[Philby]

Signs of Alien Life Will Be Found by 2025

Humanity is on the verge of discovering alien life, high-ranking NASA scientists say.

"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," NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan said Tuesday (April 7) during a panel discussion that focused on the space agency's efforts to search for habitable worlds and alien life.

"We know where to look. We know how to look," Stofan added during the event, which was webcast live. "In most cases we have the technology, and we're on a path to implementing it. And so I think we're definitely on the road." [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]

Do you think life exists on Mars today?
Yes - The Red Planet is teeming with tiny microbes, we just haven't found them yet.Yes - An advanced civilization lives below the surface, where we can't detect them.No - Life never existed on Mars.No - Mars once had life, but those organisms are long dead.
View Results Share This
Former astronaut John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, shared Stofan's optimism, predicting that signs of life will be found relatively soon both in our own solar system and beyond.

"I think we're one generation away in our solar system, whether it's on an icy moon or on Mars, and one generation [away] on a planet around a nearby star," Grunsfeld said during Tuesday's event.

Many habitable environments

Recent discoveries suggest that the solar system and broader Milky Way galaxy teem with environments that could support life as we know it, Grunsfeld said.

For example, oceans of liquid water slosh beneath the icy shells of the Jupiter moons Europa and Ganymede, as well as that of the Saturn satellite Enceladus. Oceans covered much of Mars in the ancient past, and seasonal dark streaks observed on the Red Planet's surface today may be caused by salty flowing water.

Further, NASA's Curiosity rover has found carbon-containing organic molecules and "fixed" nitrogen, basic ingredients necessary for Earth-like life, on the Martian surface.

Farther afield, observations by NASA's Kepler space telescope suggest that nearly every star in the sky hosts planets — and many of these worlds may be habitable. Indeed, Kepler's work has shown that rocky worlds like Earth and Mars are probably more common throughout the galaxy than gas giants such as Saturn and Jupiter.

And just as the solar system is awash in water, so is the greater galaxy, said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division.

The Milky Way is "a soggy place," Hertz said during Tuesday's event. "We can see water in the interstellar clouds from which planetary systems and stellar systems form. We can see water in the disks of debris that are going to become planetary systems around other stars, and we can even see comets being dissipated in other solar systems as [their] star evaporates them." [6 Most Likely Places for Alien Life in the Solar System]


Looking for life

Hunting for evidence of alien life is a much trickier proposition than identifying potentially habitable environments. But researchers are working steadily toward that more involved and ambitious goal, Stofan and others said.

For example, the agency's next Mars rover, scheduled to launch in 2020, will search for signs of past life and cache samples for a possible return to Earth for analysis. NASA also aims to land astronauts on Mars in the 2030s — a step Stofan regards as key to the search for Mars life.

"I'm a field geologist; I go out and break open rocks and look for fossils," Stofan said. "Those are hard to find. So I have a bias that it's eventually going to take humans on the surface of Mars — field geologists, astrobiologists, chemists — actually out there looking for that good evidence of life that we can bring back to Earth for all the scientists to argue about."

NASA is also planning out a mission to Europa, which may launch as early as 2022. The main goal of this $2.1 billion mission will be to shed light on the icy moon's potential habitability, but it could also search for signs of alien life: Agency officials are considering ways to sample and study the plumes of water vapor that apparently erupt from Europa's south polar region.

In the exoplanet realm, the agency's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an $8.8 billion instrument scheduled to launch in 2018, will scope out the atmospheres of nearby "super-Earth" alien planets, looking for gases that may have been produced by life.

JWST will scan the starlight that passes through the air of super-Earths, which are more massive than our own planet but significantly less so than gaseous worlds such as Uranus and Neptune. This method, called transit spectroscopy, will likely not work for potentially habitable Earth-size worlds, Hertz said.

Searching for biosignature gases on small, rocky exoplanets will instead probably require direct imaging of these worlds, using a "coronagraph" to block out the overwhelming glare of their parent stars, Hertz added.

NASA's potential Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, which may launch in the mid-2020s if given the official go-ahead, would include a coronagraph for exoplanet observations.

Looking forward to meet new neighbors!

[RhetoricThug]

Looking forward to meet new neighbors!

I bet you are... How are things with your current neighbors? Humans have an uncanny ability to keep progressing without fully realizing what they already have.

