone let the Koch brother's out of R'lyeh again ? Damn someone better get working on putting that elder sign back in place.

Re:We don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

And you should not call an adult professional woman "Miss".

Re:We don't know

[sudon't]

"We know where to look. We know how to look," Stofan added

Yeah, all it has to do is be there. The fact is, is we have no idea how life began. Until we figure that out, we can only speculate whether it exists anywhere else, whether it was a unique event, or whether it might be a common occurrence. Don't get me wrong - we should look. We should explore for the sake of exploration. But to extrapolate, or make predictions, based a sample of one, when we don't even understand that one sample? It's just wishful thinking.

Re:We don't know

[Rei]

In many ways, Titan is an easier world than Mars (no question that Europa is the odd one out, we're nowhere close to being able to get a probe to explore its oceans). If it wasn't for the distance, it'd be far easier and safer. Lower gravity plus a nice thick atmosphere makes it so easy to aerobrake and gives you tons of great ways to get around (balloons, blimps, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, tilt-rotor craft, etc). Moving by air is not only orders of magnitude faster, but - so long as the air is stable, which it appears to be on Titan - safer, too. Surface rovers can and regularly do get stuck, and sometimes it's fatal. The low gravity and dense atmosphere helps with lots of other stuff too - for example, huygens was able to touch down just with a simple parachute, no retrorockets needed (touchdown is always a very nail-biting step in any Mars mission, there's so much that can go wrong with whichever approach you use, even with all of our experience). Plus on Titan there's little electrostatic blowing dust, your radiation levels are lower, your temperatures are more stable, etc

The distance of course is the one big pain with Titan, and it majorly affects a number of things - your delta-V reqs, your transit times, your communication bandwidth / power / weight tradeoffs, your launch windows, etc, and also mandates the use of nuclear power, where on Mars it's only one of two options. Ion engines are thankfully helping to "shrink" our solar system, but no question, the distance is a real big disadvantage for Titan vs. Mars.

But it's really the only major disadvantage. It's so easy to land and get around once you're there.

Re:We don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

The concept that humans are some sort of ideal digging, rock cracking system is crazy.

The oldest myths we know of say we were created for exactly that reason:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enki#Enki_and_the_Making_of_Man

Re:We don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

If this life has any intelligence, it may be able to spell "from" correctly.

jk :)

Re:We don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

They must be cold if they want to form us into a hide.

Re:We don't know

[Immerman]

Unfortunately, from the air you can't actually do a whole lot more than from low orbit. You can get air samples and better photographs, but unless we're talking large-scale surface-dwelling life forms that won't be enough to spot them. Meanwhile, Titan is MUCH colder Mars, at around 94K average surface temperature, whereas Mars' average is about 218K . Building equipment to operate reliably in those temperatures starts to get difficult. And as you point out, nuclear is really the only viable power source, which means you have to figure out how to dissipate waste heat without damaging the surrounding environment beyond your ability to learn anything. The sort of chemistry that's volatile enough to support life at cryogenic temperatures might well vaporize when it gets within a few meters of your probe.

Re:We don't know

[Rei]

Unfortunately, from the air you can't actually do a whole lot more than from low orbit.

The whole point of "from the air" is that you can land. And take off and land and take off again and again. It's not exactly tricky to raise or lower altitude. ;) And on Titan, low gravity plus a dense atmosphere yields very low terminal velocities, i.e. cushy landings without much effort. But even if you're not talking about landing, you absolutely can do a lot more by virtue of being able to get so much closer to the surface. Much of science is about resolution.

Meanwhile, Titan is MUCH colder Mars, at around 94K average surface temperature, whereas Mars' average is about 218K . Building equipment to operate reliably in those temperatures starts to get difficult.

)

The issue isn't average temperatures. The issue is temperature ranges. Having to tolerate a single very cold temperature is far easier then having to tolerate temperatures that range from very cold to very hot. The biggest challenge for Huygens wasn't tolerating the cold of Titan, it was tolerating the cold of Titan *and* the solar heat from flying near Venus.

The average day-night temperature on Mars is a 100K difference. Seasons add another 45 on top of that. This repeated thermal cycling incredibly stressful on all of a rover's systems. It also mandates a much more complex thermal management system. For example, Curiosity uses a system of computer controlled pumps to pump a cooling fluid from its RTG either to the probe internals or to the radiators based on the ambient temperature. If it wasn't an actively managed heat flow it could overheat the probe in the summer or freeze the probe in the winter.

Remember, it was ultimately winter that killed Spirit. Had the temperature been steady, and Spirit been designed to handle that steady temperature, this would not have happened. When you have a very specific temperature envelope, it's just a situation of "insulate and add radiothermal heaters or heat output from the RTG wherever needed". It's a lot more complicated when it fluctuates.

And contrary to popular belief, it doesn't get harder to heat as the temperature gets colder, it actually gets easier - that is to say, the amount of energy needed to heat a craft to 300K in a 100K environment isn't dramatically higher than the amount of energy needed to heat it to 300K in a 200K environment, far less than double (the exact details depend on the situation). Radiative heat loss is proportional to the temperature to the fourth power, so it drops off to nearly nothing at low temperatures (we'll just ignore for now that on Titan you're also not exchanging heat with the vacuum of space, rather the upper atmosphere). Convection on Titan is also greatly slowed. That's why the calculations show that you can heat a whole sizeable hot "air" blimp on Titan with just an RTG (that, and how much lift you get for how little effort!).

And as you point out, nuclear is really the only viable power source, which means you have to figure out how to dissipate waste heat without damaging the surrounding environment beyond your ability to learn anything.

