Every so often the people searching for extraterrestrial life that just never seems to turn up need a pep talk. It often takes the form of “You know, we could be on the wrong track”.
Extraterrestrial life
At Smithsonian Magazine: What space aliens must be like
Fascinating to be so sure when we have no evidence of any space aliens at all. A religion underlies this, you may be sure.
At New Scientist: Our puny human brains can’t imagine alien life
Not true! We humans more or less invented the whole idea of aliens. Without us, they probably wouldn’t exist even as a story. Just think: There would be no market for ET tales, films, and trade goods except for us humans. Don’t believe me? Try to get clams or termites interested in ET and see what happens…
Chipping away at the millions of habitable exoplanets…
By some mere cosmic accident, these sudden radiation problems don’t affect us, right?
Archeon life form eats fragments of meteorites
At ScienceAlerts: This particular mineral connoisseur loves to dine on far more exotic rocks – ones that come from space.
Early fossils may just be “chemical gardens”
Researcher: Findings suggest that structure alone is not sufficient to confirm whether or not microscopic life-like formations are fossils. More research will be needed to say exactly how they were formed…
Talk about hope springing eternal: 2020 for our history-making alien life find?
It would be marvellous to find aliens out there to talk to, even if they turned to be an awful bore. But there is something suspicious about these statistics. With no single alien ever found, they offer us no history to go by.
Rob Sheldon dumps cold water on the “planetary autopsy” that says ET life is common
Sheldon: I would argue that this is a very weak argument, mostly trying to jazz up a very boring data set or at least distract the audience from remembering the “standard candle” Nobel Prize assumed that all white dwarfs were identical. Either way, its a preposterous story attempting to distract from its most distressing results.
Some researchers hope to grow crops on the moon
Maybe this is the closest we’ll ever really get to extraterrestrial life. Go there and grow stuff.
Researchers: Rocky dead planets common, therefore ET life common
In case you thought this field was “settled science,” see also, recently: “‘Evolution’ says we are alone” and “Once again, for the thousandth time, we are “closing in” on alien life
“Evolution” says: We are alone
Why do we keep running into arguments for intelligent design that don’t seem to realize that they ARE arguments for intelligent design?
Once again, for the thousandth time, we are “closing in” on alien life
Life on Mars would be a lot of fun but one suspects it’ll never live up to the hype.
At Scientific American: We did find life on Mars in the ‘70s. Rob Sheldon weighs in
Levin: When the Viking Molecular Analysis Experiment failed to detect organic matter, the essence of life, however, NASA concluded that the LR had found a substance mimicking life, but not life. Inexplicably, over the 43 years since Viking, none of NASA’s subsequent Mars landers has carried a life detection instrument to follow up on these exciting results.
Are some galaxies more hospitable to life than others?
When the researchers tested the thesis by studying 100,000 simulated galaxies, they found that small or dwarf galaxies with comparatively abundant heavy elements offered the best chance. Some of us would settle for a single fossil bacterium on Mars and forget all the theories.
SETI aims to become more “respectable”
And get government grants. The thing is, we do not actually have any evidence-based reason to believe that ET is out there. Why should government fund a search for ET as an alternative to, say, health care and affordable housing, for which we needn’t search very hard to see the need?