Anon - NASA on the Verge of Announcing Alien Life
 

Hacker network Anonymous has made headlines today, this time claiming that NASA is on the verge of announcing evidence of alien life.

It's a pretty bold statement, but before you get too excited, we've checked the science, and let's be clear right up front that Anonymous doesn't appear to have any substantial new evidence to back up their speculation.

In fact, their latest video announcement centres around the Kepler Space Telescope's latest discovery of 219 new planet candidates outside our Solar System, as well as comments made by Associate Administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Thomas Zurbuchen at a US*government hearing back in April.

"Taking into account all of the different activities and missions that are specifically searching for evidence of alien life, we are on the verge of making one of the most profound, unprecedented, discoveries in history," Zurbuchen said during the recent congressional hearing of the committee on 'Advances in the Search for Life', on April 26.

He was also pretty excited about the Kepler announcement last week:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Wow, 219 potential new planets! <a href="https://twitter.com/NASAKepler">@NASAKepler</a> data shows us that most stars are home to at least one planet...Are we alone? <a href="https://t.co/IW5PKEU39F">https://t.co/IW5PKEU39F</a></p>&mdash; Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) <a href="https://twitter.com/Dr_ThomasZ/status/876886757874249728">June 19, 2017</a></blockquote>
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Anonymous has taken Zurbuchen's enthusiastic testimony from that hearing (which you can watch in full at the bottom of this story), alongside the latest Kepler discovery - as well as a few other statements from former astronauts and alien enthusiasts - as evidence "something is going on in the skies above".

So what's going on here? Are we really on the verge of finding evidence of alien life?
Well, no. It's safe to say Anonymous hasn't stumbled on some smoking gun of extraterrestrial existence here - sorry, guys.

While Zurbuchen's statement back at the April meeting does sound pretty tantalising when taken out of context, what he (and others in the scientific community) are actually excited about is the advances we've made in our ability to search for extraterrestrial life - not any specific piece of evidence.

For starters, there's the Kepler Space Telescope, which was launched in 2009, and scans patches of the sky, looking for the slight dimming of distant stars as evidence of exoplanets orbiting in front of them.

So far it has discovered more than 4,000 planet candidates outside our Solar System, including 30 planets similar in size*to Earth that are located in the habitable zones of their stars - that means they're not so far away that water would freeze, and not too close that everything would be burnt to a crisp.

Notably, earlier this year NASA announced the discovery of a "sister solar system" - a star system known as TRAPPIST-1 that has seven potentially Earth-like planets orbiting it, and is a relatively close 39 light-years away.
"The TRAPPIST-1 system is just 39 light years away and its discovery tells us that there is plenty of planet making material in our little corner of the solar system, indicating that finding Earth-like planets may actually be closer to us than we originally thought. Future study of this planetary system could reveal conditions suitable for life," said Zurbuchen at the hearing back in April.

Since then, other research teams have contradicted the assumption that TRAPPIST-1's planets are habitable, but the fact that a solar system so similar to our own exists at all in our own neck of the woods suggests there are many more out there and is exciting in its own right.

And even better tools are about to come online to aid in the search for aliens.
Next year, NASA will launch the James Webb Space Telescope -an even more sensitive planet hunter - which will be an even more sensitive planet hunter, that will be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of water, methane, oxygen, ozone in an exoplanet's atmosphere - something that will help us sniff out signs of habitability if they're there.

In addition to looking for signs of life on planets outside of our own Solar System, NASA has also made significant advances when it comes to our own neighbouring planets - including the discovery of essential life building block hydrogen in the frozen oceans of Saturn's moon Enceladus, and evidence that Jupiter's watery moon Europa has oceans with very similar chemical composition to our own.*

So Anonymous is right in one way - NASA is closer than ever to having the tools to find evidence of alien life... but unfortunately that doesn't mean that evidence already exists, or even that we'll find it in our lifetime.*

But if it makes you feel any better, physicist Stephen Hawking is now "more convinced than ever that we are not alone". Although Neil deGrasse Tyson recently said in a Reddit AMA that he doesn't think we'll find alien life in the next 50 years.

http://www.sciencealert.com/anonymou...-of-alien-life

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Zurbuchen's testimony starts around the 39 minute mark -

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Their first communications will be breathlessly decoded, and it'll say, "Why on earth did the Chiefs fire Dorsey?"

so if we sent a message today, traveling at the speed of light, to a planet and it has the capacity to receive and decipher it, how long would that take? (of the known planets that MAY have the capacity for life) :D

fuggin' hell bro, RUOK? ROFL

What's more likely? An Alien Attack? or The Zombie Apocalypses?

I'm assuming it's intelligent life.

Calvin!

We are in a snow globe that when ever there is an earthquake or weather catastrophe like tornadoes hurricanes blizzards, its because we were shook up in the globe.

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Forever. Some planet was 26 light years away. It probobly does not have life.

This story is not news. There is life out there somewhere. There has to be. But the laws of physics prevent them from traveling long distances. The speed of light is not that fast.

Turns out it was just a Chiefs WR catching a pass in the endzone.

