http://cfnews13.com/StoryHeadline.aspx?id=13873

"More information forthcoming...."

Hmm.. just went to the Nasa homepage and there was no mention of a major announcement forthcoming....

That site went down as soon as it went up almost. Funny how Drudge can kill un-suspecting sites just with a link.

Here's another article about it. Apparently they just found water on some moon. Boring! I was hoping for some 6 legged aliens.

http://www.drudgereport.com/flash8na.htm

Eh, it's pretty exciting. Though it is unlikely that there actually is life on one of the outer planet's moons, the fact that there is water at all suggests that many more planets in the galaxy may be able to sustain life than we once thought. Most scientists believe that liquid water is the catalyst for the emergence of life, so finding an abundance of water so close to earth is very promising life existing elsewhere in the galaxy.

What are your opinions? Do you guys think that there is life elsewhere in the universe? It could make for an interesting discussion.

By the sheer numbers of it, I don't see how there couldn't be.


Bet they think we're a bunch of morons, though.

How could there NOT be life elsewhere in the universe? Considering our galaxy is similar to a grain of sand on the beach that is the universe, there are likely hundreds of thousands if not millions of similar worlds that can sustain intelligent life. In Time Magazine a few years ago, a well known astronomer (can't remember his name) proposed a formula to determine how many similar worlds could exist. I wish I could find a link... but bottom line is he considered about 15 different factors that would play a role in the likelihood of their existence, including distance from a star that would create a similar environment to that of Earth's etc. Of course none of this has yet been proven, but its a solid theory that I happen to buy into.

Not to mention I was abducted by aliens when I was 12.

What i never understood was, why is it that water has to be the basis for all life? Just because it is the basis for our carbon based life forms, does not mean that elsewhere in the universe there is not another viable basis for life. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Life as we know it....

Ive always wondered this too. I mean, life as we know it is one thing, but whats to say that there aren't completely different forms of life out there.

I mean, I don't know jack about science, and probably never will, but I've always wondered why we figured that life has to be sustainable only by our standards.

I've also wondered sometimes if there were other worlds out there with completely different compositoins of stuff. You, like metals and gases and stuff like that that we don't even know about.

But like I said, I don't know much at all about science, so I probably sound like a moron's idiot little brother on this topic, so oh well.

I think of superclusters of galaxies as fairly insignificant. I think that about Phil Helmuth as well though.

Well, noone's saying that there isn't life somewhere that is sustainable by some other means, or even that there aren't life forms that we can't even begin to fathom, sustainable by materials that our little mortal, earthbound minds can't even begin to fathom either. However, in the quest to find life that is similar to ourselves, finding water or other carbon based substances within our own solar system can unlock many doors and answer some questions that have long been pondered over.

Somebody should go up there and bottle that stuff. It could be worth brazillions.

Yeah I know. I was just throwing out my little "thoughts right before you go to sleep" musings.

You know, like what if dog was spelled c a t.

most likely, there is just too much stuff out there we don't know about and will never know about. But I doubt they only come to Earth to probe trailer park people.

From chemistry we basically know what elements are possible because of the periodic table. The other elements left to be discovered are extremely radioactive and unstable and tend to have existences of hundredths of a second. Water is an extremely stable molecule, and all life that we know of needs it to survive (including bacteria and viruses). There is no requirement that life NEEDS water, but there are a limited number of very stable molecules that life would need. If life were made of radioactive elements they would be in a constant state of decay.

heh, I've pondered that one for many a lonely night.

Are you saying, then, that there can't be any other elements out there that aren't radioactive because of our periodic table?

Cause I'm not talking about other elements yet to be discovered on Earth. I'm pretty sure we got those down pat. I'm just saying that it seems to me there could be other ones in distant places that we have no knowledge of. Now if there is a scientifically proven reason why there can't be, I don't know it. Of course, like I said, my knowledge of science goes to about the third grade level.

So, elements are defined by integer multiple amounts of protons contained in the nucleus. For instance, if an atom has 6 protons, it is carbon by definition. Now, among these elements, there are isotopes and ions, depending on the number of neutrons and electrons. The point is that there aren't any hidden elements that we're missing, because an atom can't have something like 2.5 protons in its nucleus. Atoms with over 100 protons in the nucleus we have found are unstable. So, even on the far corners of the universe, they still work with the same elements that we do.

oh ok. I'll take that because I hate thinking about elements and molecules. My chemistry teachers were all terrible people, guess thats the main reason I hate it now.

thanks for the explanation

In addition to water, the abundance of carbon on our planet has been one of the major factors leading to life.

