Anon - NASA on the Verge of Announcing Alien Life

[Bowser]

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:

Wow, 219 potential new planets! @NASAKepler data shows us that most stars are home to at least one planet...Are we alone? https://t.co/IW5PKEU39F

— Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) June 19, 2017

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

[O.city]

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

[Rausch]

Originally Posted by O.city

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

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?...

[Rausch]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

These scales are just so far beyond our comprehension...

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...

[ModSocks]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

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.

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.

[ModSocks]

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.

[redfan]

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

[Rausch]

Originally Posted by Detoxing

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.

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

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

[keg in kc]

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.

[jimidollar]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

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

No. "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."

[Bowser]

Originally Posted by redhed

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

[Bowser]

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.

[Scorp]

pffft do a search on Val Valiant Thor

[O.city]

Originally Posted by Scorp

pffft do a search on Val Valiant Thor

Had never heard of that.

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

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Bowser

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.

Or the horse.

[DaneMcCloud]

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...