Yet people use RTGs aplenty - even on Mars where it's possible to use solar. Almost half of successful actively-powered Mars surface probes have been RTG powered - the two Viking landers and Curiosity vs. Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity, and Phoenix. RTGs are more reliable, simpler, and provide useful heat. But they're also expensive, which is the main reason for the inner / outer solar system solar / RTG dichotomy that Mars straddles. A typical high power RTG may cost on the order of $100M. Not a big deal if it's a Flagship mission, maybe a big deal if it's a New Frontiers mission, and definitely a big deal if it's a Discovery mission. It'd be nice if a Sterling version could be finally developed, that'd be another big facilitator for outer planet missions by bringin

Re:We don't know

[Rei]

Corr: stirling, not sterling ;)

You know it's just PR

[Anonymous Coward]

when someone who knows better starts spouting borderline quackery like "get your ass to Mars" nonsense. They're rocks. We can send machines.

On the one had you have nerds getting all worked up about driverless cars and pilotless planes, but we must absolutely send people to Mars to crack rocks.

The level of cognitive dissonance required to believe this corny space nonsense has reached religious level.

Re: You know it's just PR

[cyber-vandal]

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.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, but there are many far more worthwhile goals we should be aiming for.

The 10 hour workweek leisure society with resources for all, for example.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Sarten-X]

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.

Putting a few folks on Mars is a far simpler goal, and the technology we develop along the way will help your preferred utopia, as well.

Re: You know it's just PR

[itzly]

Let's not do anything or go anywhere

Nobody says that. But the budget is only so big, so I would rather see it used on something that brings the most scientific bang for the buck.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, just like Russia's early lead into space clearly had tons of benefits for Russia and its people, right?

Re: You know it's just PR

[Applehu Akbar]

The more leisure time technology gives us, the more we spend it on 'hobbies' in the broadest sense of the term. This started in Victorian times when the first wave of industrial wealth made it possible for the Downton Abbey class to fund voyages of exploration to every unexplored part of the planet, thereby initiating a golden age of observational science.

Today, ventures like SpaceX are part of the same process. If we did achieve a ten-hour workweek, space nutters would be waving at Luddites from the Oort Cloud.

Re: You know it's just PR

[kilfarsnar]

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.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Sarten-X]

Well, yes... The Soviet Union's advancements in rocketry and spaceflight let to some very nice technological advancements, which were primarily useful after some further social and political advancements in the region.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Anonymous Coward]

Laughable conclusion. Leisure society or not, there's simply no compelling reason for people to go into space. As a matter of fact, space would look even more hostile and empty from the perspective of a leisure society technological Earth. Your whole Elysium gloom and doom flies out the window there.

Never mind the fact that there's no technology even remotely feasible that would allow anyone to "wave from the Oort Cloud".

Why? It's dark, dead, hostile, and empty. Why would you wave from there? For us to come rescue you? Where did you get your comic book world view from?

If anything, if a Space Nutter like you starts assembling his Oort spaceship from cardboard boxes in his backyard, we'd be the ones pointing and waving at YOU!

Re: You know it's just PR

[Sarten-X]

We really don't have the productive capacity for it. I've done the math before.

The short version is that there are so many people in the world that we each get a very tiny amount of raw materials, and the mass production systems we have now really only support a small fraction of the population. To support a leisure society for everyone, we need to increase global production efficiency by a few hundred percent.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you give some concrete, verifiable evidence of your claim of usefulness? Like for the common citizen in Russia in the 1960s, let's say.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Anonymous Coward]

A wonderfully simplistic and thoroughly flawed analysis. Congratulations.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Gavagai80]

Your post simply assumes that we should continue buying things we don't need and valuing a new car higher than leisure. If you want $60K/yr then yes you have to work long hours, everyone agrees on that. If you want $10K/yr then perhaps leisure is achievable.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Mariner28]

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.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Anonymous Coward]

there's simply no compelling reason for people to go into space... It's dark, dead, hostile, and empty.

The same could be said about the mountain tops around where I live. There is no resource or economic based reason to go to the topic of them, but leisure is not based on such reasoning. The result is hundreds of people each year climb to the tops, even though there are other mountains that are easier to access, and the equipment, preparation, and time can cost more than the average person can afford.

Re: You know it's just PR

[itzly]

When the next "cometary visitor" from the Oort Cloud comes knocking

It's easier to survive a comet impact on earth than it is to survive the normal conditions on Mars or other solar system object.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Sarten-X]

My post assumes that $60K income is a baseline for a leisure society. The exact numeric value is subject to inflation, arbitrary labor valuations, and many similar factors, but the economy scales uniformly.

We can redefine "leisure society" to require driving a cardboard car and eating ramen twice a day, which would significantly lower the economic cost of the redefined leisure. However, if we set the bar at a current American middle-class lifestyle, silly desires and all, then $60K is reasonable.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Immerman]

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.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Immerman]

Sure there is - the most compelling reason of all time, which has caused humanity to spread even before we had language: "Because it's there."

There may not be any *economical* reason to do, but humans are not rational beings, asking us to behave as though we are is ridiculous. What *rational* reason is there for having children, falling in love, or hanging out with the guys for a few beers? Rationality has always been nothing but a tool useful for pursuing our irrational desires. And I for one rejoice in the irrational pleasures of life.

As for not being able to wave from the Oort Cloud - what are you smoking? Admittedly we still have a ways to go on closed ecosystem engineering, but early experiments such as Biosphere 2 were incredibly promising, with most of the major problems falling into the easily avoidable "lesson learned" category. Once we have that worked out, waving from the Oort cloud is just a nuclear reactor, some ion drives, and a few centuries of transit time away.

Now who would want to do such a thing? Not I, not without a really compelling plan to start a new society better than what's being left behind at least, but as long as there's folks who have the vision to try, I say go for it. I'm sure they'll get the micro-G reproduction thing worked out soon enough - if nothing else there's always centrifugal environments.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Immerman]

Okay, so first lets ditch the pointless wars in the Middle East - lots of bang, but the only bucks are the ones being funneled from my wallet to the military-industrial complex.

