NASA Astrobiology News Conference

[Karlos]

I was wondering if this could be related to the seemingly seasonal variation of the methane in Martian atmosphere. Methane does not last long under the conditions there and so it's already understood that it must be being produced by some process, be it biological or geochemical. Or perhaps one of the Martian rovers got clamped and they received a bill from Marvin the Martian

[Karlos]

This is certainly one way to bury bad news!

Are you kidding? Only science geeks are going bother with this one.

I don't think the wikileaks stuff will be buried any time soon anyway. I wonder how much stuff there is in there?!

[Karlos]

Wonder if they've found me home planet...

Either that, or they mistook something that evolved from your vindaloos for an alien life form.

[Karlos]

My advice was that if you are making a vegetable curry, Broccoli and even cauliflower work well.

Of course, broccoli is made of pure, naturally-refined win, but that's not the point here.

[Karlos]

Actually the thing that makes this a little more interesting than the discovery of arsenic using bacteria in 2008 is that these little bugs appear to have incorporated it into aspects their biochemistry to take over roles normally performed by phosphorous. I'm not sure how much (I can't imagine they are using DNA/RNA analogues that have arsenate instead of phosphate units) but it is very interesting nonetheless.

The theme of the announcement seems to be that our existing ideas of biochemistry perhaps need to be expanded to incorporate entirely novel chemistry that could depart significantly from that with which we are familiar. In doing so, a lot of new environments no longer seem quite as unlikely to harbour life and as there are many such environments on Earth, we should take a good long look here to broaden our understanding of what might be "out there"...

[Karlos]

Communication over interstellar distances using any electromagnetic energy is going to be a bit futile for anything with lives as brief as ours.

[Karlos]

@Franko

I just have to say, with respect to general relativity, it stopped being a "theory" in "well it's just a theory, isn't it?" sense when time dilation and bending of light by gravity were experimentally demonstrated. Both phenomena are now well recognised. Indeed, even GPS positioning satellites have to take these effects into consideration.

So, the objection that you can't make an object travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum just by pushing it harder in the direction you are trying to accelerate seems a perfectly solid one.

I suspect that if travel over such distances in a manageable time-scale is to be accomplished, it will be by "cheating" in some way.

[Karlos]

The other odd thing about it is that SETI would likely only detect analog broadcasts.  Digital radio broadcasts are practically indistinguishable from static.
Human civilization will stop using analog communications in the very near future, so even if aliens are in fact following a similar technological path to our own, they might only be using detectable radio signals for a century or so.  That's a pretty small window of opportunity for us to detect their signals.

Actually, digitally encoded data may sound like static when played through a radio expecting it to be a modulated analogue signal that it's circuitry can recover, but to a dedicated signal analyser that makes no such assumption, digital signals (particularly fixed-rate bitstream ones) are often easier to detect than analogue ones.