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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.
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
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
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.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
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.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
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."
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.
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.