Re: You know it's just PR

[Ravaldy]

I agree with this. The capitalist system promotes competition and innovation but at the cost of efficiency and economy of R&D (double edge sword).

The next big obstacle is over population. Developed countries still have a positive population growth but it's significantly less than countries like India. I hate to say this but population growth control is key to the future on earth. Science continues to increase life expectancy as well as free up time to do what we want (automation + AI within 100 years will probably take over most jobs).

Re: You know it's just PR

[t_ban]

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

That is astounding. Citation, please?

Re: You know it's just PR

[Immerman]

Google is your friend - "global food waste". Most of the statistics I'm seeing now are in the 30-50% range, so perhaps my original source was overstating the case.

"So, yeah, please finanically support NASA"

[Anonymous Coward]

This is all about raising money. What else would she say? "We'll keep looking; hopefully we find something, but we have absolutely no idea whether we will. Also, looking is really expensive! Other than the usefulness of tech we develop, we're burning money."

Re:"So, yeah, please finanically support NASA"

[Crashmarik]

This is all about raising money. What else would she say? "We'll keep looking; hopefully we find something, but we have absolutely no idea whether we will. Also, looking is really expensive! Other than the usefulness of tech we develop, we're burning money."

And that's the problem. The minute she starts saying B.S. to raise funds she is no longer a scientist just a snakeoil salesman with some embossed pieces of paper and a briefcase.

That Mars Water...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you DO go to mars, don't drink the water.

Re:That Mars Water...

[GunR]

Here's the thing. It's a major event so they cannot really change that. They have to drink the water or we'll have a huge anomaly, which is pretty much always bad.

Re:That Mars Water...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, pollution of the timeline... not a pretty picture. Fine drink the water then.

Not so sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

humans digging and cracking rocks

Digging and cracking rocks in alien enviroments sounds like a perfect job for semi-/autonomous vehicles. Despite the romance of sending humans to distant planets, robots/remote vehicles are a sound economic alternative.

Re:Not so sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

The existing rovers on Mars move at an average speed of 30 meters per hour. Average human walking speed is over 100x faster. This is just one of many metrics by which the most advanced and most expensive probes ever created fail to match human performance.

Re:Not so sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

Say, how long can the human go until he needs to breathe?

Re:Not so sure...

[Holi]

Most advanced? maybe. Most expensive? surely not. Opportunity was downright cheap, especially when you consider how far beyond it's life expectancy it has lasted.

Re:Not so sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

What if you send 1000 - 100000+ probes, there is nothing quite like quantities of scale to out match human performance, efficiency and cost. How many probes can you mass produce with the money saved by not spending it on human life support systems. Also if probes role is just sample collection and do not need to generate their own power (base station required) or need to carry deep space communication equipment (base station required) or required to do analysis (base station required) the cost of sending each probe would be cheaper just in weight reduction. I like the idea of robot exploration, it is futuristic and just as romantic as human space travel.

Re:Not so sure...

[itzly]

The existing rovers on Mars move at an average speed of 30 meters per hour. Average human walking speed is over 100x faster.

When you have a few decades head start, 30 meters/hour beats 3000 meters/hour for a long time.

Re:Not so sure...

[Applehu Akbar]

The real problem is latency. From Earth, we could control teleoperators on the Moon, but no farther. If a robot on Mars reports that it sees something interesting and Mission Control decides to go drill that rock over there, at least a half hour has to elapse.

Re:Not so sure...

[Applehu Akbar]

This is how we will approach a task like assaying asteroids for exploitable mineral content. But although actually mining them would be far more robot-intensive than any terrestrial equivalent, we are still going to need some people in the loop.

Re:Not so sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

If a robot on Mars reports that it sees something interesting

then it could decide to drill autonomously, and if you have many hardware resources at your disposal the latency becomes less of an issue because the quantities of data would not be piecemeal as it has been when you only have 1 robot at your disposal as compared to 1000's. With the greater number of data sources your sampling rate increases and the less time you have to micro-managing to get the best result out of your limited resources. It is a simple numbers game.

Re:Not so sure...

[itzly]

Half an hour is not a lot of time, all things considered.

Re:Not so sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

FIRST POST!

Re:Not so sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

What if you send 1000 - 100000+ probes...

Everyone at NASA just went, "um, is the Anonymous Coward going to get us the budget for that?"

Re:Not so sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't confuse latency with "bandwidth." You might have a half-hour delay between when you tell it to look at a particular rock and it does, but that does not mean it sits there doing nothing in the meantime. You can queue up things to look at, such that it is always busy. Then the rate it works is a function of its mechanical design, not distance.

Re:Not so sure...

[Applehu Akbar]

Half an hour becomes a significant amount of time if you have to make a number of chained decisions, in which you have to wait for the results of decision A to come back before making decision B, with each cycle taking the full latency round trip..

Re:Not so sure...

[ColdWetDog]

The existing rovers on Mars move at an average speed of 30 meters per hour. Average human walking speed is over 100x faster. This is just one of many metrics by which the most advanced and most expensive probes ever created fail to match human performance.

Have you ever seen a field geologist? They do not move at 30 meters per hour. If you're lucky, you can get them to move that far in a day.

Re:Not so sure...

[itzly]

We've figured out how to keep a rover alive for several years. That's plenty of time to do a bunch of research. I think the bigger problem is that after a while they run out of interesting things to look at with the instruments they brought. What they really need is better and different instruments. Human presence couldn't help you with that. All it can do is compress the "several years" into "several weeks". Given the time to prepare and execute the entire missions, that's hardly significant, especially because a human mission would take much longer to prepare, and would cost several orders of magnitude more.