[Philby]

No complaints at all, they're good folk. One thing though, they're not alien enough.

More serious, what will evidence of alien life mean for us? Can religions deal with it? When you think of it, a lot of questions keep coming up.

[One Degree]

More serious, what will evidence of alien life mean for us? Can religions deal with it? When you think of it, a lot of questions keep coming up.

NASA is not talking of advanced life, so I see very little happening as a result on Earth. Religions will either adapt to it, or simply deny it. Many will claim the government faked it like they did the moon landing. Only advanced life will shake people up.

[Solman]

"They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."

"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."

"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"

"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."

"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."

"No brain?"

"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"

"So... what does the thinking?"

"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."

"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"

"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."

"So what does the meat have in mind."

"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."

"We're supposed to talk to meat?"

"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."

"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"

"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."

"I thought you just told me they used radio."

"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"

"Officially or unofficially?"

"Both."

"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."

"I was hoping you would say that."

"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"

"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"

"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."

"So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."

"That's it."

"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"

"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."

"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."

"And we can marked this sector unoccupied."

"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"

"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotation ago, wants to be friendly again."

"They always come around."

"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone."
Terry Bisson, 1991
They're Made out of Meat

[Heinie]

I'd rather have a tip for the 2.15 at Sandown on Saturday.

[Political Interest]

And when we discover aliens Russia, America, China, Europe and the Islamic world will become such close allies that the world will wonder how they could ever have been enemies.

[Frollein]

Star Trek won't happen, PI. I'm sorry, but it won't happen.

[Truth To Power]

And when we discover aliens Russia, America, China, Europe and the Islamic world will become such close allies that the world will wonder how they could ever have been enemies.

Did aboriginal Americans all become close allies when they encountered utterly alien (and much more advanced) European civilizations, even when the latter quickly showed themselves to be a deadly threat to the former?

[fuser]

And when we discover aliens Russia, America, China, Europe and the Islamic world will become such close allies that the world will wonder how they could ever have been enemies.

But what if Aliens are Muslims?

[Harmattan]

Star Trek won't happen, PI. I'm sorry, but it won't happen.

It will and I will be Captain Picard!



Just kidding. While I am sure that global organizations will take more importance, some distinct culturo-linguistic entities will survive. Although I doubt that European cultures will belong to the few survivors, outside of the English one, unless we dismantle the EU.

More generally the vision of Star Trek is so absurd that it is not even worth discussing. Economy, technology, society, they are all wrong imo.

[noemon]

Although I doubt that European cultures will belong to the few survivors, outside of the English one, unless we dismantle the EU.

I highly doubt the British culture(which is what precisely, a synthesis between chavs & peers?) will survive in some form of chrysallis as opposed to other European cultures, the new European culture(incl. Britain) might be English-speaking in common tongue but not English.

What is the culture of the current EU nations anyway?
Greek political philosophy + French Culture + German worker & cannon fodder + Italian Style + Spanish Ham + Scandinavian austerity + Slavic merryness + British perfidious-ness.

Imagine this like a dj deck with all the volumes in front of you, if you get the balance right you might listen to a symphony.

I love folk culture, I believe that certain folk traditions must be preserved and people do make efforts to preserve them, songs & customs of a distant past, but let's face it nobody gives a shit and in fact most youngsters find anything related to folk as an abomination, is their emo culture worth preserving?

Anyway...

[anasawad]

I don't know, i think there has to be some type of life out there, even if very primitive, and probably is.
But i don't think we'll ever discover it.
There is a higher chance that humanity will destroy it self before it could reach the level of technological advances to allow it to go deep into space.

[starman2003]

I don't know, i think there has to be some type of life out there, even if very primitive, and probably is.
But i don't think we'll ever discover it.

Habitable planets may be few and far between. But recent progress in finding exoplanets, and determining features relevant to habitability, has been phenomenal. Extrapolate a bit as techniques improve further and I find this too pessimistic.

There is a higher chance that humanity will destroy it self before it could reach the level of technological advances to allow it to go deep into space.

Waaay too pessimistic. I don't doubt various problems--environmental, economic, political etc--will ultimately come to a head and have quite an impact. But I've long predicted the upshot will be to destroy obsolete ideologies and governments not civilization. A more authoritarian regime can handle many issues with relative ease, by being better able to impose essential sacrifices, which is also the key to real progress in space.

