Evidence for ET is mounting daily, but not proven

[BridgeTheGap]

WASHINGTON -- Lately, a handful of new discoveries make it seem more likely that we are not alone - that there is life somewhere else in the universe.

In the past several days, scientists have reported there are three times as many stars as they previously thought. Another group of researchers discovered a microbe can live on arsenic, expanding our understanding of how life can thrive under the harshest environments. And earlier this year, astronomers for the first time said they'd found a potentially habitable planet.

"The evidence is just getting stronger and stronger," said Carl Pilcher, director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, which studies the origins, evolution and possibilities of life in the universe. "I think anybody looking at this evidence is going to say, 'There's got to be life out there.'"

A caveat: Since much of this research is new, scientists are still debating how solid the conclusions are.

http://www.kentucky.com/2010/12/08/1557306/evidence-for-et-is-mounting-daily.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. Young people often don't realize what an incredible turnaround there has been

in scientific thinking about potential off-world life.

"Scientists who looked for life were once dismissed as working on the fringes of science. Now, Shostak said, it's the other way around. He said that given the mounting evidence, to believe now that Earth is the only place harboring life is essentially like believing in miracles. 'And astronomers tend not to believe in miracles.'"

Read more: http://www.kentucky.com/2010/12/08/1557306/evidence-for-et-is-mounting-daily.html#ixzz17XPReOfv

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I'm old enough to have witnessed this change in scientific thought as it occurred. Even with the mindboggling numbers, as to the prevalence of galaxies (each containing hundreds of billions of stars) in the universe, that came with Hubble's work--the proof that our galaxy was not the ONLY galaxy and that the universe is filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies (each containing hundreds of billions of stars)--those who speculated that these staggering numbers imply life elsewhere were treated as kooks both within the scientific community and by the press. The notion that our solar system is unique was prevalent--and the stubbornness of "mainstream" science around the issue was very like the stubbornness in the Middle Ages about the Earth being unique and being the "center" of the universe. The more reasonable notion, given the HUGE numbers of stars and galaxies, that only one sun having a planetary system was very, very improbable, and that life on earth being unique was very, very unlikely, was dismissed, in favor of the least reasonable assumption: that, out of all that staggering galactic activity, to the further ends of space and time, only ONE sun has planets, and only ONE solar system has conditions for life to develop.

The realization that the Milky Way is only one of hundreds of billions of objects similar to it, in the greater universe, occurred in the first decades of the 20th century, but was not generally known and understood until the 1950s-1960s, and it has taken half a century after that to begin to confirm what this means--that life is not just possible, it is probable, all over the universe. Only in recent decades--the last 20 years or so--has concrete proof arrived, in the discovery of the prevalence of water in our own solar system (even on the Moon!), the discovery of extremophiles on earth (critters that can live and prosper without light, at the bottom of the sea, life that is not based on photosynthesis, sulphur-based life, life at great extremes of cold and hot), and, finally, with vast improvements and refinements of astronomical observation, the discovery of planets around other suns, then the discovery of earth-like planets (rocky planets, not gaseous giants like Jupiter, positioned around their suns in the zone where life is possible). Now we're moving on from "life as we know it" to "life as we don't know it"--for instance, arsenic-based life. This INCREDIBLY increases the probability of life elsewhere, beyond even the other big increases in that probability (prevalence of water, prevalence of planets, etc.).

Just 20 years ago, "life elsewhere" was still a "kooky" notion. It had only been with great effort that Carl Sagan had achieved an 'extraterrestial" component of NASA's moon visits and studies, in the late 1960s--a credit to the scientific "underground" (--all those CalTech and MIT scientists and engineers who had been inspired in their youths by science fiction writers). The lack of immediate results (as to life) retarded funding and kept the notion of finding life elsewhere in the "kooky" category until fairly recently. I remember arguing with people only 20 years ago that the numbers are so overwhelming that the weird thing--the impossible thing-- would be NO life anywhere but here. I urged then, and I still urge, maximum effort by our society to discover the life that is certainly out there, because it will be the most momentous discovery in human history, bar none. Many science fiction writers have imagined it. But the actual discovery will reach beyond anything they have imagined. It will shake the foundations of the human psyche and put us on a path to becoming who we really are--citizens of the universe. We are NOT who we normally think we are--creatures of Earth--any more than an American citizen or African citizen or Asian citizen is merely a citizen of those places and countries. We are ALSO citizens the world, with rights and status that have been increasingly acknowledged as "human" rights and "human status." Well, we're in for a VERY BIG upgrade in status. We "belong" to the Universe. We are its People. We are its intelligence. We are its self-awareness. And we are not alone.

[pokerfan]

2. I really wish NASA hadn't made such a big deal about this

because it sounds like they seriously overstated their conclusions.

http://www.universetoday.com/81419/backlashfeedback-on-nasa%E2%80%99s-arsenic-findings