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In the Search for Alien Life, 'Everyone Is an Astrobiologist' (scientificamerican.com)
Mary Voytek, NASA's senior scientist for astrobiology, likes to tell other researchers that "everyone is an astrobiologist; they just don't know it yet." From a report: What she means is that answering the question currently at the heart of astrobiology -- Does life exist beyond Earth? -- requires input from an incredibly wide range of disciplines, including astrophysics, geology, exoplanet science, planetary science, chemistry and various subfields of biology.
On the plus side, that means astrobiologists have a lot of resources to draw on. But it also means that people like Voytek have to deal with a flood of relevant information coming in from all of those scientific fields and figure out how to get scientists from those disciplines to work together. Voytek and other NASA representatives discussed how they are dealing with that information influx, and the interdisciplinary nature of the field, at the Astrobiology Science Strategy for the Search for Life in the Universe meeting, hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, here at the University of California, Irvine this week.
On the plus side, that means astrobiologists have a lot of resources to draw on. But it also means that people like Voytek have to deal with a flood of relevant information coming in from all of those scientific fields and figure out how to get scientists from those disciplines to work together. Voytek and other NASA representatives discussed how they are dealing with that information influx, and the interdisciplinary nature of the field, at the Astrobiology Science Strategy for the Search for Life in the Universe meeting, hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, here at the University of California, Irvine this week.
It is a science without an identifiable subject. Since there is, so far, nothing to study, it would be fair to say that nobody can be studying it.
"astrophysics, geology, exoplanet science, planetary science, chemistry and various subfields of biology" This much is true as, to get to anything like something we might actually have a shot at communicating with, there are a great many requirements in each of these categories, and several more as well (cosmology , anthropology, and statistics amongst them). Indeed, when one multiplies the likelihood of just the requirements we currently know about by each other, one might come to the conclusion that, even with ten trillion galaxies, and even if they have one hundred billion stars each, we are astronomically unlikely to ever need an astrobiologist for anything other than, possibly, alien bacteria and viruses.
We constantly look at this subject as if it has not already been proven that life can survive in space. Water bears have been PROVEN to be able to survive the Vacuum and temperatures of space. So, there is that first off. Then lets look at the properties of Self Organization and Entropy as they interact with something like "Gravity", combined with the properties of the KNOWN universe. Including the FACT, that it is SO BIG, we are TOTALLY INCAPABLE of even seeing the edge. A rough outline that we "can" generate, represents residual radio waves from the BB or other Initiating Event that Started the universe. It does NOT prove that this is the "Edge" of the universe. It just proves that this is how far the wave has traveled in the time it has existed, and in what directions. So... back to our original line of thinking... that this thing is just THAT big. (Universe at Large... At VERY Large) Filled with energy, raw materials, both seeming to emanate almost entirely from what are the Stellar FORGES of the universe. Stars. Topped off with healthy doses of ENTROPY, GRAVITY And Self Organization. All that CHANCE, ALL that SELF ORGANIZATION, ALL that GRAVITY, ALL Those Raw Materials being CONSTANTLY regenerated. (Those same materials are YOU... Yes YOU, down to the last molecule, CAME from the inside of a STAR!) And ALL that SPACE... And you STILL think you are alone? you still cannot see that the universe was DESIGNED to create the eventuality that is Complex Life? GET A CLUE! The more likely scenario, is that the distances between civilizations, and life forms, is SO VAST, that we may NEVER be able to design a technology that allows us to reach the needed speeds to travel even our OWN galaxy... But the Universe we live in, seems to me CUSTOM DESIGNED to create planets that have the needed conditions for life. An AWFUL lot of coincidence, an "Impossibly" large amount, would have had to have taken place, for us to have ended up where and WHO we are, ANY other way. God, to me, is just energy in the process off creating the universe. As the ancients saw the Sun, so should we. As it IS god. A Star like it, or one of the TRILLIONS of others we can see from our telescopes, made every particle of EACH AND EVERY one of us within its life cycle. In the flailing of its death gasps, it cast off the carbon that you now wear as a casing. To move about the universe in. If that isn't your God, then I don't know what is... (just my 2)
Thank you. Limited by the format obviously. But you got the general point :-)
Find plenty of ET aliens there. How can you spot them? 1) Bad hair. 2) Inability to provide a direct answer any question posed. (e.g. "Mitch, wanna go to lunch?" Ans: "Blah blah blah.. for 10 minutes..") 3) Inability to come to an agreement with anyone on anything.
Those are the humans.
The aliens would be the ones who have perfect hair, always answer questions right on the point, and have an inhuman ability to come to agreement with others of their kind.
Real humans don't have perfect hair. And-- humans, managing to agree on anything without arguing? Doesn't happen.
...Is there intelligent life in the \. Editorial Office? Magic Eight Ball Says...No.