ROFLROFLROFL

Ok then

The TRAPPIST 1 system is about 39 light years away. It would take at least 78 years for them to receive and send back a signal. Keep in mind that we've been broadcasting radio signals for over a century.

Check out this.
http://zidbits.com/2011/07/how-far-h...ed-from-earth/

That was fascinating. I actually watched most of their presentations.

Interesting. I kind of figured that might be the case, but you could fit my knowledge of electromagnetics inside the curve of a sine wave.

They've come in search of Chuck Berry records...

Nothing that can happen only happens once...

If we sent a radio signal when the Chiefs last won a Super Bowl.......

If your time frame is in thousands of years, then, yes.

If your time frame is billions...

Anal probes for everyone.

If we do connect, and they have artists, they will be trapeze artists

All this is based on our current ideas of how to travel and through what medium.

Compare land, sea, or air travel to only 200 years ago.

Now consider that very few nations even travel in space and even fewer travel any real distance.

It will take us centuries to maintain stable living conditions on Mars.

Hell, we won't even be considered out of the crib until we can travel beyond our own solar system, and to be honest, thousands of civilizations around us could have tried and field just as we are likely to...and we'd never know.

I kind of hate that "Anonymous says (or does) XXXX" is a thing. Anonymous is a loosely-affiliated set of a bunch of "anonymous" hackers, so that phrase is basically the equivalent of "A random hacker says (or does) XXXX."

I'd be thrilled if there was evidence of this, and you never know, but adding "Anonymous" to it doesn't make it credible in any way.

It's always crazy to me when looking at the sheer size of this stuff. The lanikai superclusters of Galaxies is crazy

Agreed.

I love this article

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

The basic thesis is a hell of a hook - "We're rare, we're first or we're ****ed..."

Their usefulness extends as far as encouraging people to do more research into a given topic based on the possibility they may have introduced some hacked/hidden info the public didn't know about before.

That's it...

Pretty much.

"What if our God/s are just tourists pissing on the side of the road?"

Pretty much. The Easter Islanders cut down all their trees to build more Moai (those big face statues) - leaving them ****ed.

If people on a small island can't band together to figure out they need to conserve a valuable resource - how are a bunch of different societies on earth going to do it?

Posited by the History/Hitler/Aliens channel...

The one that made me really say "huh...now that makes a lot of sense in a horrifying sort of way" was:

And look at that on a planetary scale; it checks out. We think primates are fun because they look like us and can't use guns yet. But the absolutely millisecond that gorillas presented a true existential threat to humanity, we'd wipe those !@#$ers off the planet. And why? Because we were first, we're at the top of the heap and we're disinclined to lose that status. Since they're no real threat to us, we're all good. But the moment they demonstrate human-level reasoning, we'll get 'em gone before they put an army together.

You think we'll ever reach a point where other creatures on this planet are capable of speaking to us in our native tongues? Oh hell no - we'll wipe them out well before they advance to that stage because we're not going to let them get anywhere near our perch.

Yeah I've read that before. Still crazy to me and. It sure what I believe.

I tend to think there's a shitload abundance of superior advanced shut out there

The most effective ruling philosophy was already determined almost a century ago.

What if you apply "1984" to a galactic scale?

What if most of all that is exists as a natural preserve and the few than can reason are just conditioned to love big(er) brother?

This could include religion as we know it and motivate a global culture to a predetermined end.

It's an interesting thought experiment...

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LMAO oh my god I need one of those!

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http://chrispiascik.com/wp-content/u...elieveThis.jpg


https://media.tenor.com/images/4a402...96b9/tenor.gif

There's a good chance we won't last long enough to find a way to leave the solar system. We need to advance to a point where we can make something like the Alcubierre drive actually work.

This topic is truly one of religious fervor.

There is no middle ground.

Grandma Pawtucket's cow WAS abducted by the aliens and they carved ole' Bessy up.

Dr. Knowledge says there's no life anywhere else in the universe. It is sterile.

If you entertain the idea you get lumped in with Grammy Pawtucket.

If you are skeptical (meaning requiring more evidence and reluctant to jump to a conclusion) you get lumped in with Dr. Knowledge.

I think they've been here and or are here. If they're that advanced, they could do it without our knowledge

I am firmly in the "the human mind simply cannot grasp just how unbelievably large the scale we're operating on here is" camp. And then throw in the whole 3 dimensional thing (which the human mind has a notoriously hard time conceptualizing) and you start to understand that even if we're looking for the right things and with the right tools, the odds of us looking at the right place and at the right time are almost infinitesimally small.

When people say "Man, how hard could it actually be to find Planet 9?" and then you listen to someone smart explain EXACTLY how hard it can be and why there's a really good chance that we just never find the thing even though we can see its wake, you get just an inkling of an understanding of the void we're dealing with.

These scales are just so far beyond our comprehension that it makes me think that A) it's virtually impossible that life doesn't exist SOMEWHERE but B) it's nearly as unlikely that we'll find it or it us over any appreciable timeline.

The timeline is the tough part. To a civilization that's a billion years old, were a speck in time.

