this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024

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251

NASA just scored a badly needed win: The best potential evidence of alien life yet (www.businessinsider.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

No it's not.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for NASA, it should get it's budget increased by x20 if you ask me, bit they didn't find alien life or anything remotely to it.

Not until there is actual evidence.

This isn't the first time that ALIENS is being screamed from NASA and it's getting annoying. Last time it was from Venus, a planet famous for a number of things, one of them being it having a lack of Hydrogen, making anything alive pretty much impossible. After the fanfare of some chemical components that "could only be created by alien microbial life!" it was just ignored because of course it wasn't alien life.

This too will just quietly be ignored, it seems to be a desperate gasp for breath as their budget slowly gets cut to zero.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

No, what’s annoying is people willfully misreading the science being published here. NASA does not claim to find alien life, they claimed to find an interesting rock with an unknown formation process consistent with microbial life in Earth rocks. People like the article writer vastly overstate what NASA is claiming.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Is NASA the one screaming AlIeNs!1 or is it shitrags like Business Insider taking 'maybe we found some microbes' and turning it into AlIeNs!1?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Nasa has made more than one shady headline about aliens themselves

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I refuse to believe that we are the only living beings in the entire universe.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Oh I didn't say we aren't. I'm sure there are aliens.

I'm just saying that all these "ALIENS!" headliners from Nasa are bullshit

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

So NASA needs aliens in order to justify its existence? The original remit was simply to reach the moon, and there were definitely no aliens there.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

It’s pretty unfortunate that with all NASA has done to expand and improve technology, society, humanity, science, the continued benefits in our day to day lives, that funding it can be so controversial. It’s such a tiny fraction of the budget already and continues to do so much - how does it become a target?

Let’s also look at space stations for similar negativism. Why are so many stories talking about destruction of ISS, and end of humans in space? NASA is planning on retiring the ISS and yes it’s a huge effort to do so safely. But how is it not inspiring, to be planning a space station orbiting the moon instead? How is it not inspiring that NASA is working with private companies such that we might have multiple space stations? This transition really could be a new era of humans living and working in space, if we let it

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Not even American but the underfunding of NASA is criminal, firstly because iirc it has something like a 5:1 return on its funding when you account for the economic benefits of all the research it does that filters into the private sector.

Secondly because it has great PR that really gets people engaged with space science. Before James Webb the ESA launched two telescopes of similar important, one radio one that produced the best map of the CMB we have to date and another one where I can't even remember what it does just that it was also groundbreaking in its field/spectrum. Which is the point, we all should have been excited about those telescopes when they launched but I can't even remember their names or what one of them even did, I can remember James Webb though because NASA did the PR work and that's incredibly telling.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

“Cosmic Vision” would have been a great opportunity to sell the overall plan better, big enough to afford marketing, expensive enough overall to need marketing. Let’s all get excited and share a

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Vision

[–] [email protected] 70 points 3 months ago (1 children)

"badly needed win" fuck off

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The title is inflammatory, but makes a good argument about how budget cuts have robbed us of several potential missions lately.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

They need to eject those inflammatories out a ~15° cone half-angle nozzle

[–] [email protected] -5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Mars obviously ain't worth shit, we have a lot of other planets to investigate and we are over here looking for artifacts and fossils

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's the most earth-like planet in our solar system. So we're naturally interested in it...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Pretty sure Venus is the most Earth-like. Well, besides Earth itself.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'd say not at all. Venus has an atmosphere 92 times denser than ours filled with sulphuric acid, its average temperature is hot enough to melt lead (455°C/850°F), probes sent there never lasted more than two hours before being completely destroyed, and it for some reason rotates backwards compared to other planets.

Mars doesn't have any of these issues and mostly resembles a cold desert with a very thin atmosphere, so it's far similar to Earth than Venus is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm not saying Venus would be easier to colonise than Mars, but just the fact that it has a dense atmosphere while Mars barely has any should tell you it's much more Earth-like. Size and gravity is also significantly closer to Earth than for Mars which is relatively tiny.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Fair enough! That's a good point.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Contrarian opinion:

Discovering that Mars once had life would be bad for NASA. It would mean that human exploration of Mars might not be allowed as it could contaminate the evidence.

And it would be terrible for humanity, according to Kurzgesagt, because it would indicate that we may soon go extinct.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

It's okay, they also say we might be ahead of the great filter. We're more than just life, we're physically super complex.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I mean it's not like Human exploration of Mars is even viewed as remotely doable right now.

And I think there are more glaring signs here on earth that we may not be around much longer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

More glaring than a million alien species that should exist, simply not existing?

That's a lot of life to discount.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Humanity is doing a fine-enough job causing problems for itself without dead aliens. They probably wouldn't even make the top 5 extinction-level issues we could have.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I think you're missing the point, they point to our extinction by our own hands. If millions of alien species have tried to survive through an era of technological advancement, and all of them have failed, that suggests that we don't have much chance of surviving either. We'll probably fall into the same talks that all of them have.

If on the other hand, we saw lots of alien civilizations existing somewhere out there, or even some civilizations, that would suggest that as long as we don't totally screw things up, we at least have a chance. Survival is at least possible.

And while it may look like we're screwing it up, to be honest, things aren't so bad. There have been a lot of mass extinctions on this planet, but there's still life. The planet has both been much cooler and much hotter at various times in the past, there's still life. There's really no guarantee that we're going to kill ourselves, things could turn out fine. But on the other hand, what we're seeing when we look around the galaxy is not super encouraging...

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