[Just my view 46]

That "Alien" life exists throughout the Universe has been known for thousands of years. Only some "scientists" seem to be ignorant of this fact. That our humanity calls some of the teachers from outside "Gods" is only due to not grasping the concept. For Christians the "Lord's Prayer" should have made this abundantly clear. If this wasn't enough, there is the "Shroud of Turin". Clearly done with technology we still don't have. A photographic negative on linen which has so far lasted about 2,000 years! When so-called "scientists" snipped a piece off the patches, which were added hundreds of years later, they declared it a fraud. The only fraud were the "scientists".

In the Hindi "Sanskrit" language stories were told thousands of years before Christ of their "Gods" coming in "Vimanas" - what we would nowadays consider as UFOs. Anyone interested in this should read the "Mahabharata" or the "Bhaghavad Gita", which have long been translated into English.

The Universe is brimming with life. We are definitely NOT alone.

[MB.]

It really depends on your worldview and philosophy. Interstellar travel is completely possible, technologically speaking, and has been so since the start of the atomic age. Programs using anti-matter or Orion type engines could deliver payloads to Alpha Centauri in about 100 years. Admittedly it would take many tens of thousands of years to do so using conventional propellent. Many long-term projects have been undertaken to prepare the species for interstellar and interplanetary travel, and the blossoming science fiction literature and entertainment media have normalized the concept immensely.

SETI and NASA have, additionally, discovered several targets that are likely technological or at least in someway related to another space-faring civilization. The enormous quantity of Earth-like and super-Earth planets discovered orbiting brown dwarf stars or Sun-like stars by the Kepler mission suggest that Earthling-like life is probably widespread around the galaxy, although the failure to detect any radio communications in the last sixty years or so suggests that any nearby life has not developed to the breakout stage towards Type 1 civilization development, although. The Fermi paradox remains significant, and I suspect this may be because, like the Drake equation suggests, technological civilizations do not last for very long in the cosmic scale.

Closer to home, Mars is a source of intense interest for global space agencies, and the question of what happened to the Martian life is significant in that it suggests the direction the Earth may be approaching as humans continue to impact the atmospheric conditions. On the other hand, if at any time in the past Mars did have an active magnetic core it was likely many hundreds of millions of years ago, and thus doubtful life was able to evolve there for long prior to its destruction by whatever catastrophe halted the rotation of its core. Other targets for extraterrestrial life that have been suggested are Europa, Enceladus, Callisto, Titan, or Ceres.

Now all this is fine and well, however, there is also much debate about human contact with alien or otherwise extraterrestrial (or inter-dimensional) life that requires some explanation. Indeed, there are many who believe that aliens are currently in the employ of or in someway working alongside or controlling large portions of the planet's affairs, any number of theories represented by allegations that shadow agencies are in contact with aliens working for the US Government, Illuminati steering committee, underground bunkers, Zionist reptilian David Ike conspiracy or what have you. Jacques Vallée has documented hundreds of cases of alleged alien encounters dating back to the 1850s, and suggested that the likely explanation for this paranormal phenomena has something to do with inter-dimensional interference, possibly from parallel universes as suggested by M-theory. Philip K. Dick believed that an alien entity from the near future was sending information back in time using Tachyons, thus influencing human history; kind of the reverse of the Trafalmadorians from Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan.

UFO phenomena have been studied extensively by the US Air Force, French Ministry of Defence and British MOD, amongst other national military organizations, and have been generally dismissed as, although legitimate and interesting phenomena, of no threat to national security. The American report is the famous Blue Book published, I believe, after the study's termination in the 1970s. The British and French MODs have recently released their UFO files, and US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has suggested that she would prioritize the release of Pentagon files in a similar manner.

Assuming reality is a procedural simulation centered on the Earth and moving outwards from there to the observable horizon of the universe, I would expect that in the near future more specific information explaining the relationship between UFO phenomena, alien encounters, and human colonization of space will be introduced or revealed, so the NASA timeframe for "finding" life by 2025 does not seem unreasonable. The question, as I said at the outset, is really one of world-views: Do you believe the universe is a procedural simulation? Do you believe aliens control the illuminati and are concealing their presence? How do you explain the documented historical cases of alien encounters and UFO reports? Some, such as Bernardo Kastrup, adhering to the idealist position in the old Platonic dualism of reality and forms, believes that the universe is some kind of metacognitive process in which these phenomena are an expression thereof. Others believe aliens from distant galaxies have mastered quantum tunneling and wormhole generation technologies and are freely traveling about the universe, stopping by the Earth to maintain its status as a galactic prison, somewhat reminiscent of the Men In Black comics and movies.

