The "sex offender" registry hasn't prevented one crime against children, and has in fact caused more problems than it has solved.
How could you possibly know that the list hasn't prevented one crime against children? Or that it has caused more problems than it has solved?
Sex crimes are the only crimes we continue to punish people after they've "paid their debt to society".
There are permanent legal consequences to ALL crimes that people are convicted of past the age of majority. As for "paying their debt to society", there is no such thing. The only thing that comes close is if you are executed for a murder, because society has taken from you as much as you have taken from society. However, even then, society has certainly not be repaid for what you took from it. The family of your victim has nothing more after you are executed than before. If you kill or rape someone, spend a few years in prison, and then go back about your life, you are so far from having "repaid your debt to society" as to be laughable.
In the specific case of sex offenders, if they are so dangerous that we have to notify people when they move into the neighborhood, then why the fuck are they being released from prison?
Because, circa 1970, the US Supreme Court imposed the restriction on the American people that they cannot execute rapists, as justice would require. Moreover, the laws don't even provide for lengthy sentences for rapists and many murderers. As a result, other, more "creative", laws and judicial orders are substituted for actual justice, in the attempt to provide the protection for society that justice would provide.
There's no legal requirement that a convict's "slate be wiped clean" after serving a prison term. For example, they can permanently forfeit their right to vote by being convicted of a felony.
More to the point, is the fact that this killing was not done for either justice or vengeance, but for self-preservation -- that is, protection of his family. Both Megan's Law, and this killing happened for the simple fact that we as a society have lost our taste for justice and no longer provide it. Justice would require that this rapist be executed or spend his life in prison. If rapists and murderers were treated accordingly, there would be no need for such acts, or for Megan's Law.
it's a lot more likely that it's a retrovirus that lost the ability to leave the cell than that it's a transposon that gained that ability and then lost it again.
It wouldn't be a transposon that gained the ability and lost it again -- what we see would be essentially the fossils of the evolution of that transposon into one that is functional as a virus. When it actually reaches that point, it takes over the cell and converts it into viruses. So we would never see that in a stable genome, only the various steps that preceded it but are not yet functional.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but surgery is just the type of thing that robots would generally NOT do very well. Every surgery is different. Robots offer an advantage over humans when every repeated action needs to be identical. Surgery requires looking into a space and visually identifying the various structures... all while blood is repeatedly covering them up, and they're jostling around. That's the type of thing that the human brain is exceptionally good at, and robots are ridiculously bad at. Add the fact that there is no margin for mistakes, and I don't think we're going to see robotic surgeons any time soon.
I think the most likely scenario would be that some seed manufacturer fucks up royally and creates cereals that kill you, it comes out after 20 years, we don't have any prior creations anymore and now we're stuck with deadly wheat.
I think that's about as likely as it was likely as -- as people were afraid of when computers were new -- once we became dependent on computers, they would become conscious and kill us all. Or that alternating current would kill us all, as the public was afraid of after Tesla introduced it. Or that electricity, together with the new medical sciences, would be used to create frankenstein monsters. All these fears seem technically justified from a distance, but they aren't.
There are some 23 species of wheat cultivated around the world, along with their subspecies; all of them inventions of our ancestors. None of them are going anywhere. GM wheat is not going to cross-pollinate with these species, because these species all self-pollinate. Hybrids only happen when they are done manually. GM wheat would be created by adding a gene from another organism to transcribe some known protein. If the protein isn't poisonous to us in the other organism, neither will it be poisonous to us in the wheat. Although GMO is more powerful than simple hybridization, it is less dangerous, because we know specifically what genes were are transferring, and what proteins they code for. With traditional hybridization, there is the hypothetical risk you could activate some deactivated poison gene in one of the donor species. You have no idea what thousands of genes you're getting. There aren't these unknowns with GMO. As long as it's disclosed what proteins have been added to the organism, the scientific community can fully assess the health risks of the added proteins.
And despite the natural distaste for patents on genomes, patents are the only thing that makes it possible for specifics of these genetic changes to be disclosed. Without them, the inventors would be fighting tooth and nail to keep the changes trade secrets.
IMO the most likely scenario where the seed bank would be needed is when the human race eventually tries to restart agriculture after the start of the next ice age. Yet when that happens, it's very likely that this island could be under a mile-thick ice sheet. That doesn't seem like the best location.