Re:Not so sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

More and more mining work is being mechanized and automated, considering the hazards and the abilities of machines to do tedious, repetitive work. The main impediment is that people on Earth are just so much cheaper compared to machines. But if you take away that cheap option, it changes. For example with oil drilling, the amount of geology and work that can now be done remotely within a borehole is incredible, reducing or removing need to expensively retrieve samples for a human to hold.

Well, to be fair...

[Overzeetop]

If we put humans on Mars, I'm guessing that would be considered life beyond earth. If NASA sends someone who isn't a US Citizen, they would be an alien.

So, really, not too far fetched for the pedantic among us. And, being /., that would be pretty much all of us.

Re:Well, to be fair...

[hooiberg]

They should send somebody from a very small country, so it will be an alien to most of us. Perhaps Paddy Roy Bates from Sealand:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Re:Well, to be fair...

[oodaloop]

And since he's dead, we can say we found alien remains on Mars.

Re:Well, to be fair...

[Overzeetop]

Paint him green and give him a funny looking helmet and we have a deal.

NASA's Chief Scientist Wants More Funding

[XxtraLarGe]

Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA, made a wildly speculative, headline-grabbing claim in an attempt to gain more funding.

Re:NASA's Chief Scientist Wants More Funding

[mean pun]

I fail to see what is so outrageous about her prediction. Let me repeat the quotes from the summary:

"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.

Is that really so implausible? There are hints that there is or has been life beyond Earth even in our own planetary system. There is solid evidence for many planets beyond our solar system, and although these discovered planets are usually too large to carry life similar to our own, they strongly hint that there are also smaller planets out there that could carry such life. Yes, Ellen Stofan is speculating, but if she's asked to speculate about the subject, this seems to me like a pretty solid reply.

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."

Again, pretty solid reasoning. What's the problem?

Of course she can still be wrong. Predicting the future is hard, and there are no perfect guarantees, but her prediction sounds pretty plausible to me.

Re:NASA's Chief Scientist Wants More Funding

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Is that really so implausible?

So she has no "strong indications" yet and she's already jumping to the next step of "definitive evidence"? It's a shot in the dark.

Re:NASA's Chief Scientist Wants More Funding

[Anonymous Coward]

All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.

Everyone here just thinks you're a fucking idiot along with your moronic friends.

Translation

[sjbe]

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.

Obligatory XKCD translating what that means

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

And that is a thing of beauty.

And...

[hcs_$reboot]

we were supposed to
- cure AIDS by year 2000
- have an inhabited mission to Jupiter in the early 2000
- have already people living on the Moon / Mars
"Experts" also said the big one (earthquake) in Tokyo had to happen by 2012, and so many other BS that sometimes, statistically, a few prove to be true.

Re:And...

[oodaloop]

Predicting is hard, especially about the future.

Re:And...

[XxtraLarGe]

And let's not forget
- Run out of oil
- Run out of food
- Kill all life in the oceans
- Have another ice age

Re:And...

[Holi]

I don't know about the Tokyo earthquake, they were close on that one only off by a year. I'd call a 9.0 a "Big One". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...

Re:And...

[Holi]

>- Have another ice age [wikipedia.org] From the article: This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, So no we never thought that. >- Kill all life in the oceans [wikipedia.org] Really because a fucking actor said something? So no, we never said that either. Ted Danson may have, but who the fuck does he speak for? no one. Are you just pulling out things random people have said and now your claiming that they are experts? And that they speak for the scientific community?

Re:And...

[XxtraLarGe]

Ted Danson may have, but who the fuck does he speak for? no one. Are you just pulling out things random people have said and now your claiming that they are experts? And that they speak for the scientific community?

In Ted Danson's case, he testified before Congress on behalf of an environmental group, so no, I'm not just pulling out things "random people" have said. These are people who are trying to affect socioeconomic policies by making wild statements they claim are backed by science.

Re:And...

[itzly]

So, where did Ted Danson actually claim that we were going to kill all ocean life ?

Re:And...

[hcs_$reboot]

I know well the Tohoku earthquake, being there at the time... Nope, not talking about this one. Just after the 11/3/11 earthquake, a lot of information came from embassies, about Fukushima and about the odds of a big one in Tokyo (the 11/3/11 one was big, but the epicenter was far from Tokyo - Tokyo was "shindo" ~5.5, Sendai, much closer to the epicenter, was shindo 7 (the max)). That "experts" information said a big one is likely to happen within 3 days(!) after the Tohoku EQ. Then a week later, the same people said it's very likely to happen within a year etc... More recently, that big EQ is very likely to happen by March 2015. If you combine all probabilities, and go back to 11/3/11, you get something like a 99+% certainty of a big one in Tokyo by March 2015. Ridiculous.

Re:And...

[XxtraLarGe]

So, where did Ted Danson actually claim that we were going to kill all ocean life ?

Here's a link to get you started. After that, I'm sure you can figure out the rest on your own. Go get 'em, Tiger!

Re:And...

[Crashmarik]

Oh seriously, have you been living under a rock for the past 50 years ?

Rachel Carson and DDT ? http://www.21stcenturysciencet...

Paul Ehrlich and the population bomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Hows your soylent green today ?

Endless peak oil doom ? http://www.wsj.com/articles/wh...
BTW the first were out of oil doom, dates from the early 1900s

Re:And...

[Applehu Akbar]

" Ted Danson may have, but who the fuck does he speak for?"

He was considered chief environmental scientist for all the same Enlightened Ones who got their energy policy from Peter, Paul and Mary.

Re:And...

[itzly]

You make a claim and you want me to provide the evidence for it ? That's not how it goes. What Ted Danson says is "The industrial way we fish for seafood is harming the marine habitats that all ocean life depends upon.". That's a bit more accurate than "kill all life in the oceans".

Re:And...

[itzly]

Endless peak oil doom ?

Conventional oil has already peaked. Shale oil wasn't included in the Peak Oil predictions, but that will peak within a few decades.

Re:And...

