I think you may want to go in circles around your own post
Holding their own in the political sense that they still exist, which in practical terms is all they need. However, from a military perspective they have not had any significant victories over the US.
Guerilla warfare is very effective as a political tool, it has limited military value. It's primary purpose is not to "win," it's to induce weariness in the enemy through disruption.
This crap is what happens when everyone has been drumming up mass hysteria of Think-of-the-children 24/7. Read any newspaper, watch any channel on TV and you will get a couple of makenews items related to the same awesome phenomenon. Why is everyone surprised that people are actually losing track of why such a law seemed like a good thing initially? This is inevitable with everything which is started with a emotional reason rather than a logical one - sooner or later the reason is forgotten and everyone blindly follows the 'consequence' part of the law.
I bet that if some angry lawmakers were able to pass a law back then which asked for public molesting/raping of the child molesters/rapists then you would be reading about how the court has decided a date for public stripping and molesting of those two kids because of some bullshit way they could have hurt themselves in some possible future.
This is all the more disgusting because majority of the media is a part of the hysteriacampaign. You can bitch about it as much as you want but as long as no one wants to take a public stand against such bullshit nothing will change.
I agree with you for the most part. But the thing is, its all very fine to talk like that when you (or anyone you love) are NOT in a position where you are facing death in the face. I would rather have the option of getting rid of any cancer I may or may not get in future, than just believe that I will be content with the quality of life I had when I am lying in a bed in ICU in some hospital. What if I am diagnosed with some deadly form of cancer at something like 35. I don't think I would like to die at that age no matter how good my life has been till then. Add to this the fact that I don't believe in God or reincarnation or any other soothing things like that.
Don't get me wrong. I KNOW that I will die one day no matter how much I can try to delay the inevitable, but I wouldn't be content with my death when it could have been avoided if enough medical research was done for a cure of something as old as cancer. Not that it matters in the long run but I, for one, welcome any research which can be done to prolong the lifetime of humans and cure them of life-threatening diseases. Would you be content with the quality of life of your 10 year old daughter if she was diagnosed with cancer and was looking at 2-3 months of life at the most? Won't you wish there was a cure so she could live longer ?
Saying things like "I am not worried about death" is redundant when you are not facing it. And what exactly is "Life worth living" ? That you 'helped' as many people as you could? Gave food and clothes to the poor and helped old ladies cross the road? Saved the life of 100 children drowning in a river? Believed in your God to the end and walked the religious path strictly all your life? Killed the infidels who were minions of satans/shaitaan? Lead your country in a war and won it? Raped and killed dozens of girls because the voice of God in your head told you to? Lived in a small hut on a secluded mountain top in Himalayas meditating about the teachings of Buddha? Went to temple/mosque every Tuesday/Friday and made sure your children grow up in a nice religious Hindu/Muslim environment? Played as many games as you can because they made you feel better ? That phrase is so overused and cliched that there is no meaning left to relate to. A life worth living to you maybe the most detestable life for someone else. Generalizations are all nice and dandy, but preaching them to All people just does not work.
After taking the advice of a fellow/.er (Read up threads a week or two after they haver been posted to actually get decent/honest comments), I must say he was totally right.
Let me start with a disclaimer: I mostly agree with the people who want to make sure their young and the next generation have a decent shot at the kind of life they have enjoyed.
But when it comes to the attitude - "As long as things work in our favor, its all justified. If it seems like to go other way, its irrational/unpatriotic/treason/immoral/etc." - things get distorted. Its all nice and dandy for you to keep such an attitude but don't try to justify it for everyone else. Don't you think that when things are not going your way, they are going some other person's way ? Why shouldn't they think the same way about your objections "Fuck them. We seem to be getting the better end of the deal. We will deal with the thing if/when it comes to bite us back" ? How do you think countries like India felt when their industries were destroyed because of mass produced goods from developed countries which (even though of inferior quality in some areas like textiles) were immensely cheaper to produce and drove the manually-powered industries to close. There were so many immensely talented workers in industries like handicraft, textile etc. who actually starved to death (as opposed to the metaphorical starvation people like to throw in arguments against offshoring) Back then these countries were told to deal with it and learn how the capitalist gods operate. Now tables seem to be turned in some areas so people from the other side are bitching about it. They seem to forget that the bitter lessons of those days have taught countries like India to move forward and not to try to protect each and everything from "outsiders" in vain. It has been a good lesson and it has helped them to try to become a better nation.