Needless to say, the technological transformation of the last 200 years has effectively destroyed all certainties leaving the Early Modern nation-states in a desperate struggle for survival. I feel I will not be surprised by whatever information is eventually released or discovered. From a purely defence-strategic position I encourage the scientific community to discover any large space-faring civilizations quickly, preferably before they discover us. However, I would also not be surprised if reality is an enormous solipsistic hologram and therefore the question of "discovery" itself would be effectively meaningless. If aliens have been visiting and influencing the Earth for many centuries, and if it is, in-fact, already under alien control, then the only acceptable philosophy is fatalism since surely so powerful a collection of entities will have already determined the next stages for our development.

It is really a metaphysical question, and I am interested to know what you believe.

[Nonsense]

I have no doubt whatsoever that 'life' abounds throughout the universe,for if something happens once, it can happen again & again.
All it requires is 'time' & 'matter' in the form of creating the 'right' conditions or environment for it to exist.


At that point, the question of 'capable' or 'intelligent' life that can develop 'technologically' is of orders of magntude much more remote & infitessimally small.

Think about it, you see, any species must, like us, have the ability to 'think' other than 'surviving' in it's environment by successfully feeding itself.
To humanity, the 'wheel' was the pinnacle of 'evolution', it enabled transportation, 'progress' or more correctly 'technical evolution', consider how much the wheel itself has evolved alone,especially in respect of it's many varied uses.
Other 'tools' of human ingenuity that have had\will forever enable ever more'progress', such as the 'telescope' or 'microscope', through to the discovery of & utilisation of 'electricity' from massive machinery - 'micro-electronics'.

Those five dicoveries have been of fundamental importance to human techno-development, never to be under-estimated.
Considering the above,with how we have developed alongside that technology,consider the astronomical odds AGAINST such 'evolution' happening elsewhere,even in our own terms, the level & variation required to bring what we alone have made with materials is truly phenominal.

How would an 'alien' civilisation begin, yet alone develop it's own 'scientific' understanding of nature in which to bring about technological progress is impossible to calculate with any certainty.

So, it isn't that 'life' is not out there, it is, we are 'proof' of that, it's is there life out there that has evolved into what is similar to what we are, which is, I contest, a pre-requisite to they discovering us, before we discover them, which is more of a certainty.

[MB.]

Actually there is no such prerequisite for human analog technological development. Panspermia theory and recent studies on microorganism suggest that life can survive solar radiation and cold soaking in space. The Oort cloud expected at the edge of the solar system may indeed harbour frozen life forms or be home to rogue brown dwarfs capable of supporting such life. My point is that a technological civilization along human lines is not necessarily required at all. I think it is a common mistake caused by entertainment media which portrays extraterrestrial life as invariably human like that is the source of this cliche.

[Rancid]

One theory as to why we haven't found signs of life outside of earth is that we are one of the first occurrences of life in the universe. Perhaps some billions of years from now, life will be much more prevalent around the universe.

[MB.]

That is certainly one possibility, Rancid. However the geological and prehistorical evidence suggests that life has been nearly wiped out on this planet at a number of occasions by various mega catastrophes, comet impact, deforestation (defoliation leading to asphyxiation), megavolcanism, and so. The Cambrian explosion (expansion of life) 500 million years ago that heralded the first large scale proliferation of multicellular life on the Earth was largely reduced 60 million years later by the Ordovician extinction event and the Permian extinction of 250 million years ago almost killed off all life on the planet. What I want to stress here is that, while extinction events can be devastating, life is very robust (redundant), and once it has begun it is difficult to terminate it, to totality, even with mass extinction events. I think the rare Earth hypothesis is questionable at this point considering the proliferation of evidence that suggests that exoplanets are common, water abundant, and so on. Not to rule out the possibility of course, and it would fit in with the solipsistic demiurge vision of reality I've outlined above.