[Crashmarik]

Seriously a Century of being wrong on this and your response is double down ?

Give me a call when we hit peak gas to liquids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
from methane hydrates
http://geology.com/articles/me...

Re:And...

[XxtraLarGe]

You make a claim and you want me to provide the evidence for it ? That's not how it goes.

The claim was backed up by the original wikipedia link I provided. My reply after that was a response to your trolling.

Re:And...

[itzly]

Seriously a Century of being wrong on this

That's not being serious. Hubbert's peak theory wasn't formulated until 1956, and serious claims as to the exact moment of peak oil only appeared in the last decades. Of course, things like methane hydrates are not included in the peak oil discussion. That doesn't make the prediction wrong, just limited in scope. Obviously, when you expand the scope, you have to adjust the predications.

As far as methane hydrates, what's the best guess for when we can capture enough methane hydrates to generate a million barrels/day from it ?

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

Eventually we will. It always amuses me when people expect date-exact predictions for planetary systems. The error could be measured in decades. Since your life span is also measured in decades, it doesn't matter to you...
But long term, we can't keep shitting out more people on a finite planet. Space won't save us, you can forget that and put those dead space dreams in the ground where they belong.
Oil is finite. Period. The kind of magical growth it allowed from the mid 20th century can not be sustained or replicated. Forget it.
We're going either for a catastrophic breakdown or a painful stagnation. But keep chugging along, your kids will see the result.

To think otherwise is to make a wildly speculative, headline-grabbing claim. You wouldn't want to make one of those, would you?

Re:And...

[Crashmarik]

That's not being serious. Hubbert's peak theory wasn't formulated until 1956

Sure it is. The running out of oil scare goes all the way back to the teapot dome scandal. Back then your unconventional oil would have been offshore reserves. You pick a time Ill give you new sources that somehow failed to make their way into the calculation.

Re:And...

[itzly]

Oh, you mean this one: "In 1988, he said we had 10 years to save the oceans or we would pay the consequences, which would be death.[citation needed]".

I stand corrected of course. Why didn't you just quote that line ?

Re:And...

[itzly]

I think it makes more sense to work with the known data, and not count on magical new stuff appearing when we need it. Betting our future on sufficient methane hydrate production is a big gamble. It may work out, of course, and then I'll be happy to hear you say "I told you so".

Re:And...

[Crashmarik]

I think it makes more sense to work with the known data, and not count on magical new stuff

I find it's even more helpful to not make up your mind before you even look at the data.

Re:And...

[XxtraLarGe]

You can be pedantic if you want, but there's plenty info on the web supporting it, and I remember seeing him make such claims on TV when it happened.

Re:And...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know that the Saudi's have not shared their data for over thirty years, right?

Re:And...

[the gnat]

Rachel Carson and DDT ? http://www.21stcenturysciencet... [21stcentur...cetech.com]

If you want to be taken seriously, here's a tip: don't post links to publications from Lyndon LaRouche's organization in support of your arguments.

Re:And...

[Crashmarik]

Facts are Facts man, if there is anything in that link you think is inaccurate attack it.

But just for you here is the second link of 700,000 links about Carson on this topic.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/he...

Re:And...

[nealric]

The peak oil alarmists really don't understand the oil industry. We haven't even scratched the surface of available oil on earth. Forget shale and other unconventionals. Consider that 70% of the earth is deep water oceans. The average ocean depth is around 12,000 feet. Until recently, we didn't have the technology to drill at 12,000 feet. There has been essentially no exploration deep offshore in international waters. That's more than 2/3 of the earth that hasn't even really been explored for oil yet, let alone tapped. It won't be until prices rise substantially, as it's nowhere near economic at today's prices. We also keep finding more and more shale. Everyone's been talking about the Eagle Ford shale in Texas. Well, guess what? The Austin Chalk layer, which is largely untapped, has been found to have huge potential as well. Same physical location above ground, just different depths.

It's almost certain that there will be some point in human history (perhaps within some of our lifetimes) when oil dependence ceases. When it happens, it will simply be because oil got out competed in the market place by other alternatives. That's what is starting to happen to coal in some parts of the world. There are myriad potential doomsday scenarios, but peak oil isn't one of them.

Conflict

[tehcyder]

There must be a lot of the Space Nutter fraternity on slashdot who are torn here, as the only thing they seem to hate more than people who don't understand why a sane human being would want to go on a suicide mission to a barren red rock is NASA.

Detecting life on Earth

[hooiberg]

This reminded me of an experiment from the eighties to detect life on earth, from space. It actually worked:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Life != Aliens

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you are really bad at math, we need a few hundred million more years of being around to make contact with aliens.

Already discovered

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear that the founld a nigger in uranus

No astronauts are getting their asses to Mars

[NotDrWho]

Stofan thinks putting astronauts on Mars will be a big part of that goal.

In that case, you're going to be in for a VERY long wait. Man may one day set foot on Mars, but it won't be any time within our liftetimes, and they won't be wearing a NASA patch on their spacesuit.

Re:No astronauts are getting their asses to Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

They might be wearing NASA patches... Government surplus is a great way to keep costs down.

Re:No astronauts are getting their asses to Mars

[martas]

If the argument for putting humans on Mars is that they can break rocks that robots can't, then they should instead invest the $10B dollars and 10 years it would take to get a human to Mars (conservative estimates) on robotics research, which would be enough to develop something that would have better rock-breaking capabilities than humans, without any of the downsides. The only remotely reasonable argument for putting people on Mars in the foreseeable future is PR.

Re:No astronauts are getting their asses to Mars

[hcs_$reboot]

they won't be wearing a NASA patch on their spacesuit.

Well it depends how you pronounce it, if you can read Chinese characters.

Re:No astronauts are getting their asses to Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

PR is NASAs single biggest challenge. It always has been. They need lots of money for long periods of time, and they may accidentally kill national heros. And all they'll have to show for it is some sciencey stuff that most people will see as little more than an attack on their fairy tales.