Seems like old lessons are lost along with wisdom when a generation dies. The irony is still interesting to observe.
As noble that sentiment is, it is not correct unless you assume that there is some Truth "out there" irrespective of whether we know it or not. Truth is what you think is true. Period. If people(/state/media/"whatever forces & circumstances you fancy") can make you believe something then it becomes the truth. Who is to say that those new "facts" uncovered after the collapse of Soviet Union are The Truth? Do YOU actually know what happened in WW2? Do YOU know what goes on in your country? Do YOU know what goes on in your neighbourhood? Aren't you just believing what has been told to you by others. Truth is a good label to put on something you believe in. It doesn't matter if someday I see a purple UFO and post in on some blog. It will not be truth to you and everyone else. It won't even be truth for me once I begin to doubt my senses enough (maybe it was the last drink I had that day etc etc,), But then maybe it Was the last drink and there wasn't any UFO there at all. As long as I believe I saw a UFO it is truth for me, the moment I start not believing it enough, it loses that tag.
Correct. I remember a case from some years back where an old(50+) guy was charged with soliciting for child porn after the fbi/police guys posed as child-porn peddlers. The court threw out the case after the defense pleaded entrapment and said something to the tone of "After he was offered child-porn, he may have asked for it out of mere curiosity. This does not prove that he would have gone out of his way to search for it if he was not approached in the first place".
Just a thought. Going by the same logic, if FBI was to set up a torrent tracker for movies or dummy movie files on a (public) FTP server, and some guy just happened to come across it when searching for pubs on napalm or some other ftp search method. Can he also plead entrapment if he was accused of downloading from that site?
Well I too don't understand the importance being put on one fossil being found. I mean, yeah it would have been interesting if they found a buried fossil colony of a milllion of them or something (even then it may or may not have been strong enough to dispute a whole theory) but one fossil can be explained in a lot of ways:
It was brought to the island by a predatory bird which went hunting to the aussie land (yeah I know, too far, but someone earlied posted about haast eagle which has a similar range, so its a possibility).
Traditional rodents have amazing survival capabilities. It is not impossible for a rodent-like mammal to have travelled far into the sea on a small floating landmass/tree only to be captured by a bird dead/alive and finally dumped in new zealand.
It could also be eaten by a fish and which ended up in new zealand, dead or alive, or after itself being grabbed by a bird.
The list can go on. I am not putting much thought into this theory till they find more collaborative evidence to further support this finding.
<green> We vegetarians love the environment. carnivores are sick freaks. <Frank> How can vegetarians possibly love the environment.. you keep eating all the fucking plants
Whenever someone brings up colonizing another planet, I can't help but wonder "why?" Yes, there is the novelty factor of being able to do it. But how practical is it? What is the objective? Would we do it to preserve the species? From what? An asteriod hitting Earth and turning it into a wasteland? Could Earth possibly be any worse than Titan... or even Mars... in that case?
Yes it can possibly be Much much worse than Titan (or Mars) in that case for a number of reasons. First, in the absence of any other colony, Earth is all we will have at that time and if even a mediocre size meteor was to hit the earth, the entire civilization will go back hundreds(or thousands) of years at the least, not to mention the massive loss of life and the immense damage to the ecosystem and Earth as a whole - which may or may not be reversible. Now you may think of saving the critical infrastructure under some massive network of bunkers but how much can you save really? Can you save all the knowledge of different civilizations all across the globe which may or maynot give us the next breakthrough somewhere in future? How many people can you save at a time like that? How much bio-diversity can you recreate when you ran to a hole with a limited number of samples? And will you even have the ability to do change earth back to "normal-like" situation when you finally emerge from those bunkers, since you have no practical knowledge of how to go about doing such a thing - considering that your steered clear of trying anything like that on other planets because there was no need.
We can sit here and perish or we can increase our chances of surviving as a species by setting up pockets of life in as many places as we can. We WILL have to move out eventually even if you think its a stupid idea now. Hell, forget about waiting for Sun to burn up totally, how much longer can the earth sustain us and the immense resources we require for our everyday life? How about getting new source for energy and other valuable raw materials from places where its just lying there, totally untapped. How about pushing the boundary of science and technology so that we have a choice of the type of life we want to live, instead of dying in future wars where everyone wants all the resources for himself. Read up some books about the importance of the control over sources of water and the wars which will most likely be fought over such a mundane thing like that. Its virtually a time-bomb we are sitting on and it will go off when its time comes whether you like it or not.