And just because that's the question you can answer doesn't mean it's the question I asked. I asked for a falsifiable test of the darwinian mechanism of macroevolution, not the theory of common descent. Specifically, the theory that random mutation is the source of all macroevolutionary change.
"theory that all macroevolutionary change is caused by random mutation" is not a very good summary of the theory of evolution, which is what I assume you're challenging me to prove. In this very thread, there are several well-moderated examples of places where evolutionary theories have made predictions that were later borne out, whether archeologically or in the lab. Perhaps you'd like to read the thread before posting in it?
You're assuming wrong. The "theory that all macroevolutionary change is caused by random mutation" is the theory I am challenged you to prove, which is half of the neodarwinist mechanism for evolution, the other half being natural selection; not "the theory of evolution," whatever specific set of theories you may mean by that. That is why I said the former rather than the latter.
What testable predictions are made by the theory that all macroevolutionary change is caused by random mutation?
As opposed to magic? None.
As opposed to something that isn't random. It's no more scientifically legitimate to arbitrarily decide that it's random than it is to arbitrarily decide it that it's directionally changed by some natural mechanism, or to arbitrarily decide that God intervened to make the changes. Until there is direct evidence for the nature of the mechanism, or until the theory of randomness can make predictions, it is unknown. The most fundamental aspect of knowledge is the ability to discern the unknown from the known.
It is of course a great irony that Charles Darwin himself was a theology student, but he arrived at the theory of evolution via Scientific method. Religion and Science are not incompatible, they just dont deal with the same areas.
When they deal with the nature of the human mind, which the mechanism of evolution has great implications for, science and religion can definitely overlap in subject matter. However, I would suggest that science, at least so far, has no legitimately scientific basis for making conclusions about the nature of the human mind. Evolutionary psychology is based on the assumption that no other factors formed human beings other than fitness for reproduction and survival. This is an unfalsifiable philosophical basis, not a scientific one.
The epigenetic changes that pass from one generation to the next are known to not be random, but are based on the behavior and environment of the ancestor organism. The epigenome activates and deactivates specific genes. That it might modulate or in some way influence the actual genetic changes seems fairly probable to me. If this, or some other natural (or supernatural) cause gives directionality to genetic mutation, then that is the primary mechanism of evolution, and fitness for reproduction and survival merely secondary. That would make entire fields, such as evolutionary psychology, completely illegitimate. And there's not one scientific reason to assume it's not true.
As an extra extra bonus, if we continue to develop these two lines of ancestry I predict they will eventually diverge enough in genetic makeup that they can be considered a new species of bacteria. Tada! Macroevolution is the cumulative effect of microevolution!
What is called a new species is an arbitrary distinction. No microevolution is going to get the bacteria closer to becoming a multicellular organism.
It has nothing to do with how you define "species". The reason why macroevolution is fundamentally different from microevolution, is that macroevolution must be credited with the increasing of complexity, while microevolution need not. The mechanism described by random mutation and natural selection is fundamentally an optimization algorithm. This makes it a perfectly reasonable mechanism to explain lateral adaptive change is organisms. But it makes it, IMO, an insufficient theory to explain increases in complexity of organisms. A multicellular organism is not merely an optimization of a single-celled organism. The adaptive immune system is not merely an optimization of the innate immune system. I don't know if this can be proven mathematically; it certainly hasn't been yet. But it's a problem that exists with the theory if you believe in God or not.
The second problem is that, to my knowledge, there are no possible test that could falsify the theory that the proposed mechanism is the mechanism of macroevolution. But it's given weight as "scientific" nevertheless. This is probably because all those who point these deficiencies out also tend to talk about God, and so are dismissed. It's like the decades of scientific resistance to the Big Bang theory, owing to the fact that the theory was put forth by a scientist who was also a Catholic priest, and because the Big Bang sounds too much like an act of creation and would obviously imply to many a creator. If the religious opposition to the neodarwinist mechanism of macroevolution didn't exist, I believe there would be non-religious scientific opposition to it that would be just as great.
I agree that some aspects of ID generally belongs more to philosophy or theology than to science, but its criticism of the theory of the neodarwinist mechanism of macroevolution IS science; it is insisting that the scientific method be applied to that theory. Since it cannot be, that theory could only, I suppose, be called a kind of materialist philosophy, presented as science.