The Real Question Is...

[wisebabo]

Will they find extra-terrestrial life IN the solar system or Outside it?

Frankly if they find it within the solar system then it would be a more significant find unless, of course, they found evidence of advanced (intelligent) life outside the solar system. It would mean that the universe is absolutely crawling with life; even if the life was somehow related to that on earth (distributed by asteroid impacts?) that would mean that panspermia is a viable method of distributing life over (at least) interplanetary distances.

In addition, it would mean that there would be a chance of someone going and really examining it within what's left of my lifetime!

So let's hope that it's on Mars (doubtful), Europa/Enceladus (possibly) or Titan. Of course if they find life on Titan, it'll have to be so radically different that our own that it'll blow the minds of just about every biologist in the world! Of course they'd be very very happy to find just fossils.

Re:The Real Question Is...

[swb]

Life outside the solar system seems more significant than inside it.

I have a feeling that a find of life inside the solar system will end up being something weird along the lines of a virus or bacteria that chemically might qualify as "life" but is so marginal that it only excites a biochemist.

Plus there's the notion that whatever caused life on Earth might have contributed something to life elsewhere in the solar system.

Life outside the solar system seems more likely to be intelligent (given that we'd have to detect meaningful activity, not electron micrographs or chemical assays you'd pick up on site) and statistically unrelated to life on earth because of the distance.

Re:The Real Question Is...

[ColdWetDog]

Nobody really cares if it is a single celled bug. If it can be clearly shown to be extra terrestrial it blows the doors on the origins of life wide open. We just need a wee bit of DNA to make one of the momentous discoveries of biology ever.

Of course, if it's 7 feet tall, blue and looks like Zoe Saldana then all the better.

Re:The Real Question Is...

[swb]

The thing is, I think it will be the kind of thing that is declared life by a committee of microbiologists, virologists, chemists and physicists on a split decision.

It will leave plenty of room for the usual cast of religious nutjobs to say it isn't life and it will be the kind of thing that will open the door for endless debate as to whether it really is life.

I think it would take an organism much more recognizable as life and/or intelligent to really be groundbreaking.

Remember this one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Goes back some. See if it rings a bell.

The dingo ate mah baby. Oi!

Truth is stranger. Aliens ate the baby.

In reality

[Anonymous Coward]

"If NASA sends someone who isn't a US Citizen, they would be an alien."

And if he smuggled aboard he would be considered an illegal alien.

And deported of course.

Hopefully

[NotFamous]

Hopefully we will find intelligent life on Earth by then.

Re:Hopefully

[Anonymous Coward]

That'll happen as soon as they stop looking for in in parliaments :)

Pointless speculation

[Thisstatementisfalse]

What is the purpose of engaging in pointless speculation like this? This becomes a story when extraterrestrial life is actually discovered.

Viking Mars landers...

[stkpogo]

They'll discover that the 1976 Viking Mars lander transported life from Earth, and it survived.

Well...

[The Grim Reefer]

I predict we'll find proof of life by 2024. And definitive proof in 19 to 29 years. Her numbers are off by a year according to my "calculations".

I predict...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah whatever. No evidence for those predictions at all. Way to go Nostradamus.

NASA PR treated as fact

[DCFC]

The 10 year horizon offers no step change in our space exploration to discover life.
We certainly won't visit the gas giant moons that seem promising within a decade, NASA can't send humans to Mars within a decade, SETI continues good but unrewarded work, we have no new physics to peer more closely at extrasolar planets and even if we did, NASA can't build *anything* new in less than a decade.

So you basically have to ask, "will today's tech with a slight upgrade do something basically different in the next decade ?"

Maybe, but probably not.

NASA exists only to distribute pork according to the demands of incumbent politicians.

What we have here is in no useful way different from the Disney Hype for the next Star Wars film.
Indeed I expect more surprises from SW7 than from NASA in the next decade, which is bloody sad.

Re:NASA PR treated as fact

[ColdWetDog]

Now, now. Stop being such a downer.

While you're more correct than is comfortable, there is still quite a bit bits-on-the-ground stuff that NASA could do with with essentially current tech. We have ONE fully functional lander on Mars. ONE beat up mini rover and a bunch of orbital infrastructure. A dozen Curiosity class rovers would do wonders to improve our knowledge of Mars. Knowledge that we really should have before we drop meat popsicles on the planet.

Yes, NASA is pork. So is pretty much everything else in government. Beats textured vegetable protein anyday.

And....

[morgauxo]

And that will be the year of the Linux desktop...
And the year of the first human explorers on Mars...
It will be the year that we get a submersible robot into one of the ice covered ocean moons

I think we may even figure out how life started that year
And cure all cancers
plus Alzheimers
Prevent and reverse aging

We will finally get our damn flying cars

I can't wait!!!

Maybe I can take all this stuff in my time machine that will no doubt exist at that time and bring it back to myself now so that I don't have to wait!

Do they know more than they're letting on?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not generally prone to conspiracy theories, however the fact that she is making such a bold, declarative prediction on this subject does make me wonder if they know more than they're letting in in regards to there being possible signs of life on Mars or elsewhere. On the other hand, they could also just be making a provocative sales pitch to get boots on the ground, an endeavor that will keep the cash flowing their way for years to come.

Re:Do they know more than they're letting on?

[Mariner28]

82 posts and not a single reference from the Conspiracy Theory faction about the shadow US Government controlled by the Grays. Or Thetans. Or Pleiadians.

For shame, /., for shame.

Re:Do they know more than they're letting on?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm not generally prone to conspiracy theories" but... conspiracy!

Re:Do they know more than they're letting on?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they do know more than they're letting on, they have a vested interest in keeping the existence of keeping the knowledge of extra-terrestrial life secret from the public. Such a discovery would result in the collapse of religious doctrines, world wide panic, the collapse of the financial system and more. Continuity of the status-queue is paramount to governments around they world.

