NASA’s Astrobiology discovery

[Succellus]

Actually it is measurable and thus in some sense, absolute - you can go from zero to something or other, based on a standard test or definition.

 

As before, you just babble on, Sir.

 

If you mean IQ, it has already been proven you can train a monkey to have higher IQ...

IQ as far as it goes, is actually a matter of training.

 

 

I have forgotten to say that intelligence must be broken in many parts.

Someone can be a quemistry genius but a total moron when it comes to finances for example.

Of course people will have way higher results than others in an overall view.

[monotwix]

WTF is the correct acronym when it comes to understanding every thing

[GGTharos]

I'm not sure what you're trying to argue. Not only are you not saying anything new, and you're not addressing anything in particular. No, I'm not talking about IQ - that's one way to measure things which has weaknesses as you have pointed out.

 

There are many methods of measure, and you use something tailored to your experiment when doing research. You're trying to simplify a very complex field.

 

If you mean IQ, it has already been proven you can train a monkey to have higher IQ...

IQ as far as it goes, is actually a matter of training.

 

 

I have forgotten to say that intelligence must be broken in many parts.

Someone can be a quemistry genius but a total moron when it comes to finances for example.

Of course people will have way higher results than others in an overall view.

[Sticky]

Didn't get to read this topic until now, but I started thinking it would be interesting what other people think about this. I was proven wrong :D

 

LOL QFT!

[EtherealN]

So enlighten me please. If i am missing something i want to know. Im serious.

 

Ok:

 

 

Science is the art of collecting the so called evidences to proove your point while securing others can t prove you wrong.

 

This here is where it goes wrong right from the start. The scientific method relies on something called the Null Hypothesis. That is - whatever it is you are working on, the experiment needs to be set up in such a way that you are competing with the null hypothesis; essentially, your work is about trying to proove yourself wrong. When you fail in doing this, you write it up and hand it over to others (through the peer-review literature) where they try to shoot you down. If they fail, you get published and we have one datapoint.

 

Once this datapoint is achieved, the next step ensues: can others repeat the whole thing and do they get the same result? Others conduct the experiments (or variants thereof), and they also publish. At this stage we are now establishing what's called "a literature" - that is, the whole thing is repeated by independent researchers and if there is a coherence in the results people start to think that "maybe there is something in here".

 

A very fine example of failure to use the Null Hypothesis correctly would be stuff like Ponz and Fleichmann (sp?) and their Cold Fusion. They failed to work adequately hard at disproving themselves, so they ended up causing a hubbubb that was just plain wrong. Similar things happened later with a guy whose name escapes me at the moment (he used sonoluminescense to attempt achieving fusion) - he failed to properly take into account the background neutrons produced by the equipment and reported success when there was none.

 

Basically, scientists who make a claim and then wait for someone else to disprove them tend to have their careers demolished and see themselves laughed out of their university. The scientific community is extremely brutal on things like this.

 

In fact its the same process as law court, i am right until someone can proove i am wrong.

 

Extremely wrong. If this were true, then we would give equal credibility to the celestial teapot as anything else, because the celestial teapot has not been disproved. But strangely, there's no astronomers out there trying to tell us that there actually is a celestial teapot.

 

The thing that laymen very often fail to understand that a single result is not worth the paper it's written on. Unfortunately, media generally don't understand it either. (This is why there's so the media phenomenon of a glass of wine a day being good for you one day and bad for you the next - media and laymen don't understand that it is the overall literature that matters, not any one study or any one experiment.)

 

Which incidentally is just what you are talking about here:

 

Tell me how many times theories supported by evidences have been refuted a few years latter just because someone did find evidences that the evidences prooving the theorie where uncomplete or biased or plainly wrong.

 

It is very interesting to see the astronomical difference between what laymen think of a given theory or hypothesis, and what the actual scientists involved think about them.