One of the reasons why this whole debate is so astonishingly stupid is the whole "falsifiable, testable prediction" thing. The #1 way to make various timecube-style crackpots leave you alone is to say "OK, great, what testable predictions does your crazy crackpot theory make?" For ID, just as for timecube, the answer is "not a one." In principle, then, we're done. It's not science! It fails the one and only test that a scientific theory must pass!
What testable predictions are made by the theory that all macroevolutionary change is caused by random mutation?
It's fine to take your assertion as a starting point, but then you need a number of positive falsifiable experiments to test your hypothesis. That is science. What you have now is a philosophical theory. It has not become a scientific hypothesis yet, and this is why it must not be taught in science classes as an equal to evolutionary theory, which does have many falsifiable experiments that have supported it. Even for evolution theory's so-called Achilles' Heel, the fossil records are at least an observational test of organisms of the past, for which people have a reasonable repeatable measure of their age(whether it is ultimately the right measure is not the issue). You cannot create such a falsifiable test for a theory that has an extra-systemic creator as its basis.
What falsifiable test exists for the Darwinian mechanism of macro-evolution? I've never heard of one. So why should we treat it as science?
I tried to play the "infinity" card against an IDer recently, the "paradox of evil" as you put it (and they put it). For the uninitiated, the argument goes: God is infinite, which means by definition that he includes everything. Ergo, if evil exists then it too must be part of God. This requires one of three conclusions, (a) God is not all good, (b) God is not infinite, or (c) evil doesn't exist.
Where did you get the definition requiring an infinite God to include everything?
Mathematically, your definition is easily refutable by counterexample: No given infinite line contains all the points in any given finite area. (For that matter, no infinite volume in Cartesian space contains any point in a separate Cartesian space!)
Physically, your definition is also easily refutable by counterexample: All gravitational fields are infinite (they extend infinitely), but magnetic fields are not part of gravitational fields, but are independent.
In fact, the opposite is necessarily true: The Infinite must be something distinct from the finite. The natural world is finite -- everything changes and moves through time. The Infinite is necessarily unchangeable. Nothing infinite, or which comprises the infinite, could possibly change through time. The two are necessarily distinct, and have different natures.
Theologically, the Infinite, who is Being itself, created and sustains a finite universe out of Himself, from Himself, and distinct from Himself, but which only sustained in being and existence from Him, who is Being itself and Existence itself.
The most important part of His creation is free will, because with free will, it is possible for the recipient forms of his Life, to experience life as if from themselves, and so to genuinely be forms of life. When such forms choose to manifest the life that flows in from the Infinite, they manifest good; when such forms choose to pervert that life into something else, they manifest evil. So both good and evil can only exist from God's influx of life, but only good is a manifestation of God.
As a post-script, here is one other anecdote. In college I was party to a similar debate. One girl, arguing the ID side, was at one point confronted by another student with the statement, "This is basic logic!" To which she replied, "Yeah, human logic, maybe."
God didn't make everybody clever. He did, however, make Truth available to everybody, in an infinity of forms. Cleverness, though useful, does not by itself lead to truth. If cleverness leads one to shun all other paths to Truth, it will, in fact, become an obstacle rather than an aid. You could surpass everyone you ever meet in cleverness, and still end up further from Truth than any of them.
GHWB (not to be confused with GHB, which can be metabolized from certain toy paints) was made fun of a lot for one of his campaign mottos, which was "It's time for a kindler, gentler America." Dana Carvey made gravy from spoofing GHWB on SNL, and the "kindler, gentler America" bit was an instant classic.
IIRC, it was from a state-of-the-union address rather than a campaign motto. I remember thinking, "Kinder gentler? I want a more kick-ass America!" Thank God he had a son!
The evolution is easily explained. Wasps sting and kill cockroaches and lay an egg on the dead roach to provide ready food for their larvae. Some wasps had less potent venom, strong enough to paralyze but taking longer to kill. These roaches would stay alive longer and provide better, less rotten bodies for the larvae. Now you can see the selection mechanism, give it a few million years and a billion generations, you can see behavior that is incredible.
