http://www.universetoday.com/134158/cassini-teach-us/ (...) On September 15, 2017, the Cassini mission will end. How do we know it’s going to happen on this exact date? Because NASA is going to crash the spacecraft into Saturn, killing it dead. That seems a little harsh, doesn’t it, especially for a spacecraft which has delivered so many amazing images to us over nearly two decades of space exploration? (... And that might just keep on going for a long time ...) The problem is that the Saturnian system contains some of the best environments for life in the Solar System. Saturn’s moon Enceladus, for example, has geysers of water blasting out into space. Cassini spacecraft is covered in Earth-based bacteria and other microscopic organisms that hitched a ride to Saturn, and would be glad to take a nice hot Enceladian bath. All they need is liquid water and a few organic chemicals to get going, and Enceladus seems to have both. NASA feels that it’s safer to end Cassini now, when they can still control it, than to wait until they lose communication or run out of propellant in the future. The chances that Cassini will actually crash into an icy moon and infect it with our Earth life are remote, but why take the risk? For the last few months, Cassini has been taking a series of orbits to prepare itself for its final mission. Starting in April, it’ll actually cross inside the orbit of the rings, getting closer and closer to Saturn. And on September 15th, it’ll briefly become a meteor, flashing through the upper atmosphere of Saturn, gone forever. (...)
But I wonder what they're going to do about landers on moons like Europa and Enceladus. I doubt there's anything near a sure-fire method for decontaminating them before launch.
In that case, it's like sending landers to Mars: We do our best to completely sterilize and seal them. No method is perfect, of course, but the hope is that it's "good enough." The Russians are said not have been quite as stringent as we are, and at least one of their probes that impacted on Mars hadn't been decontaminated.
Yes, I've heard the same thing. Naturally this should be an ethical question (just in case). How would we like it if Little Green Men sent a probe here and inadvertently wiped out all complex life forms on Earth? But it's also, as you know, sound procedure. What if they eventually find life on one of those moons that has been previously visited by probes from Earth. Then they say Holy shit! It bears a remarkable genetic resemblance to terrestrial life. Ah'll be danged!
Can't happen. As Dr. Robert Zubrin so eloquently explains in "The Case for Mars". It would be like Dutch Elm Disease causing a pandemic.
Assumes facts not in evidence. Without actually studying alien life, we cannot ascertain if it could pose a threat to us or not. Many organisms on Earth didn't evolve to infect humans, but they can most assuredly make us sick if we're exposed to them. If alien life doesn't have DNA, or uses slightly different amino acids than our DNA, the odds of it being able to infect us are practically nil. However, the laws of chemistry and physics being the same across the universe, there's certainly other planets out there that have life which has DNA or uses the same amino acids we do. Bacteria can multiply rapidly, and adapt to new conditions in a matter of days. An alien bacteria could certainly evolve into something which posed a threat to us, even if it was only to cause a massive allergic reaction leading to anaphylactic shock and death.
It is, however, a reasonable inference, given that we've seen nothing elsewhere in the universe which indicates otherwise. However, you don't believe in alien life or evolution, so your opinions on the subject aren't worth much.
You didn't say Because evolution affects every living thing, to say that you don't believe that it affects every living thing, means that you don't believe in evolution. Furthermore, you've also said this: As for aliens, you've said: The logical conclusion that any reasonable person can draw from those comments is that you don't believe in evolution and that you don't think there's any alien life out there. You've made more comments on the subject, but I'm not going to bother digging through the mass of threads out there to find them.
I believe there is life elsewhere in the universe though that is a matter of faith to me as there is no evidence of it whatsoever.e Though you will not admit it, it is a matter of faith to you as well. Evolution as far as I can tell has happened. Though I personally do not believe it has applied to human beings and once again Tuckerfan creates Strawman arguments by announcing what I believe (thus creating a "Strawman" he can then knock down"
"Faith" in the sense that I trust in the math which supports the hypothesis. As my quotes of your posts have shown, however, you seem to be extremely dubious of the idea that alien life exists. There is ample evidence that humans have evolved over the hundreds of thousands of years in which homo sapiens sapiens have existed on the planet. The fact that some of us have darker skin than others is but one example (unless, of course, you believe that Ham was cursed because he saw Noah naked). Then, there's also the fact that certain populations can drink milk well into adulthood, while others cannot. So, how do you explain that two-thirds of the adult human population cannot drink milk? And that until roughly 7K years ago, no adult humans could drink milk? I'm guessing that you've only recently learned what the term "strawman" means, given your sudden use of it in recent weeks. If, for example, I were to make a strawman argument against you in regards to evolution, I would have to say that you claimed any belief in evolution supported Satanism. You clearly have never said that. You have said that you somehow think that humans are exempt from evolution, which means that you either don't believe that humans are living beings (which you clearly do), or you don't believe in evolution, which says that all living beings are subject to evolution (which clearly you don't). Do you understand the difference?
I do wonder how microbes, bacteria and the like survive years of vacuum, temperatures around absolute zero and the hard radiation out there. These probes should be sterile as sterile can be.