 

But we are deviating quite far from the topic, yet again. But I can try to put this all into the context of the discovery that this thread is actually about:

 

Astrobiologists have a very big problem insofar as extraterrestrial life goes, since we only really have a single datapoint - we know some of how life works, evolved and started on this planet. But trying to extrapolate from that what the universal rules for life are like is extremely difficult - it's a bit like taking a stroll through a black neighborhood in Harlem*, looking at the people there, and then try to use that to form an opinion on what color the skin of human beings are. We'll have a valid datapoint since we know people can have black/colored skin. But can we say for certain that all humans therefore have that color skin? Nope.

 

In the field of biology, this whole thing is about trying to identify the basic necessities for life. As we slowly but surely get better at the whole exploring the universe thing it would be nice to know what to look for, even aside from the purely academic interest of stuff just being cool to learn and any possible medical benefits. But right now we are basically still in harlem, but this little bacterium that was discovered is like the first time we see a white person: a whole new variable has been introduced. Specifically in this case it is that this bacterium can use arsenic instead of phosphorous - something that isn't strictly new (we've seen extremophile bacteria do that before in protein coding), but this thing can actually do the same trick in it's genome. So basically, until now we had every reason to think that phosphorous is an absolute requirement for life due to it's role in DNA and RNA, but suddenly this white dude walks by and we get a new datapoint.

 

Here's something that also happens a lot in media reporting of science: many media outlets say that this somehow would disprove an earlier theory or something like that. And it doesn't. It adds a datapoint. This might sound a bit like semantics, but it actually is extremely important because it enters into how the work is actually done. Just like Einstein added to newtonian mechanics through his work on relativity - he didn't disprove Newton. Newton's equations still work perfectly for the things that Newton used them on, and the assumption that most people are black still holds true in Harlem, where we gathered the previous data point.

 

*DISCLAIMER: I actually have no clue about the true demographics in Harlem. I needed a workable and simple analogy and took a movie cliché.*

[egorter]

I am agog to here the reply

[topol-m]

Just a thought that came to me these days, if there is so much dark matter and dark energy in the Universe as some scientists say, imagine if there are some life forms based on dark matter. What would those be like? The little that we know about the universe no wonder life comes to be much more bizarre than we`ve ever expected.

[EtherealN]

Really no way to say, really. If the dark matter really is non-baryonic, which seems to be the case, then dark matter life would be impossible since it's only interaction with anything is through gravity. But without actually identifying it it is impossible to say.

[hassata]

imagine if there are some life forms based on dark matter. What would those be like?

 

[topol-m]

^^^ :laugh:

[Succellus]

There are many methods of measure, and you use something tailored to your experiment when doing research. You're trying to simplify a very complex field.

 

Thats why i m trying to say when speaking: take intelligence with a grain of salt.

There are many fields, usually test try to focus on a specific aspect and its very hard to make an overview of the whole. Right now we are only able to take high discrepancies.

I think we will see many changes in the few next decades.

 

As for those asking me what do i contribute for this specific topic, i just did continue an already disvirtuated topic.

 

If i had to say anything about it. I think there s many more interesting stuff to reshearch than lifeforms that aren t viable on our planet, or could bring no end of trouble if out of control, or try to colonise mars as NASA is doing, when our planet suffer, and we endanger ourselves with the energy matrix we re using.

But as i sayd reshearch cannot be thought in short term, especially if they are able trought these mutations evolve a bactery that would eat carbon or other pullutant produced by our actual lifestile.

[Succellus]

Ok:

 

 

 

 

This here is where it goes wrong right from the start. The scientific method relies on something called the Null Hypothesis. That is - whatever it is you are working on, the experiment needs to be set up in such a way that you are competing with the null hypothesis; essentially, your work is about trying to proove yourself wrong. When you fail in doing this, you write it up and hand it over to others (through the peer-review literature) where they try to shoot you down. If they fail, you get published and we have one datapoint.

 

Once this datapoint is achieved, the next step ensues: can others repeat the whole thing and do they get the same result? Others conduct the experiments (or variants thereof), and they also publish. At this stage we are now establishing what's called "a literature" - that is, the whole thing is repeated by independent researchers and if there is a coherence in the results people start to think that "maybe there is something in here".