This is largely because of its ability for form chains, which is necessary for large organic molecules (proteins, nucleic acids). Its four valence electrons give it this ability.

It has been hypothesized that silicon could be the base for another form of life because of it's four valence electrons.

Life as we know it would probably have to be formed form either of these two elements.

Something from another element however...your guess is as good as anyones.

While we're speculating here, first I agree with everything you've said. Could it be possible that there are other subatomic particles that we haven't discovered that could contribute to the formation of other elements? I do have a basic understanding of chemistry, but it's just a basic understanding.

As long as the sex is good there will be life everywhere.

"mars aint the kind of place to raise a kid. in fact, its cold as hell, and even if you did, there would be no on there to raise it."

who knows what song thats from? id be impressed.

anyway i thought it related to the questions in this thread

Rocket Man?

ya, definitely. why is that impressive?

Well, if we're really going to do this right, we should go one level deeper. So far, we have discovered 6 quarks and 3 lepton families which make up the elementary particles which make up matter. There are many theories that predict many different type of particles that we haven't yet discovered (sypersymmetry, etc), so of course it's possible that there are particles that we haven't come across which make up matter else where. But I'd say it's unlikely that other parts of the universe are totally made up of different kids of matter in the way that our part of the universe is made up of the matter we know. Of course, I could easily be wrong.

now you're just making up words.



j/k

although it would be pretty spectacular if someone discovered an isolated section of antimatter in the universe somewhere.

as to the life problem, i tend to agree with "rare earth" by ward. you should read this book if you are at all interested in these sort of things.

unicellular life might actually be somewhat common, but life intelligent enough to manipulate things like electromagnetism is extremely rare.

(cue lack of intelligent life on earth joke here)

ive been to the moon

Yeah, the whole inbalance of matter and antimatter is a big mystery to us right now. Are there regions of the universe that are totally made up of antimatter, or is there some fundamental physical reason why matter tends toward the state that we call "matter" such as a lack of C-P symmetry, etc.

Do you mean humans, or just Americans?

I was following along this thread somewat nicely till the guy mentioned querks and leperscon .

Now i gotta go throw up.

scuse me

Anyone ever read "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawkins?

Great great book...

i actually downloaded it and listened to it, along with some other of his lectures on time travel/string theory/and a bunch of other stuff i can barely even begin to understand, on a plane ride to australia. he explains his super complex theories in a fairly simple and straightforward manner, i would suggest downloading them, i got them off limewire, they are really interesting.

My friend posted this on her blog but didn't leave a source.


“There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers.



Inside the bottle are samples left over from one of the strangest incidents in recent meteorological history. On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the next two months. All along the coast it rained crimson, turning local people's clothes pink, burning leaves on trees and falling as scarlet sheets at some points.




Investigations suggested the rain was red because winds had swept up dust from Arabia and dumped it on Kerala. But Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, after gathering samples left over from the rains, concluded this was nonsense. 'If you look at these particles under a microscope, you can see they are not dust, they have a clear biological appearance.' Instead Louis decided that the rain was made up of bacteria-like material that had been swept to Earth from a passing comet. In short, it rained aliens over India during the summer of 2001.”

Start playing the 5 notes.

I think the reason we look for planets that have water is that it is easier -- we know about the sorts of things that make "life as we know it" possible, so we might as well start looking there. The task of considering where life may be found is difficult as it is... we might as well focus on what we undersand.

There might be some sort of intelligent beings out there that function in some way totally forien to us -- but that just opens up many more difficulties as far as a search for life is concerned. Might as well look for what we know about, and if we somehow find that, then we can start thinking about more bizzare life forms.

In 100 billion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars, it'd be pretty goddam amazing if our little star was the only one that housed life.

That said, until we find life on another planet, you can't assume that there is any.





You're kidding, right? Your source is: "my friend, who didn't leave a source." And the theory itself is being proposed by some crazy Indian dude who nobody believes. Rightly so.

A. Objects entering earth's atmosphere burn up, unless they are very large or are made of heat-resistant material.

B. Why should we accept that these mysterious "biological" particles originated anywhere other than earth?

Yeah I agree actually. Just found it weird. She hasn't been on MSN for awhile but I've been meaning to ask her where she read it.

It sounds like something out of War of the Worlds, you know with the red plants taking over everything.

If it rained blood in my neighborhood I would definitely freak out though.

We look for water and carbon because those are the two things that are essential to almost all life on Earth. The definition of something having life is that it contains carbon. There are other factors, but this is the one requisite before any others are considered.