And vice versa for bacteria harmless to us that arrive on the probe. The symbiotic bacteria in our gut perform all sorts of marvels for us that medical science has discovered only extremely recently. I thoroughly recommend Giulia Enders' eye-opening and often entertaining book Gut. So there's always a chance that alien life forms could do us good ..... But I wouldn't count on it. PS I came across this image of the cover (mine is different). I like it. She doesn't look like you'd expect the author of a book about intestines holding two kilos of bacteria to look. And her smile tells you she has good news and a sense of humour. And I love the drawing beneath.
Yeah, well that was what was long assumed. But they keep discovering astounding cases of the contrary. One of the few things that investigators found intact (in a field in Texas or Louisiana) after the space shuttle disintegrated on re-entry was an experiment on microbes. The microbes were fine. I mean, who would have thought that all these "extremophiles" they keep finding living in incredibly high temperatures around hydrothermal vents, in Antarctic ice, in incredibly acidic environments, etc. were there? But they are.
Evolution as far as I can tell has happened. Though I personally do not believe it has applied to human beings - Dayton I totally don't get this statement. Since we are made up of the exact same thing as every other living thing and the laws of science & physics apply universally then why would humans be exempt from the same processes as the rest of the planet? When we try to separate ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom we get arrogant, reckless and ignorant. We as a species are one of many species in a chain - not the first, not the last. And we are different but not "the best" we are only the best at filling the niche we exploited, which is very much the whole driving force of evolution. Life adapts to the environmental demands put upon it over time. Since any individual organism is limited to the amount of change it can undergo, we reproduce so that eventually (hopefully) our descendants will be able to handle the environmental change. Being human doesn't give us license to circumvent that process.
Dayton doesn't personally agree for the same reason Galileo had such a bitch of a time with the Church. Once you start to view us as Part of Nature and Subject to Nature's Laws like all other Species, then you start undermining Dayton's religion. And not only Dayton's religion. So Professor Dayton is left with the conundrum of refusing to believe what his frontal lobe is telling him. Must be pretty exhausting.
Your whining is ill becoming. I didn't use bad language. Personal insults. Trolling or flaming. So why the bitching and moaning on your part?
Your last post most certainly was trolling. As is this one, because you're feigning innocence, when you clearly know that a response of "yes" to a series of questions wasn't adequate. It was done "to get my goat." This ain't the Red Room, we don't troll here, so knock it off. Don't like it? Then take your complaint to the Help Desk or the Red Room. Otherwise, either contribute to this thread like an adult, or leave. It's that simple.
Fine. Don't we have too small a sample to be able to definitively determine whether the laws of physics and chemistry as we know them today apply "universally"? I can remember when optical evidence indicated that gas plumes (IIRC) emitted from certain stars indicated they were traveling faster than the speed of light. I also remember that (science fiction not withstanding) it was widely believed (and considered one of the basic FACTS of physics) that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. Now it has been shown at least mathematically that it is possible for an object to be propelled faster than light
Not really. Because if the laws of chemistry and/or physics worked differently on a planet we've yet to see, we'd still notice that as the star it orbited would have to operate under different laws as well. And certain rules about the universe seem to be involute, meaning that if you change one element of them, then it wouldn't be possible for the universe, or anything in it, to form. Tweak the laws and not only can you not have fusion, but you can't have atoms. Tweak the laws another way, and suddenly you've got stars running off fusing uranium to make heavier elements which are far longer lived than they should have been. Which is meaningless, because that was caused by a misunderstanding of what was happening. Any kind of abnormality in data is jumped upon by scientists because they know that if they can show that a currently established theory is wrong, they'll have made a name for themselves in the literature. So, they're looking for that, and they're also looking to knock down any kind of data which might indicate an established theory is wrong. What makes science different than religion is that scientists don't cling to old ideas centuries after they've been proven to be wrong. There's nobody in the scientific world who clings to the idea that the sun goes around the Earth, but with religion, you do have people clinging to ideas that should have been long since supplanted. If, for example, religion operated the way science does, then the Jews all would have converted to Christianity, as according to Christianity, the existence of Jesus fulfilled all that was implied in the Old Testament. The reason that religion doesn't work the same way as science, is that there's no way to objectively test the claims of religion. (Not strictly true, because there are elements of religion we can objectively test for, and those results have been in the negative. For example, Mormons claim that Jews built such-and-such a city in the Americas in 600 BC, and when you dig where they claim those cities were, there's no sign of a city ever being there. Oops.) We can, however, objectively test the claims of science. Those that can be repeated are considered valid, those which can't are discarded as being invalid. I'm not aware of any mathematical proof which says that an object can travel faster than light.
Alcubierre's work has yet to be proven, in either a mathematical sense or real world research, though in both areas there are hints that he might be right. Nor does his work claim that an object can be "propelled faster than light," only that it should be possible to bend space in such a manner that one person could travel from one point to another in less time than it would take light to traverse the unbent difference. While the effect might be the same as traveling faster than light, the means by which it is done is vastly different. It's akin to the difference between fatally shooting someone and dosing them with massive amounts of radioactive material. Your victim winds up dead in both cases, but how they died isn't at all the same.