 

A very fine example of failure to use the Null Hypothesis correctly would be stuff like Ponz and Fleichmann (sp?) and their Cold Fusion. They failed to work adequately hard at disproving themselves, so they ended up causing a hubbubb that was just plain wrong. Similar things happened later with a guy whose name escapes me at the moment (he used sonoluminescense to attempt achieving fusion) - he failed to properly take into account the background neutrons produced by the equipment and reported success when there was none.

 

Basically, scientists who make a claim and then wait for someone else to disprove them tend to have their careers demolished and see themselves laughed out of their university. The scientific community is extremely brutal on things like this.

 

 

 

Extremely wrong. If this were true, then we would give equal credibility to the celestial teapot as anything else, because the celestial teapot has not been disproved. But strangely, there's no astronomers out there trying to tell us that there actually is a celestial teapot.

 

The thing that laymen very often fail to understand that a single result is not worth the paper it's written on. Unfortunately, media generally don't understand it either. (This is why there's so the media phenomenon of a glass of wine a day being good for you one day and bad for you the next - media and laymen don't understand that it is the overall literature that matters, not any one study or any one experiment.)

 

Which incidentally is just what you are talking about here:

 

 

 

It is very interesting to see the astronomical difference between what laymen think of a given theory or hypothesis, and what the actual scientists involved think about them.

 

But we are deviating quite far from the topic, yet again. But I can try to put this all into the context of the discovery that this thread is actually about:

 

Astrobiologists have a very big problem insofar as extraterrestrial life goes, since we only really have a single datapoint - we know some of how life works, evolved and started on this planet. But trying to extrapolate from that what the universal rules for life are like is extremely difficult - it's a bit like taking a stroll through a black neighborhood in Harlem*, looking at the people there, and then try to use that to form an opinion on what color the skin of human beings are. We'll have a valid datapoint since we know people can have black/colored skin. But can we say for certain that all humans therefore have that color skin? Nope.

 

In the field of biology, this whole thing is about trying to identify the basic necessities for life. As we slowly but surely get better at the whole exploring the universe thing it would be nice to know what to look for, even aside from the purely academic interest of stuff just being cool to learn and any possible medical benefits. But right now we are basically still in harlem, but this little bacterium that was discovered is like the first time we see a white person: a whole new variable has been introduced. Specifically in this case it is that this bacterium can use arsenic instead of phosphorous - something that isn't strictly new (we've seen extremophile bacteria do that before in protein coding), but this thing can actually do the same trick in it's genome. So basically, until now we had every reason to think that phosphorous is an absolute requirement for life due to it's role in DNA and RNA, but suddenly this white dude walks by and we get a new datapoint.

 

Here's something that also happens a lot in media reporting of science: many media outlets say that this somehow would disprove an earlier theory or something like that. And it doesn't. It adds a datapoint. This might sound a bit like semantics, but it actually is extremely important because it enters into how the work is actually done. Just like Einstein added to newtonian mechanics through his work on relativity - he didn't disprove Newton. Newton's equations still work perfectly for the things that Newton used them on, and the assumption that most people are black still holds true in Harlem, where we gathered the previous data point.

 

*DISCLAIMER: I actually have no clue about the true demographics in Harlem. I needed a workable and simple analogy and took a movie cliché.*

 

Thank , although i was a bit provocative, there a point i really failed in. So i learned and re-learned something. Thanks:thumbup:

Edited December 6, 2010 by Succellus

[topol-m]

Colonization of other planets, or at least building bases on planets/satellites for gathering resources is inevitable. With the speed production is growing and the resources are depleting as well as population growth those possibilities not only seem possible but absolutely necessary. There is no other way, we either go back to sticks and rocks or we colonize. When exactly those space programs will be realized I don`t know but with the speed technology is improving I guess there might be some resource bases on the Moon by the middle of the century.

