NASA Conference???

Loulou

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/r ... 0-110.html

So what does everyone think this is about? Is there life on Mars? Is there another planet? Have they found E.T. or have they learnt that Pearl Jam concerts can be heard from space?? hehehehe?? What are your thoughts?

CJMST3K

Someone on the board, actually two peeps, work for NASA. Let's see if they chime in.

Loulou

Ooo really?? C'mon don't hold out on us folks, tell us the goss! Heheheh i think they may get in a bit of strife if they did.

CJMST3K wrote:

Someone on the board, actually two peeps, work for NASA. Let's see if they chime in.

RB112589

Great post! Thanks for the info. I will waiting for the news!

Loulou

Why thank you RB112589!, your welcome!

RB112589 wrote:

Great post! Thanks for the info. I will waiting for the news!

Loulou

http://kottke.org/10/11/has-nasa-discov ... trial-life

I found this article about the different scientists who worked on this project for those interested.

Drowned Out

Anyone watching? Can't stream it from work....


NASA finds entirely new form of life
Doesn’t share building blocks of anything on Earth

Thursday, December 2, 2010 1:47pm - 0 Comments
NASA is set to deliver an important press conference today, but hours before, news has leaked they’ll be announcing the discovery of a new form of life – one that doesn’t share biological building blocks of anything currently living on Earth, Wired reports. NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce they’ve found a bacteria whose DNA is alien to what we know. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake in California, it’s made of arsenic, which was thought to be impossible. The press conference is to take place at 2 pm Eastern.


http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/12/02/nasa ... m-of-life/

BinauralJam

Drowned Out wrote:

Anyone watching? Can't stream it from work....


NASA finds entirely new form of life
Doesn’t share building blocks of anything on Earth

Thursday, December 2, 2010 1:47pm - 0 Comments
NASA is set to deliver an important press conference today, but hours before, news has leaked they’ll be announcing the discovery of a new form of life – one that doesn’t share biological building blocks of anything currently living on Earth, Wired reports. NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce they’ve found a bacteria whose DNA is alien to what we know. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake in California, it’s made of arsenic, which was thought to be impossible. The press conference is to take place at 2 pm Eastern.


http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/12/02/nasa ... m-of-life/

Loulou

OOooooooooo spooky! Nice find Drowned Out!

Drowned Out

ya, so it sounds like they're wetting themselves over the fact that there are life forms that can survive in what we expect to be unlivable conditions...
I'm sure it's cool to find concrete evidence of other life forms....but were we really expecting to find humans or plants on another planet? If we find life out there I'm willing to bet it will not have opposable thumbs and a symetrical face like we do...that's common sense. I guess proof is an exciting thing for the scientific community tho...


http://www.time.com/time/health/article ... 01,00.html

The Web has been percolating for a couple of days now about a hush-hush NASA press conference scheduled for Thursday afternoon about a major discovery in the field of astrobiology — the search for life on other planets. "Has NASA Found Life Near Saturn?" asked the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Has NASA Found Alien Life?" wondered PC Magazine.

Well, no, and it's unfortunate that all of this nonsense has been out there, because the real story is important to enough without the hype. What a team of scientists actually found, as described in a paper in Science, is what may be the oddest bacteria on Earth. These microbes live in hellish conditions in Mono Lake, a super-salty, alkaline, arsenic-rich body of water in eastern California that would be toxic to most organisms. But the new bug doesn't just thrive here: it actually uses arsenic in place of the standard phosphorous as a building block for its internal proteins, and even its DNA — and nothing like that has ever been seen before.
(See the top 50 space moments since Sputnik.)


Bacteria are already known to live in some pretty harsh places — boiling springs in Yellowstone National Park, encased in solid rock a mile underground, in pools of radioactive water — but this creature represents a true biological alternate reality. That's a big deal in any case, revealing how much we have yet to understand about nature's astonishing capacity for improvisation.