Oh and about "Earth would have to be all but vaporized for it to be much worse than any place you could find in outer space", do you honestly believe that if we were to terraform or colonize another planet/satellite in the universe, it will always remain the same barren piece of rock and ice it is now? Its more probable that people will opt to live on those planets because we will have the chance to use the knowledge of centuries without making the same mistakes we did.
We have come from stone age tools to this age because we have kept pushing boundaries. The moment we let go of our curiosity and innovation is the moment the countdown to our impending doom will start.
Just goes to show how less we know about our own world. One of these days someone will come out of an old abandoned mine and declare that he has found a whole civilization living there! More on topic, take this for a sci-fi imagination: Alien:)
.... I don't like this UID comparing business but 44 goddammit! Hmm, on the brighter side, we finally get a post from one of the Old Ones we keep hearing so much about in all those damn RPGs ! Please don't destroy the world till next year. I am saving for a new graphics card !
I understand you have a dislike towards 'gamers' being put in the same category as other professionals but I will bite.
Who pays them? Um.. mainly folks from gaming and hardware industry but essentially the the same type of people who sponsor professional Bowling championships, professional Snooker tournaments, World Cup Soccer, Olympics etc. You know, the ones who get to advertise their goodies. The masses get entertainment after(sometimes) paying to watch. Regular stuff you know.
It may not be so explicitly tied up to sensory perception as the researchers are trying to prove/disprove. It has happened a lot of times when I am in deeply thinking about something and suddenly I get the deja-vu feeling, can't even put my hands on what was it that triggered it. Was it some particular incident in the train of thought or some particular person/place which poppped up somewhere. I am sure lots of people have similar experiences. It just so happens that almost all of the data we acquire comes through the sensory organs so we tend to relate the feeling to the way those organs operate.
Somewhere above someone has posted that it might be related to the brain short-circuiting to pass a memory directly to the long-term-memory, and we get the odd sensation when accessing that particular memory. I find it much more plausible than any particular organ responsible of the feeling of deja-vu.
Yeah and then maybe they will stop moderating the funny comments as Informative too ! Wait.. I think I have seen this before somewhere.. some slash something site... goddammit...
Good point. Though I do not agree with some part of it. The less you know, the more statements must be taken as assumptions I think it should be "The less you know, the more the number of baby steps you have to take to arrive at the same conclusion". It does not make those steps assumptions because once you start dividing each step into a set of baby steps, they become "knowledge" instead of "assumptions" and no longer stand in the way of Occam's razor because of the very nature of knowledge - seemingly simple and obvious.
One major problem with your theory. Young children won't be able to tell if they had anything like deja-vu. Even the grown ups can not differentiate between deja-vu and the ordinary "forgetting-something" all the time. For children it may be more of a non-event, something clicked and was gone in a second. Do you honestly think they will care or remember it after 10 seconds, or remember it well enough to convey to someone that they had an episode of deja-vu (if they even give know what that means)? Attaching probes on their head will be akin to assuming the reason and then considering only the data which supports it. All the accepted type of signals will be considered cases of deja vu even though it will not be possible to prove it one way or the other.
Thanks. That was very informative. However I still have a question. Since the up quark has (+2/3) charge and the two down quarks have (-1/3) charge each, why will the behavior of an incoming proton/electron be consistence in every trial since, as far as I can tell, they are both experiencing the same net electrical force at a distance and the force experienced at close quarters will depend on the alignment of quarks in the neutron at that particular instance. So an incoming electron may be diverted away from or attracted to the neutron depending upon if the down quarks are aligned closer to the impact zone or the up quark are closer to it. I think I am missing something obvious here (I am not a physicist obviously). Also, is there a possibility that quarks themselves are are made up of even mroe fundamental blocks whose net charge determines the charge of a particular quark? In that case, would the presence of a fraction of those entities in a particle like axion necessarily divert an incoming proton/electron from its path to a determinable degree, since the force of interaction may be too small to make a significant change to the course.
I don't understand this particular stand which most of the professional/amateur scientists seem to have about the conditions necessary for 'Life' to exist anywhere. Surely we can say that life, as we know it on earth (or the type we have seen so far on earth), needs water to exist but why the generalization ? Why is it necessary that all types of life everywhere in the universe has to be carbon based ? Why should even the lowest level consciousness need water to exist ? We frequently talk about the future when AI will be indistinguishable from human intelligence and still put water as one of the indispensable ingredients when we go looking for life in other planets.