Perhaps I'm missing something. How can a DNA mutation make the wasp know how to locate the brain and lodge the stinger directly into it? When this change happened, it would have presumably killed the roach if the venom wasn't already a dopamine analogue rather than a toxin. If the roaches were killed after this change, the venom couldn't have been changed by successive steps into a dopamine, as a small change from dead is still dead. If the venom was already a dopamine analogue before the wasp learned to inject into the brain, then how? Dopamine, at least in humans, can't cross the blood-brain barrier, so would only be effective if injected into the brain.
While this sounds great for search results, it's terrifying in regards to privacy. Does any company have the right to that kind of data? Does any person? Most of us would say no.
I don't get it. Why would anyone care if Google or any other company knows their marital status, gender or age?
Earth will constantly present the same side to the moon, just as the moon does to us now. Whatever is around at that time will be in big trouble. We can expect the climate alarmists to provide additional spin, but it's probably not going to be enough.
I'm not sure why rotation getting synchronized with the moon's orbit would be such a problem, especially since it will happen very gradually. There will be no tides, which may mean fewer earthquakes (not to mention easier dock, bridge and harbor construction). Sounds and bays that are salty now will become fresh water. Also there will surely be a big boon in tourism to whichever hemisphere gets the moon in its sky. There will be people on the other side who go their whole lives never having seen the moon!
The one of the previous mass extinctions in Earth's history was attributed to severe volcanic eruptions that released about 6 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as man has since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Now, that to me is a scary and still hopeful message at the same time. One: six times as much doesn't seem like THAT much more. Considering that this resulted in well over 90% of all life on the planet dieing, that's not a pretty picture.
If you're talking about the K-T extinction, the idea that it was caused by CO2 is a fringe theory to say the least! (But maybe that's the kind the sells better at the Discovery channel, I don't know.) The mainstream theory that involve volcanoes attribute it to volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere, blocking out or dimming the sun for an extended period of time.
I think we'd better make absolutely certain that it isn't already habited before we decide to make it habitable. Considering that we're still finding life forms in unexpected places in and on the earth, ruling out the presence of life would be at least as big a project as transforming its atmosphere.
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How could you possibly know that the list hasn't prevented one crime against children? Or that it has caused more problems than it has solved?
There are permanent legal consequences to ALL crimes that people are convicted of past the age of majority. As for "paying their debt to society", there is no such thing. The only thing that comes close is if you are executed for a murder, because society has taken from you as much as you have taken from society. However, even then, society has certainly not be repaid for what you took from it. The family of your victim has nothing more after you are executed than before. If you kill or rape someone, spend a few years in prison, and then go back about your life, you are so far from having "repaid your debt to society" as to be laughable.
Because, circa 1970, the US Supreme Court imposed the restriction on the American people that they cannot execute rapists, as justice would require. Moreover, the laws don't even provide for lengthy sentences for rapists and many murderers. As a result, other, more "creative", laws and judicial orders are substituted for actual justice, in the attempt to provide the protection for society that justice would provide.
There's no legal requirement that a convict's "slate be wiped clean" after serving a prison term. For example, they can permanently forfeit their right to vote by being convicted of a felony.
More to the point, is the fact that this killing was not done for either justice or vengeance, but for self-preservation -- that is, protection of his family. Both Megan's Law, and this killing happened for the simple fact that we as a society have lost our taste for justice and no longer provide it. Justice would require that this rapist be executed or spend his life in prison. If rapists and murderers were treated accordingly, there would be no need for such acts, or for Megan's Law.
RTFA. The offender's entry was not wrong. It was only ambiguous.
It wouldn't be a transposon that gained the ability and lost it again -- what we see would be essentially the fossils of the evolution of that transposon into one that is functional as a virus. When it actually reaches that point, it takes over the cell and converts it into viruses. So we would never see that in a stable genome, only the various steps that preceded it but are not yet functional.
Why does it take 2 freakin Gig to install? What's in there, a high resolution feature-length documentary of the making of?
I'm not saying it's impossible, but surgery is just the type of thing that robots would generally NOT do very well. Every surgery is different. Robots offer an advantage over humans when every repeated action needs to be identical. Surgery requires looking into a space and visually identifying the various structures... all while blood is repeatedly covering them up, and they're jostling around. That's the type of thing that the human brain is exceptionally good at, and robots are ridiculously bad at. Add the fact that there is no margin for mistakes, and I don't think we're going to see robotic surgeons any time soon.