But the astrobiology connection just raises the stakes. Scientists who hope to discover actual alien life someday have always had to concentrate on life as we know it — because after all, if we don't know it, how can we know where and how to look?
(See pictures of Earth from space.)


It's never been shown that other kinds of life are impossible, though. For decades, for example, biologists have wondered if silicon could take the place of carbon, the basis of all life on Earth, in forming self-reproducing, information-carrying molecules like DNA. Indeed, Arizona State University physicist Paul Davies, a co-author of the Science paper, has been arguing for some time that life as we don't know it might even exist, as a sort of "shadow biosphere," here on Earth.

This discovery proves that it isn't just wild speculation. And if alternate biologies can happen here, there's no reason to think they can't happen elsewhere — not just this one, but all sorts of different takes on what life might look like. If so, it's great news for astrobiologists: the more variety out there, the more places you can go looking for aliens. "We've cracked open the door for what's possible for life in the universe, and that's profound," says lead author Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey. "What else might we find?"



http://www.time.com/time/health/article ... z16zfs77Bu

Loulou

They should have just visited my brothers house, there's life forms in there under completely unliveable conditions, hahahahaha

Drowned Out wrote:

ya, so it sounds like they're wetting themselves over the fact that there are life forms that can survive in what we expect to be unlivable conditions...
I'm sure it's cool to find concrete evidence of other life forms....but were we really expecting to find humans or plants on another planet? If we find life out there I'm willing to bet it will not have opposable thumbs and a symetrical face like we do...that's common sense. I guess proof is an exciting thing for the scientific community tho...


http://www.time.com/time/health/article ... 01,00.html

The Web has been percolating for a couple of days now about a hush-hush NASA press conference scheduled for Thursday afternoon about a major discovery in the field of astrobiology — the search for life on other planets. "Has NASA Found Life Near Saturn?" asked the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Has NASA Found Alien Life?" wondered PC Magazine.

Well, no, and it's unfortunate that all of this nonsense has been out there, because the real story is important to enough without the hype. What a team of scientists actually found, as described in a paper in Science, is what may be the oddest bacteria on Earth. These microbes live in hellish conditions in Mono Lake, a super-salty, alkaline, arsenic-rich body of water in eastern California that would be toxic to most organisms. But the new bug doesn't just thrive here: it actually uses arsenic in place of the standard phosphorous as a building block for its internal proteins, and even its DNA — and nothing like that has ever been seen before.
(See the top 50 space moments since Sputnik.)


Bacteria are already known to live in some pretty harsh places — boiling springs in Yellowstone National Park, encased in solid rock a mile underground, in pools of radioactive water — but this creature represents a true biological alternate reality. That's a big deal in any case, revealing how much we have yet to understand about nature's astonishing capacity for improvisation.

But the astrobiology connection just raises the stakes. Scientists who hope to discover actual alien life someday have always had to concentrate on life as we know it — because after all, if we don't know it, how can we know where and how to look?
(See pictures of Earth from space.)


It's never been shown that other kinds of life are impossible, though. For decades, for example, biologists have wondered if silicon could take the place of carbon, the basis of all life on Earth, in forming self-reproducing, information-carrying molecules like DNA. Indeed, Arizona State University physicist Paul Davies, a co-author of the Science paper, has been arguing for some time that life as we don't know it might even exist, as a sort of "shadow biosphere," here on Earth.

This discovery proves that it isn't just wild speculation. And if alternate biologies can happen here, there's no reason to think they can't happen elsewhere — not just this one, but all sorts of different takes on what life might look like. If so, it's great news for astrobiologists: the more variety out there, the more places you can go looking for aliens. "We've cracked open the door for what's possible for life in the universe, and that's profound," says lead author Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey. "What else might we find?"



http://www.time.com/time/health/article ... z16zfs77Bu

Drowned Out

Loulou wrote:

They should have just visited my brothers house, there's life forms in there under completely unliveable conditions, hahahahaha