Its a huge flight of fantasy but why can't there theoretically be Sulphur/Silicon based life in say Mars or Venus (or even Mercury) The life we know as it exists on Earth will not be able to survive in those condition but then that is probably the reason we are not living there. If there is actually life in those places then I am sure it is well suited to survive in those "extreme" conditions.
Yeah I know the primary purpose of searching for signs of water is to decide if we can someday colonize that particular planet or its satellites but when someone proclaims something like "No evidence of water therefore no life possible on that Planet", I really wonder about the possible pockets of Life we may be ignoring.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot Rocket Scientist and Porn Star.
This crap is what happens when everyone has been drumming up mass hysteria of Think-of-the-children 24/7. Read any newspaper, watch any channel on TV and you will get a couple of makenews items related to the same awesome phenomenon. Why is everyone surprised that people are actually losing track of why such a law seemed like a good thing initially? This is inevitable with everything which is started with a emotional reason rather than a logical one - sooner or later the reason is forgotten and everyone blindly follows the 'consequence' part of the law. I bet that if some angry lawmakers were able to pass a law back then which asked for public molesting/raping of the child molesters/rapists then you would be reading about how the court has decided a date for public stripping and molesting of those two kids because of some bullshit way they could have hurt themselves in some possible future.
This is all the more disgusting because majority of the media is a part of the hysteria campaign. You can bitch about it as much as you want but as long as no one wants to take a public stand against such bullshit nothing will change.
Nice tip. Works like a charm. Thanks
Tu quoque !
Q1: Why is Google using inconsistent terminology in its products for such an important term?
A1: google.
Q2: Is there a real difference between a tag and a label?"
A2: labels, tags. whocares.
[+] slownewsday, google, labels, tags, whocares (tagging beta)
I agree with you for the most part. But the thing is, its all very fine to talk like that when you (or anyone you love) are NOT in a position where you are facing death in the face. I would rather have the option of getting rid of any cancer I may or may not get in future, than just believe that I will be content with the quality of life I had when I am lying in a bed in ICU in some hospital. What if I am diagnosed with some deadly form of cancer at something like 35. I don't think I would like to die at that age no matter how good my life has been till then. Add to this the fact that I don't believe in God or reincarnation or any other soothing things like that.
Don't get me wrong. I KNOW that I will die one day no matter how much I can try to delay the inevitable, but I wouldn't be content with my death when it could have been avoided if enough medical research was done for a cure of something as old as cancer. Not that it matters in the long run but I, for one, welcome any research which can be done to prolong the lifetime of humans and cure them of life-threatening diseases. Would you be content with the quality of life of your 10 year old daughter if she was diagnosed with cancer and was looking at 2-3 months of life at the most? Won't you wish there was a cure so she could live longer ?
Saying things like "I am not worried about death" is redundant when you are not facing it. And what exactly is "Life worth living" ? That you 'helped' as many people as you could? Gave food and clothes to the poor and helped old ladies cross the road? Saved the life of 100 children drowning in a river? Believed in your God to the end and walked the religious path strictly all your life? Killed the infidels who were minions of satans/shaitaan? Lead your country in a war and won it? Raped and killed dozens of girls because the voice of God in your head told you to? Lived in a small hut on a secluded mountain top in Himalayas meditating about the teachings of Buddha? Went to temple/mosque every Tuesday/Friday and made sure your children grow up in a nice religious Hindu/Muslim environment? Played as many games as you can because they made you feel better ? That phrase is so overused and cliched that there is no meaning left to relate to. A life worth living to you maybe the most detestable life for someone else. Generalizations are all nice and dandy, but preaching them to All people just does not work.
After taking the advice of a fellow /.er (Read up threads a week or two after they haver been posted to actually get decent/honest comments), I must say he was totally right.
Let me start with a disclaimer: I mostly agree with the people who want to make sure their young and the next generation have a decent shot at the kind of life they have enjoyed.
But when it comes to the attitude - "As long as things work in our favor, its all justified. If it seems like to go other way, its irrational/unpatriotic/treason/immoral/etc." - things get distorted. Its all nice and dandy for you to keep such an attitude but don't try to justify it for everyone else. Don't you think that when things are not going your way, they are going some other person's way ? Why shouldn't they think the same way about your objections "Fuck them. We seem to be getting the better end of the deal. We will deal with the thing if/when it comes to bite us back" ? How do you think countries like India felt when their industries were destroyed because of mass produced goods from developed countries which (even though of inferior quality in some areas like textiles) were immensely cheaper to produce and drove the manually-powered industries to close. There were so many immensely talented workers in industries like handicraft, textile etc. who actually starved to death (as opposed to the metaphorical starvation people like to throw in arguments against offshoring) Back then these countries were told to deal with it and learn how the capitalist gods operate. Now tables seem to be turned in some areas so people from the other side are bitching about it. They seem to forget that the bitter lessons of those days have taught countries like India to move forward and not to try to protect each and everything from "outsiders" in vain. It has been a good lesson and it has helped them to try to become a better nation.
