Quote:
Originally Posted by CraigS
Carl;
I don't mean this to be insulting, but I find your thinking to be unconstrained to the point of being science fiction.
How could anyone possibly conceive of a way of detecting, either remotely or locally, such inorganic lifeforms ? Especially if we haven't even detected them here on lifeform central ? Would we even call them lifeforms at all ? If so, why ? If not, then their very definition automatically excludes them from the scope of detecting lifeforms !
How would you design the detection systems for MSL/Curiosity with these models in mind ?
We've gotta get real about this .. otherwise the money will disappear from the budget before we can spend it !! 
Cheers |
Einstein once said the most important part of doing science is having an imagination. He's right....it's precisely where Relativity and many other great leaps forward came from. Where do you think String Theory originally came from. It's where most of our greatest inventions also came from. Edison said that invention was 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration....Tesla said he quoted that because he was the most unimaginative person he'd ever met
. Leaps forward can come from anywhere. Even from the "everyday drudgery" of doing science...where someone takes a step back from the assembly line process of hypothesis testing and looks at a problem from a new and different angle. Not that this way of doing things doesn't create progress. It just happens far more slowly.
Being able to locate and detect such lifeforms is upto someone to come up with a way of doing so. We know about inorganic chemistry, we know about the structure of crystals, optics, EMR, etc etc. What we need to do is to put together what we already know and extrapolate on the known principles. Experiment with what we have and come up with new ideas.
This place is hardly lifeform central
. Even though we don't know of any other life bearing planet, this universe is a very big place. We should and must be prepared for any eventuality, whatever way it happens to go. Even then, we'll be in for some very big surprises.
I agree, we need to concentrate on what we know to try and find out if that type of life (carbon based) exists elsewhere in our Solar System. But even if we don't find it (which I think we will, eventually), that doesn't mean to say that we're going to be the norm throughout the galaxy or the universe, even. We may just be the unlucky sods to be one of the few (or many, who knows) that only has one life bearing planet in a system. We may even be surrounded by silicon based life...we just don't know. Look at it this way...we've barely been doing science for not much longer than 400 years and rigorous science for 250 years (if you count the Industrial Revolution as being a part of it). We're still in the first day of kindergarten...we haven't even reached Grade 1 yet
. We have a long way to go and very much to learn...even of the basics.
To even think we know what we're doing or have some sort of handle on things is arrogance in the extreme. People who actually know very little are usually the ones who think they know the most. It's a very bad habit that a lot of scientists have gotten themselves into. It's a bad habit this human species as whole has gotten itself into.
Oh, you speak of lifeforms that we haven't even detected yet on Earth that are like anything I have mentioned.
Ever heard of viruses. Prions??. They are carbon based, for the most part, but they most certainly don't act in a way you'd call life in any obvious sense. Many scientists don't even consider them as being living organisms.
What do we really understand of them...less than you might think.