And that would be my guess.

It makes no sense to do much of what the UFO community suggests is happening.

Here's another thought experiment: if a huge object did hit the earth 65 million years ago and did throw a European-metric-****-ton of biological material out into space (as is suggested,) how long would that frozen life take to land on any planet ANYWHERE and reproduce at even the most basic level?...

I think that's the key issue.

It's so mind blowing you either say "**** it, I'm out" or it's something you want to look into.

On or off.
Left or right.
Dem or Rep...

Agreed.

I don't recall where i saw it, or who taught it (I believe it was Neil Degrasse Tyson) but he illustrated it perfectly.

Warning: I'm about to butcher what i learned, but i hope i can spit out the general idea.

He used an L.E.D particle board to illustrate how unlikely we are to find life because of the scale of time. Each time an L.E.D momentarily blipped on and off, that represented several hundred thousand years, or the life and death of a civilization.

The point being that time and space operate at such a grand scale that our mere existence and the existence of other intelligent civilizations is nothing more than a mere blip, and the reason why we haven't found other life is because they have already expired or not even come to fruition yet.

And because Time/Space is so vast and any signal would take so long to reach us that even if we did get a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization that it's quite possible that civilization has already come and gone before we even got the signal.

Think about that shit....if we ever actually do get a signal, that signal may have taken so long to get to us that those who sent it may have already been wiped off the universe thousands of years ago.....mind = blown.

That alien life? Single celled organisms.
SPAAAAAACE MIIIICROOOOBES!! PBJ

He is also deeply compromised on his beliefs due to his station in life.

He falls under that same sick Kaku succumbed to...

Life does not mean intelligent life. I, personally, believe that NASA has been sitting on evidence of life of Mars since the 70's. I also believe that a number of announcements they've made in the last half dozen years are in preparation for finally making the announcement that there is evidence of life on other bodies in the solar system. It all been ramping up in the last year or two.

As far as intelligent life making it here, there are lots of possibilities there. Because we haven't worked out how cross interstellar distances, or between dimensions, or in some other way outside our current infantile understanding of physics doesnot make it impossible. We have this mistaken belief that we are the pinnacle of science. Maybe we are. Maybe we aren't.

But as far as simple, basic life goes, it exits in huge variety on this planet, some of it in impossibly hostile conditions. I would be shocked if we don't find more of it in other places in the solar system.

That's just my opinion, of course.

No. "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."

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When it comes to subjects like this, I always feel that mankind is supremely arrogant in thinking we have all the answers figured out regarding space. There is no telling what mode of transportation or communication advanced civilizations use to travel the void. It would be like telling a knight on the crusades how to use a Sat Phone to call in a cruise missile strike on an enemies castle. He'd figure it out with proper training, but couldn't possibly come up with it, much less construct it, on his own. That's mankind right now in relation to the possibility of star faring civilizations - we're the knight.

pffft do a search on Val Valiant Thor

Had never heard of that.

Upon reading about it, I wish I hadn't.

Or the horse.

Humans have just entered Pre-K regarding the Universe.

If Evolution and Survival of the Fittest are the guides, then human beings on Earth would be better off not trying to contact alien civilizations...

Particularly when you consider that, using earth as a reference, the animals that are smart are predators.

It is a bit naive to just assume that an alien species more advanced would also somehow be more civil.

We share 99% of our DNA with chimps. We keep them in zoos and use them for scientific experiments.

Aliens would **** us hard.....

Roger Goodell is already looking at the prospect of having a Jaguars/Browns game in TRAPPIST-1.

In a highly evolved ecosystem, could happen that pure benevolence and altruism have come to define "fitness".

https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.1312...8.lite-1u2.jpg

On second thought, let's try to not contact any alien civilizations anytime soon.
I don't want our alien overlords' first meeting on this planet to be with this dipshit:

http://media.salon.com/2017/02/VIDEO...mp-620x350.jpg

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and this happened what, how many thousands of years ago, but just recently captured the event? :D

Humans are so clueless lol

LOL, some hacker kid probably saw the movie Fire in the Sky/Close Encounters of the Third Kind over the weekend,and decided to create fake news

does not compute! :D

No, NASA Hasn't Found Alien Life

NASA is not preparing to drop an alien-life bombshell, despite what you may have heard.

Last week, the hacking group Anonymous posted a video on YouTube suggesting that the space agency is about to announce the discovery of life beyond Earth. The video has made a big splash online — so big that NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen addressed the rumor today (June 26).

"Contrary to some reports, there's no pending announcement from NASA regarding extraterrestrial life," Zurbuchen said via Twitter, where he posts as @Dr_ThomasZ.

"Are we alone in the universe? While we do not know yet, we have missions moving forward that may help answer that fundamental question," he added in another tweet today.

Of course that's what they'd say

I bet the aliens are holding Thomas Zurbuchen's family hostage to be sure that he remains quiet.

From your anus

Real question what are they trying to hide from our eyes.

its actually 98.5% and even that number is dropping with our technology advancing..

Someone give me a gif of a mic drop plz.

What?