Seems like old lessons are lost along with wisdom when a generation dies. The irony is still interesting to observe.
As noble that sentiment is, it is not correct unless you assume that there is some Truth "out there" irrespective of whether we know it or not. Truth is what you think is true. Period. If people(/state/media/"whatever forces & circumstances you fancy") can make you believe something then it becomes the truth. Who is to say that those new "facts" uncovered after the collapse of Soviet Union are The Truth? Do YOU actually know what happened in WW2? Do YOU know what goes on in your country? Do YOU know what goes on in your neighbourhood? Aren't you just believing what has been told to you by others. Truth is a good label to put on something you believe in. It doesn't matter if someday I see a purple UFO and post in on some blog. It will not be truth to you and everyone else. It won't even be truth for me once I begin to doubt my senses enough (maybe it was the last drink I had that day etc etc,), But then maybe it Was the last drink and there wasn't any UFO there at all. As long as I believe I saw a UFO it is truth for me, the moment I start not believing it enough, it loses that tag.
Its cheggit.net. Er.. I guess.
Correct. I remember a case from some years back where an old(50+) guy was charged with soliciting for child porn after the fbi/police guys posed as child-porn peddlers. The court threw out the case after the defense pleaded entrapment and said something to the tone of "After he was offered child-porn, he may have asked for it out of mere curiosity. This does not prove that he would have gone out of his way to search for it if he was not approached in the first place".
Just a thought. Going by the same logic, if FBI was to set up a torrent tracker for movies or dummy movie files on a (public) FTP server, and some guy just happened to come across it when searching for pubs on napalm or some other ftp search method. Can he also plead entrapment if he was accused of downloading from that site?
The list can go on. I am not putting much thought into this theory till they find more collaborative evidence to further support this finding.
Yes it can possibly be Much much worse than Titan (or Mars) in that case for a number of reasons. First, in the absence of any other colony, Earth is all we will have at that time and if even a mediocre size meteor was to hit the earth, the entire civilization will go back hundreds(or thousands) of years at the least, not to mention the massive loss of life and the immense damage to the ecosystem and Earth as a whole - which may or may not be reversible. Now you may think of saving the critical infrastructure under some massive network of bunkers but how much can you save really? Can you save all the knowledge of different civilizations all across the globe which may or maynot give us the next breakthrough somewhere in future? How many people can you save at a time like that? How much bio-diversity can you recreate when you ran to a hole with a limited number of samples? And will you even have the ability to do change earth back to "normal-like" situation when you finally emerge from those bunkers, since you have no practical knowledge of how to go about doing such a thing - considering that your steered clear of trying anything like that on other planets because there was no need.
We can sit here and perish or we can increase our chances of surviving as a species by setting up pockets of life in as many places as we can. We WILL have to move out eventually even if you think its a stupid idea now. Hell, forget about waiting for Sun to burn up totally, how much longer can the earth sustain us and the immense resources we require for our everyday life? How about getting new source for energy and other valuable raw materials from places where its just lying there, totally untapped. How about pushing the boundary of science and technology so that we have a choice of the type of life we want to live, instead of dying in future wars where everyone wants all the resources for himself. Read up some books about the importance of the control over sources of water and the wars which will most likely be fought over such a mundane thing like that. Its virtually a time-bomb we are sitting on and it will go off when its time comes whether you like it or not.
Oh and about "Earth would have to be all but vaporized for it to be much worse than any place you could find in outer space", do you honestly believe that if we were to terraform or colonize another planet/satellite in the universe, it will always remain the same barren piece of rock and ice it is now? Its more probable that people will opt to live on those planets because we will have the chance to use the knowledge of centuries without making the same mistakes we did.
We have come from stone age tools to this age because we have kept pushing boundaries. The moment we let go of our curiosity and innovation is the moment the countdown to our impending doom will start.