Bwa ha ha ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

She's making predictions on the future discovery of future discoveries!

Just watch

[Anonymous Coward]

Just watch how the Republican Congress and Senate slash NASA's already paltry budget because "only life can exist on Earth"... They won't allow looking for others in the great beyond because it conflicts with their fundamental religious beliefs...

I hope not...

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, hope we DON'T find alien life. If we could, we'd just bribe them into leasing us some land on their home planet; which would lead to Starbucks, McDonald's, cell phone stores and car dealerships at every turn. In other words, we would fuck it up just as fast (if not faster) than our own planet.

Robots are proxies, not substitutes

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Robots are proxies, not substitutes

[itzly]

There is a huge difference between looking through a webcam at an ocean and actually standing at the shore yourself.

The difference is a lot smaller when you can move the camera (and other instruments) around, zoom in on any details that the human could see, and you have a team of experts deciding where to look.

Humans can create new tools

The environment of Mars limits what you can make.

There are economic benefits to developing the technology to send humans that go far beyond the mission itself.

That also applies to technology we would develop for autonomous robots. Probably more so.

Re:Robots are proxies, not substitutes

[Rei]

Humans can create new tools and are vastly more flexible in what they can do than any robot.

Okay, you're on Mars. You discover that there's a neat rock that the instruments you were sent with aren't good enough to completely. You could use some more data. Perhaps thermal conductivity? Okay, go ahead and make a thermal conductivity probe on Mars with enough accuracy to be useful. Maybe one possibility is sensitive to, say, hydrofluoric acid? Go ahead, make some hydrofluoric on Mars. Well, what about a streak or hardness test? Aha, a human could come up with a way to do that by using some other tools or other objects for purposes they weren't designed for! But you know what? So could a robot.

You might be able to come up with some edge case that a human could do that a robot couldn't. But "edge cases" don't pay for increasing the budget by orders of magnitude.

There is a huge difference between looking through a webcam at an ocean and actually standing at the shore yourself.

Unless you're talking about "gee whiz" factors, no. A proper payload can replicate your senses in far more accuracy in far less mass. Your eyes are cool and all, but their eyes can zoom, record readings at each spectral frequency, see IR and UV, see polarization, etc. Your sense of touch is cool and all, but theirs can get precise measurements of thermal conductivity, electrical conductivity, etc. Your sense of smell is neat and all, but versus a mass spectrometer? Just no. And on and on. You are not a scientific instrument. The only thing you really have going for you is your brain. And you know what? That works just fine here on Earth, regardless of how it gets its data.

There are economic benefits to developing the technology to send humans

The economic knock-on effects of building a bigger rocket to carry people, tons of supplies, radiation shielding, etc, versus instead using the same money to build dozens of diverse robots with all kinds of diverse scientific equipment? Absolutely no contest there that the latter will pay off better.

There are some things we will only learn if we are there ourselves.

Like, "Wow, that sure cost a DAMNED lot of money!"

Re:Robots are proxies, not substitutes

[Mantrid42]

By going to other planets ourselves, we'll learn one of the most important lessons of all: how to get ourselves to other planets.

You cannot understand the ocean through a camera

[sjbe]

The difference is a lot smaller when you can move the camera (and other instruments) around, zoom in on any details that the human could see, and you have a team of experts deciding where to look.

The difference is vast between standing somewhere and looking through a webcam and it will never become otherwise. It doesn't matter how good your camera is. You seriously are pretending that you know what the ocean is like because you looked at it through a camera? It's not even close to the same thing. What does it smell like? What does the breeze feel like? How does it feel?

No robot can tell you everything you will learn by standing there yourself. There are biological questions that remote robotics simply cannot answer. There are economic benefits that robotics cannot contribute to.

The environment of Mars limits what you can make.

It's a planet with all the resources a planet has. Once you get a sufficient amount of technology to the location you are exploring there is very little that couldn't be done.

Mars: already there

[Anonymous Coward]

There already strong indications of life on Mars from the MSL SAM results...

Re:You cannot understand the ocean through a camer

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is vast between standing somewhere and looking through a webcam and it will never become otherwise.

Yeah, because we've reached the point that cameras can exceed human vision in so many ways. If only human eyes were able to do quantitative spectral analysis, observations for days on end, and all while sitting at temperature extremes. I'm not trying to downplay the importance of knowing what the smell is like, but there is a lot of value in knowing quantitatively the ratio of different salts and even isotope ratios within the water, something that can be done with a machine smaller than a breadbox these days.

WTF?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that like saying, "Hey, this roulette wheel is hot, it's ready to pay off, man!"?

Did anybody do the math?

[blang]

Let us make a few assumptions first, and maybe throw in some facts as well.

1. What are the odds that there exist or has existed life beyond earth?
          Well, even if the chance of a given solar system or any of its planets has life, we are talking about an infitesimal number of galaxies with their solar systems and planets So I'd say the odds are pretty good, almost so good that I would not bet a penny against it for a dollar.

2. What are the odds that evidence of such life or remnants of such life could be found within a few decades in human time scale? Almost impossible, if not flat out impossible.

Why do I say that?
Well, I learnt when I was a kid watching a Sagan program that the universe was sort of like a giant dough with raisins i it, that is ever expanding. The odds that one raisin will ever meet another raisin is pretty slim , and the raisins will get further and further apart over time. So whatever crap they find digging in mars rocks is likely stuff from our solar system, and if they find any stuff from outside the solar system, due to the nature of the big bang, you would only find stuff from the very birth of the universe.

Since it takes up to a few billions of years to get all the conditions right for the nurture of life, I'd think it very unlikely that any such primordial space debris would have any remaining evidence of life.

