NASA Astrobiology Discovery Conference Thursday

[westwall]

Hmmmm, maybe they found ET after all. I will certainly be tuned in.

NASA - Home

 

[Mr. H.]

If you were a media representative, what question(s) would you ask the participants?

 

[editec]

I am inclined to think that if we ever beyond this solar system and can just enough to explore our own galaxy, we're going to discover that LIFE isn't all that uncommon.

Intelligent life might turn out to be very rare, but I expect that life is rather common.

Seems to me that there some kind of life-force in the universe that make life the norm rather than something rare.

And since we know that life is enormously adaptive to even very extreme conditions, I expect that we're going to find all sorts of weird kinds of life who cling to life and adapt to conditions that we currently think cannot possible support life.

I would not be at all surprised, for example, if we learned that some kind of life even exists in conditions like the coroneas of stars or even in what appears to be the vacuum of space.

I rather doubt that life is restricted to forming only out of Oxygen, Nitrogen and Carbon and hyrdogen.

 

[dilloduck]

I am inclined to think that if we ever beyond this solar system and can just enough to explore our own galaxy, we're going to discover that LIFE isn't all that uncommon.

Intelligent life might turn out to be very rare, but I expect that life is rather common.

Seems to me that there some kind of life-force in the universe that make life the norm rather than something rare.

And since we know that life is enormously adaptive to even very extreme conditions, I expect that we're going to find all sorts of weird kinds of life who cling to life and adapt to conditions that we currently think cannot possible support life.

I would not be at all surprised, for example, if we learned that some kind of life even exists in conditions like the coroneas of stars or even in what appears to be the vacuum of space.

I rather doubt that life is restricted to forming only out of Oxygen, Nitrogen and Carbon and hyrdogen.

Define "intelligent".

 

[westwall]

If you were a media representative, what question(s) would you ask the participants?

It all depends on what they announce. I can think of no single question that is relevant to all possible eventualities.

 

[RespectForVets]

NASA rocks.

 

[Old Rocks]

I am inclined to think that if we ever beyond this solar system and can just enough to explore our own galaxy, we're going to discover that LIFE isn't all that uncommon.

Intelligent life might turn out to be very rare, but I expect that life is rather common.

Seems to me that there some kind of life-force in the universe that make life the norm rather than something rare.

And since we know that life is enormously adaptive to even very extreme conditions, I expect that we're going to find all sorts of weird kinds of life who cling to life and adapt to conditions that we currently think cannot possible support life.

I would not be at all surprised, for example, if we learned that some kind of life even exists in conditions like the coroneas of stars or even in what appears to be the vacuum of space.

I rather doubt that life is restricted to forming only out of Oxygen, Nitrogen and Carbon and hyrdogen.

Given the experiments done already on abiogenisis, it would seem that even for the Earth, the question is not what the path to life is, but which path, out of many possibilities, was taken here.

There was a paradigm shift in the thinking concerning the conditions that life requires when we found the rift zone communities. Now we have found a bacterium that uses arsenic in its life processes, I think that we can begin to appreciate that there are many more paths in life processes than we can imagine with our present knowledge.

I do not remember whether it was Asimov or Clark that stated that as we explore the universe, that we will find not only stranger than we imagine, but stanger than we can imagine.