Just goes to show how less we know about our own world. One of these days someone will come out of an old abandoned mine and declare that he has found a whole civilization living there! More on topic, take this for a sci-fi imagination: Alien :)
.... I don't like this UID comparing business but 44 goddammit! Hmm, on the brighter side, we finally get a post from one of the Old Ones we keep hearing so much about in all those damn RPGs ! Please don't destroy the world till next year. I am saving for a new graphics card !
That, sir, has to be the funniest yet meaningful statement I have heard in a while. Thanks for the sig!
I understand you have a dislike towards 'gamers' being put in the same category as other professionals but I will bite.
Who pays them? Um.. mainly folks from gaming and hardware industry but essentially the the same type of people who sponsor professional Bowling championships, professional Snooker tournaments, World Cup Soccer, Olympics etc. You know, the ones who get to advertise their goodies. The masses get entertainment after(sometimes) paying to watch. Regular stuff you know.
It may not be so explicitly tied up to sensory perception as the researchers are trying to prove/disprove. It has happened a lot of times when I am in deeply thinking about something and suddenly I get the deja-vu feeling, can't even put my hands on what was it that triggered it. Was it some particular incident in the train of thought or some particular person/place which poppped up somewhere. I am sure lots of people have similar experiences. It just so happens that almost all of the data we acquire comes through the sensory organs so we tend to relate the feeling to the way those organs operate.
Somewhere above someone has posted that it might be related to the brain short-circuiting to pass a memory directly to the long-term-memory, and we get the odd sensation when accessing that particular memory. I find it much more plausible than any particular organ responsible of the feeling of deja-vu.
Yeah and then maybe they will stop moderating the funny comments as Informative too ! Wait.. I think I have seen this before somewhere.. some slash something site... goddammit...
Good point. Though I do not agree with some part of it. The less you know, the more statements must be taken as assumptions I think it should be "The less you know, the more the number of baby steps you have to take to arrive at the same conclusion". It does not make those steps assumptions because once you start dividing each step into a set of baby steps, they become "knowledge" instead of "assumptions" and no longer stand in the way of Occam's razor because of the very nature of knowledge - seemingly simple and obvious.
One major problem with your theory. Young children won't be able to tell if they had anything like deja-vu. Even the grown ups can not differentiate between deja-vu and the ordinary "forgetting-something" all the time. For children it may be more of a non-event, something clicked and was gone in a second. Do you honestly think they will care or remember it after 10 seconds, or remember it well enough to convey to someone that they had an episode of deja-vu (if they even give know what that means)? Attaching probes on their head will be akin to assuming the reason and then considering only the data which supports it. All the accepted type of signals will be considered cases of deja vu even though it will not be possible to prove it one way or the other.
Thanks. That was very informative. However I still have a question. Since the up quark has (+2/3) charge and the two down quarks have (-1/3) charge each, why will the behavior of an incoming proton/electron be consistence in every trial since, as far as I can tell, they are both experiencing the same net electrical force at a distance and the force experienced at close quarters will depend on the alignment of quarks in the neutron at that particular instance. So an incoming electron may be diverted away from or attracted to the neutron depending upon if the down quarks are aligned closer to the impact zone or the up quark are closer to it. I think I am missing something obvious here (I am not a physicist obviously). Also, is there a possibility that quarks themselves are are made up of even mroe fundamental blocks whose net charge determines the charge of a particular quark? In that case, would the presence of a fraction of those entities in a particle like axion necessarily divert an incoming proton/electron from its path to a determinable degree, since the force of interaction may be too small to make a significant change to the course.
I don't understand this particular stand which most of the professional/amateur scientists seem to have about the conditions necessary for 'Life' to exist anywhere. Surely we can say that life, as we know it on earth (or the type we have seen so far on earth), needs water to exist but why the generalization ? Why is it necessary that all types of life everywhere in the universe has to be carbon based ? Why should even the lowest level consciousness need water to exist ? We frequently talk about the future when AI will be indistinguishable from human intelligence and still put water as one of the indispensable ingredients when we go looking for life in other planets.
Its a huge flight of fantasy but why can't there theoretically be Sulphur/Silicon based life in say Mars or Venus (or even Mercury) The life we know as it exists on Earth will not be able to survive in those condition but then that is probably the reason we are not living there. If there is actually life in those places then I am sure it is well suited to survive in those "extreme" conditions.
Yeah I know the primary purpose of searching for signs of water is to decide if we can someday colonize that particular planet or its satellites but when someone proclaims something like "No evidence of water therefore no life possible on that Planet", I really wonder about the possible pockets of Life we may be ignoring.