Aliens here, what utter nonsense. Assume that time travel and travel beyond velocity of light is impossible. Given the distances at play, an alien could not target earth, or even our solar system for a trip. What they observed from our solar system would have been millions of years old when they saw it, and given the expanding nature of the universe, they might even need to break the laws of physics to travel in that direction fast enough for millions of years to catch earth.

If life was achieved in the very few birthing moments of the universe, and if intelligent species managed to come up with space travel and colonized a fair amount of of the primordial matter, we still would have only infinitesimally small chances of ever finding any evidence of this.

I find it distasteful that NASA, which should be founded on science is engaging is such claptrap gallopping charlatanism. The universe is plenty interesting enough as it is, no need to add hobgoblins and other hocus pocus.

Re:Did anybody do the math?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure what you're going on about with the expansion of the universe (the raisins represent clusters of galaxies, smaller stuff is much closer together and doesn't expand with everything else) and primordial material and traveling large distances. The idea of life on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system is not that it traveled from elsewhere, but that it evolved there. The same goes for looking for evidence of life on exoplanets via spectroscopy.

Re:Did anybody do the math?

[david_thornley]

Much of what you say depends very heavily on how common life is in the Universe, or more specifically, within a limited number of parsecs (dozens? hundreds?) from my iPhone here. Unless and until we get close to the hypothetical Big Rip, we can ignore the expansion of the Universe for this purpose.

Suppose an advanced civilization were able to send generation ships or hibernation ships at, say, 1% of the speed of light, it could colonize other systems, build up industry and technology, and head off to the next promising system. I rather think that a spacefaring race will expand at at least a thousandth of the speed of light.

This means that such a civilization a hundred parsecs away (and there's a LOT of stars within that radius) could expand to our system in about three hundred thousand years. This is a lot longer than our species has existed, but it's a small amount of time on a geological or astronomical scale.

Given that technology, they likely have the ability to do spectroscopic observations of planetary atmospheres from a considerable distance. In that case, they'll notice Earth's atmosphere, which has such things as oxygen and water vapor in it, and mark it as a planet with probable life, worth investigating. Depending on the accuracy and the distance, they might find things that suggest civilization.

Re:Did anybody do the math?

[blang]

I'm not an astronomer, but again, big numbers will play tricks with us.
A quick google search states:.
"As of October 2005, astronomers have been able to detect the presence of planets around only 28 G-type stars (including Sol) -- or around 5.5 percent -- of those 511 stars located within 100 light-years of Earth."
Lets double it to 50, to be on safe side.

I'm thinking that chance of life being created is very small even if the favorable conditions for it exist for millions of years.
I'm thinking maybe 1 in a million or less. But let's say it is 1 in 20, and that we get 2 stars with life within 100 parsecs.

I'm also thinking that the chance of evolving into sentient life is also very small, and also that the reign of any species at the top of the food chain might be similar to what we have at earth, very short. Humans have been at the top for some 50k years. We have only recently (100 years) been able to reach a level of technology where space faring and space colonization is feasible or at at least thinkable. At this level of technology, we have also become a very serious threat to our own ecosystem, and endangering the future for the species, and a real risk that it might devolve in to a less technologically savvy species.

If an advanced civilization in relative proximity could keep the reign for millions of years before falling into civil wars or destroying their own habitats, and continually sending colonization ships in all directions, yes we might see some traces of life. But the chance of such civilization ever existing I find extremely unlikely. Such a civilization would need to have extreme aversion to conflict and govern itself very well, being able to plan projects that last not 100's but 1000's of years, be no danger to its ecosystem, and maintain a stable population, and those traits is also the reason such a civilization would be unlikely to ever need or want to colonize the neighboring stars. It will be a civilization of cows that have no wish for space travel, or humanoids, who would love to space travel if they could just avoid killing each other first.

OK, and even if we win the lottery, what are the chances that we would ever see real aliens in a UFO?
Well, let's say it's 2 instances of life, and 1 millionth chance that this life becomes space travelling, almost 1/1 chance that they would be able to identify Sol as a potential life form hosting system, and maybe 1 millionth chance that the civilization's would overlap with the time that we have humans on earth. No matter how I turn it, it is still likelier to win the lottery (which happens every day for someone, somewhere) than humans ever finding remnants of alien life. The difference between someone winning the lottery every day and this chance of meeting UFO is that we only have 1 ticket. Maybe if there were billions or trillions of earth-like civilizations, there might be a decent chance that one of them would get to meet one of the other, or find traces of each other.

In other news...

[nealric]

NASA seeks more funding!

Re:You cannot understand the ocean through a camer

[mwehle]

The difference is vast between standing somewhere and looking through a webcam and it will never become otherwise. It doesn't matter how good your camera is. You seriously are pretending that you know what the ocean is like because you looked at it through a camera? It's not even close to the same thing. What does it smell like? What does the breeze feel like?

Unfortunately immediately after having smelled an alien ocean or after feeling the Martian breeze a human will need replacing, whereas a robot will remain functional. A human standing on another planet will be sensing everything through mechanical mediation. Gazing through a visor may be preferable to viewing via a remote screen, but you are unlikely to ever be feeling that breeze on your cheek.

Getting on, but still hopeful

[peetm]

As the title says, I'm getting on now - and even thinking of properly retiring.

Ever since I was aware of such things, I was always very much more than hopeful - convinced really - that we would receive some signal (in a 'Contact' fashion) before I was placed into my box (cremate/inter :- hey surprise me!) An example of self-centred hubris in the ‘belief of ourselves’, including me of course!

Still, I live in hope.

Goodness knows what it would do to all those religious fundamentalists though!

God of the aliens...

[akayani]

I wonder if the aliens will claim they are chosen by God? Will they even believe in God? Will they have a Mork and Mindy at the centre of their creation myth?

John 14:2

[vandamme]

"In My Father's house are many dwelling places".