I think that's about as likely as it was likely as -- as people were afraid of when computers were new -- once we became dependent on computers, they would become conscious and kill us all. Or that alternating current would kill us all, as the public was afraid of after Tesla introduced it. Or that electricity, together with the new medical sciences, would be used to create frankenstein monsters. All these fears seem technically justified from a distance, but they aren't.
There are some 23 species of wheat cultivated around the world, along with their subspecies; all of them inventions of our ancestors. None of them are going anywhere. GM wheat is not going to cross-pollinate with these species, because these species all self-pollinate. Hybrids only happen when they are done manually. GM wheat would be created by adding a gene from another organism to transcribe some known protein. If the protein isn't poisonous to us in the other organism, neither will it be poisonous to us in the wheat. Although GMO is more powerful than simple hybridization, it is less dangerous, because we know specifically what genes were are transferring, and what proteins they code for. With traditional hybridization, there is the hypothetical risk you could activate some deactivated poison gene in one of the donor species. You have no idea what thousands of genes you're getting. There aren't these unknowns with GMO. As long as it's disclosed what proteins have been added to the organism, the scientific community can fully assess the health risks of the added proteins.
And despite the natural distaste for patents on genomes, patents are the only thing that makes it possible for specifics of these genetic changes to be disclosed. Without them, the inventors would be fighting tooth and nail to keep the changes trade secrets.
IMO the most likely scenario where the seed bank would be needed is when the human race eventually tries to restart agriculture after the start of the next ice age. Yet when that happens, it's very likely that this island could be under a mile-thick ice sheet. That doesn't seem like the best location.
And just because that's the question you can answer doesn't mean it's the question I asked. I asked for a falsifiable test of the darwinian mechanism of macroevolution, not the theory of common descent. Specifically, the theory that random mutation is the source of all macroevolutionary change.
You're assuming wrong. The "theory that all macroevolutionary change is caused by random mutation" is the theory I am challenged you to prove, which is half of the neodarwinist mechanism for evolution, the other half being natural selection; not "the theory of evolution," whatever specific set of theories you may mean by that. That is why I said the former rather than the latter.
As opposed to something that isn't random. It's no more scientifically legitimate to arbitrarily decide that it's random than it is to arbitrarily decide it that it's directionally changed by some natural mechanism, or to arbitrarily decide that God intervened to make the changes. Until there is direct evidence for the nature of the mechanism, or until the theory of randomness can make predictions, it is unknown. The most fundamental aspect of knowledge is the ability to discern the unknown from the known.
When they deal with the nature of the human mind, which the mechanism of evolution has great implications for, science and religion can definitely overlap in subject matter. However, I would suggest that science, at least so far, has no legitimately scientific basis for making conclusions about the nature of the human mind. Evolutionary psychology is based on the assumption that no other factors formed human beings other than fitness for reproduction and survival. This is an unfalsifiable philosophical basis, not a scientific one.
The epigenetic changes that pass from one generation to the next are known to not be random, but are based on the behavior and environment of the ancestor organism. The epigenome activates and deactivates specific genes. That it might modulate or in some way influence the actual genetic changes seems fairly probable to me. If this, or some other natural (or supernatural) cause gives directionality to genetic mutation, then that is the primary mechanism of evolution, and fitness for reproduction and survival merely secondary. That would make entire fields, such as evolutionary psychology, completely illegitimate. And there's not one scientific reason to assume it's not true.
What is called a new species is an arbitrary distinction. No microevolution is going to get the bacteria closer to becoming a multicellular organism.
It has nothing to do with how you define "species". The reason why macroevolution is fundamentally different from microevolution, is that macroevolution must be credited with the increasing of complexity, while microevolution need not. The mechanism described by random mutation and natural selection is fundamentally an optimization algorithm. This makes it a perfectly reasonable mechanism to explain lateral adaptive change is organisms. But it makes it, IMO, an insufficient theory to explain increases in complexity of organisms. A multicellular organism is not merely an optimization of a single-celled organism. The adaptive immune system is not merely an optimization of the innate immune system. I don't know if this can be proven mathematically; it certainly hasn't been yet. But it's a problem that exists with the theory if you believe in God or not.
