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Yeah, but what if they use some sort of weird space-sonar?
I dare say that if aliens ever did land and proved to be utterly incomprehensible, there would be no shortage of people claiming to be able to 'channel' them. The worry is that some people might even take them seriously.We are able to leave three dimensional reality at will and can shape shift.
graylien said:There are those who claim to channel dolphins, of course. The dolphins often claim to be extraterrestrials themselves, which begs the question of how they got here in the first place, having no opposable thumbs and all. Although according to Big Mama:
I dare say that if aliens ever did land and proved to be utterly incomprehensible, there would be no shortage of people claiming to be able to 'channel' them. The worry is that some people might even take them seriously.We are able to leave three dimensional reality at will and can shape shift.
graylien said:... The dolphins often claim to be extraterrestrials themselves, which begs the question of how they got here in the first place, having no opposable thumbs and all...
'Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than the dolphin, because he has achieved so much more throughout history... the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins ever did was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins know themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reason.'
Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy[/ quote]
graylien said:Yes, but why is that so important? It's no more than the cosmic equivalent of finding some new kind of beetle in the rainforest. It's not going to cure cancer, or end war, or significantly improve the day-to-day life of the man in the street.
Planet shine 'to aid life search'
By Jonathan Amos
Earth-like planets around distant stars may be too far away to be reached by spacecraft but scientists could still investigate whether they harbour life.
Telescope technologies are being developed that will probe the very faint light from these objects for tell-tale signs of biology.
These are the same "life markers" known to be present in light reflected off the Earth - so-called "earthshine".
They include signatures for water, and gases such as oxygen and methane.
"This gives you some information on habitability," said Wesley Traub, chief scientist on the US space agency's (Nasa) Navigator Program which specialises in the search for far-off worlds.
"These are only signs of life; they are only indicators. You can't actually detect the life itself crawling or sliming around on the surface of the planet," he told the American Geophysical Union Joint Assembly here in Baltimore, US.
In the glare
Traub is hopeful Nasa will approve the funds necessary to launch a Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission some time in the next decade.
It will comprise two space-borne observatories which will hunt down and study Earth-sized planets orbiting stars at distances where liquid water could exist and sustain life.
Europe has a similar, ambitious mission under consideration known as Darwin.
It is a hard task - the parent star is likely to be a billion to 10 billion times brighter than its tiny companion - but recent experiments at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggest the technologies are getting close to the sensitivities required.
The "template" for the information that a TPF or Darwin mission would target is based around what we know about the Earth's reflected light.
As the Sun's rays hit our world much of it bounces back out into space. We can see this light in the faint illumination it gives to the dark segment of a crescent moon.
Scientists have long established that this light carries information about the Earth's atmosphere and surface properties.
Pilar Montanes-Rodriguez, from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, reported to the meeting how she had been able to see in this earthshine a clear marker for chlorophyll, the pigment in plants that plays a critical role in photosynthesis.
Ancient planets
Clearly, to be able to detect such a signature in the light from a world tens of light-years away would be astonishing; but Montanes-Rodriguez cautioned: "For a typical day the signal of the vegetation is very weak for the Earth because it is obscured by the bright clouds.
"We used models and satellite cloud data to simulate the Earth reflectance for a whole year. We then applied what we'd learnt from Earth to an extrasolar planet.
"As this planet revolves around a parent star, there will be times when the signal will be prominent and can be unambiguously detected. Unfortunately, at these times the angle of distance between the planet and the star will be small and it will be difficult to rule out the light of the star."
She warned the instrumentation required might require a level of precision beyond what had previously been thought necessary.
Traub's own modelling has tried to work out what the Earth's planet shine would have looked like at various stages in geologic history - to get a set of "profiles" planet hunters could use to gauge what stage in the evolution of life a newly discovered world might have reached.
"If you look at the [current] earthshine spectrum and you calculate what that would have looked like at a point before any life arose on Earth, you see a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane," he informed the meeting.
"You wouldn't see any oxygen and you wouldn't see any ozone line, because the ozone comes from oxygen. As an Earth evolves, you would see the CO2 disappearing, you would see the oxygen increasing and at some late point you see the [infrared] of vegetation coming on."
source
Analis said:Some of their arguments are naive. Why did we discover so many giant planets orbiting so close to their sun? Because:
1) It is much easier to detect giant planets.
2) It is much easier to detect planets which are close to their sun.
So it is a mere artefact. Nothing allows to say that our model of solar system is unique. Now that more stars are studied for a longer time, chances to detect planets orbiting far to their sun increase. Because we have more chance to spot them as they pass in front of it. And so, such discoveries increase.
Anome_ said:Why does life need to be carbon based?
Funny, but true.Mythopoeika said:I can think of some silicone-based lifeforms - Jordan, Lolo Ferrari, Lea in Big Brother...
:lol:
You're kind of proving my point. People seem to think that life has to look like it does on Earth, with carbon-based compounds etc, because that's what it looks like on Earth.graylien said:Anome_ said:Why does life need to be carbon based?
Because carbon is the only element able to form the long and complex chains of molecules necessary to make organic compounds.
(Although there is some debate about the possibility of silicon based lifeforms.)
Agree totally - we don't really know what imbues any particular set of compounds with life anyway - who's to say that under different chemical conditions it won't nonethless produce a similar effect?Anome_ said:You're kind of proving my point. People seem to think that life has to look like it does on Earth, with carbon-based compounds etc, because that's what it looks like on Earth.
There is no reason to think that life might not arise with a totally different chemistry to life on Earth.
According to Dr. Steven Greer, yes, SETI has received multiple extraterrestrial signals. This news he says, is confirmed by senior employees within the SETI program.
This is what Greer had to say at a recent Exopolitics Conference:
"We have confirmation - and I'm not going to give the name yet because we are trying to coax this guy out of the closet - but one of the senior people in the SETI project, which is the Carl Sagan Search for Extraterrestrial project, has confirmed to the Disclosure Project that they have received multiple extraterrestrial signals," Greer said.
"but that now they are getting external human, probably NRO or NSA jamming of those signals and they are getting very frustrated. "
Greer continued, "The question is why hasn't the SETI project, funded by Paul Alan the co-founder of Microsoft, come forward with this information? I'm a little uncomfortable even mentioning this, except for the fact that the public needs to know that this effort, which has received a great deal of mainstream media attention, has actually confirmed to us from two inside sources that they have received extraterrestrial signals and have confirmed them as being extraterrestrial and that they have become increasing in frequency and number."
Dr. Steven Greer is head of the the Disclosure Project, a non-profit organization with almost now 500 former military, intelligence, and government employees who go on record about their various experiences with aliens and alien technology.
Since the National Press Conference of 2001, viewed by millions of people across the globe, Steven Greer has been referred to as the authority on the truth about extraterrestrials.
For Greer to come out and make a statement of this magnitude, something is defiantly up. We will wait patiently to see whether or not these SETI insiders take the stage and become whistle blowers for this monumental secret.