Concerning the search for alien life, I`d be more happy if we find intelligent ETs :alien: than finding alien bacteria on some God forgotten rock. But you gotta start from somewhere :)

Even that would be a great discovery of huge importance for the science. I don`t expect science to be preoccupied only with things that I can use in my daily life cause this way it will be more practical and will be a reasonable investment. I mean seriously, I would be happier if scientists learn more about space instead of thinking how to integrate lasers in my coffee machine.

[EtherealN]

Thank , although i was a bit provocative, there a point i really failed in. So i learned and re-learned something. Thanks:thumbup:

 

My pleasure, and sorry for my tone a few times. Most of the time I run into the neighborhood of that kind of statements it is by people who are "far worse", if you pardon the expression, and I get a bit aggressive since I'm used to then having to deal with people who run into all kinds of funny conspiracies (you know, the "all biologists are liars and only talk about evolution because they need to do so to be PK enough to get funding" etcetera, and similar for climatology and so on).

 

So hey, I just got myself a new and important datapoint too! :thumbup:

[Succellus]

Colonization of other planets, or at least building bases on planets/satellites for gathering resources is inevitable. With the speed production is growing and the resources are depleting as well as population growth those possibilities not only seem possible but absolutely necessary. There is no other way, we either go back to sticks and rocks or we colonize. When exactly those space programs will be realized I don`t know but with the speed technology is improving I guess there might be some resource bases on the Moon by the middle of the century.

Concerning the search for alien life, I`d be more happy if we find intelligent ETs :alien: than finding alien bacteria on some God forgotten rock. But you gotta start from somewhere :)

Even that would be a great discovery of huge importance for the science. I don`t expect science to be preoccupied only with things that I can use in my daily life cause this way it will be more practical and will be a reasonable investment. I mean seriously, I would be happier if scientists learn more about space instead of thinking how to integrate lasers in my coffee machine.

 

There s another less costy and simpler way but it require education, a medium lvl of perception by individual, a high lvl of human perception as a specie, and huge political work.

 

Its called birth control / population planing.

Hearth doesn t need 3 billions chinese, 3 bilions americans, thre billions of whatever human race can breed. Nor do we humans need it.

There s a rupture point to how big a virus population an host can support without damage. We ve definitly crossed that point, in the last 30 years.

As as result the biostructure of the planet will try to adapt and rebalance itself.

This will bring enormous costs in biology diversity (us included), and probably some

wars over edible water and food.

 

We can continue to act like a virus or grasshopper cloud, or we can act in a responsible way. Responsible inply in penalising those with more than a single child once pop goes above a lvl (and ultimately reduce global population to a reasonable lvl).

That s what potencially get us apart from a virus, a cancerous noddle or a cloud of grasshopers: The conscious knowledge of limitation and the act upon the problem, which these organism can t do by themselves.

 

So far the host defenses have totally failed in controling us in the last 200 years.

 

Its a matter of time till we choose a new path by our will or as a result of our actions. Bringing rock from space wont save it, its not a matter of how much ressources we have but a matter of how many are conssuming ressources.

We have already started a cycle where nature will claim more and more lives trying to achieve a status quo. Life quality will degrade fast everywhere even for human time standarts, and no scientist is seeing this stopping for some hundred of years, if ever, depending on how much damage we will still cause.

The worst that can happen is the planet turning poisoning to us.

Even if this happens in 500 hundred of years, its nothing but a flicker in time span.

Fleeing to another planet ain t viable but for 0,01% if that much of actual pop, and will be even less as funds are shifted to repair of damages, posponing the real problem, maybe until its too late and in the end very few will survive locked in highly technological bunkers, same way it would be in an human life unsuported planet.

 

There s no god, there s no aliens (yet ?), and on a planetary life scale, we re nothing. (And even if there s aliens, what s the odd of them helping us from the odds of them looking at us as monkeys in a cage trying to survive on their own poo ? Supposing they don t end up thinking we should be erased in the prol of other life forms.)

 

Unless our biospere change drastically or there s a cosmic event, this planet will still breed life with or without us.

May the dinosaurs serve as a lesson. We can adapt, sure, but how many will die ? wouldn t it be a better solution to regulate ourselves ?

Edited January 21, 2011 by Succellus