The second problem is that, to my knowledge, there are no possible test that could falsify the theory that the proposed mechanism is the mechanism of macroevolution. But it's given weight as "scientific" nevertheless. This is probably because all those who point these deficiencies out also tend to talk about God, and so are dismissed. It's like the decades of scientific resistance to the Big Bang theory, owing to the fact that the theory was put forth by a scientist who was also a Catholic priest, and because the Big Bang sounds too much like an act of creation and would obviously imply to many a creator. If the religious opposition to the neodarwinist mechanism of macroevolution didn't exist, I believe there would be non-religious scientific opposition to it that would be just as great.
I agree that some aspects of ID generally belongs more to philosophy or theology than to science, but its criticism of the theory of the neodarwinist mechanism of macroevolution IS science; it is insisting that the scientific method be applied to that theory. Since it cannot be, that theory could only, I suppose, be called a kind of materialist philosophy, presented as science.
What testable predictions are made by the theory that all macroevolutionary change is caused by random mutation?
What falsifiable test exists for the Darwinian mechanism of macro-evolution? I've never heard of one. So why should we treat it as science?
Where did you get the definition requiring an infinite God to include everything?
Mathematically, your definition is easily refutable by counterexample: No given infinite line contains all the points in any given finite area. (For that matter, no infinite volume in Cartesian space contains any point in a separate Cartesian space!)
Physically, your definition is also easily refutable by counterexample: All gravitational fields are infinite (they extend infinitely), but magnetic fields are not part of gravitational fields, but are independent.
In fact, the opposite is necessarily true: The Infinite must be something distinct from the finite. The natural world is finite -- everything changes and moves through time. The Infinite is necessarily unchangeable. Nothing infinite, or which comprises the infinite, could possibly change through time. The two are necessarily distinct, and have different natures.
Theologically, the Infinite, who is Being itself, created and sustains a finite universe out of Himself, from Himself, and distinct from Himself, but which only sustained in being and existence from Him, who is Being itself and Existence itself.
The most important part of His creation is free will, because with free will, it is possible for the recipient forms of his Life, to experience life as if from themselves, and so to genuinely be forms of life. When such forms choose to manifest the life that flows in from the Infinite, they manifest good; when such forms choose to pervert that life into something else, they manifest evil. So both good and evil can only exist from God's influx of life, but only good is a manifestation of God.
God didn't make everybody clever. He did, however, make Truth available to everybody, in an infinity of forms. Cleverness, though useful, does not by itself lead to truth. If cleverness leads one to shun all other paths to Truth, it will, in fact, become an obstacle rather than an aid. You could surpass everyone you ever meet in cleverness, and still end up further from Truth than any of them.
IIRC, it was from a state-of-the-union address rather than a campaign motto. I remember thinking, "Kinder gentler? I want a more kick-ass America!" Thank God he had a son!
Of maybe just, "Scientists Observed Mimicking Behavior of Emerald Cockroach Wasps."
Perhaps I'm missing something. How can a DNA mutation make the wasp know how to locate the brain and lodge the stinger directly into it? When this change happened, it would have presumably killed the roach if the venom wasn't already a dopamine analogue rather than a toxin. If the roaches were killed after this change, the venom couldn't have been changed by successive steps into a dopamine, as a small change from dead is still dead. If the venom was already a dopamine analogue before the wasp learned to inject into the brain, then how? Dopamine, at least in humans, can't cross the blood-brain barrier, so would only be effective if injected into the brain.
I don't get it. Why would anyone care if Google or any other company knows their marital status, gender or age?
I'm not sure why rotation getting synchronized with the moon's orbit would be such a problem, especially since it will happen very gradually. There will be no tides, which may mean fewer earthquakes (not to mention easier dock, bridge and harbor construction). Sounds and bays that are salty now will become fresh water. Also there will surely be a big boon in tourism to whichever hemisphere gets the moon in its sky. There will be people on the other side who go their whole lives never having seen the moon!
If you're talking about the K-T extinction, the idea that it was caused by CO2 is a fringe theory to say the least! (But maybe that's the kind the sells better at the Discovery channel, I don't know.) The mainstream theory that involve volcanoes attribute it to volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere, blocking out or dimming the sun for an extended period of time.
I think we'd better make absolutely certain that it isn't already habited before we decide to make it habitable. Considering that we're still finding life forms in unexpected places in and on the earth, ruling out the presence of life would be at least as big a project as transforming its atmosphere.