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Scientist says The search for aliens should start on Earth

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Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona University will tell a meeting at the Royal Society that the best way of proving that extra-terrestrial life exists elsewhere in the universe is to use evidence from earth.
The meeting at the Royal Society, which will include representatives from Nasa, the European Space Agency and the UN Office for Outer space Affairs marks the 5th anniversary of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme. Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society will also lead one of the sessions.


Prof Davies said: We need to give up the notion that ET is sending us some sort of customised message and take a new approach."
He suggested that the search could focus on deserts, volcanic vents, salt-saturated lakes and the dry valleys of Antarctica - places where ordinary life struggles to survive - to find "weird" microbes that belong to a "shadow biosphere".
Felissa Wolfe-Simon, from the US Geological Survey, is currently looking at the possibility that arsenic, found in contaminated places such as the Mono Lake in California, might support forms of life in the same way as other life forms use phosphorous.



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/...-on-Earth-not-outer-space-says-scientist.html
 
How would that prove that aliens exist? All that proves is that some microbes have evolved to use a different subset of elements...

Unless you were to examine them and they didn't have DNA or something like that...
 
bignateyk said:
How would that prove that aliens exist? All that proves is that some microbes have evolved to use a different subset of elements...

Unless you were to examine them and they didn't have DNA or something like that...
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The idea is if microbes on Earth can survive in such harsh conditions they may be able to survive on other planets under the same conditions. I personally think Europa right now holds the best possibility of life elsewhere.
 
So they are saying we should try and find intelligent life on Earth before looking elsewhere in the universe?
 
Genx87 said:
The idea is if microbes on Earth can survive in such harsh conditions they may be able to survive on other planets under the same conditions. I personally think Europa right now holds the best possibility of life elsewhere.
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I guess that makes sense.
 
I'm somewhat familiar with who Paul Davies is, and (unless I'm thinking of the wrong guy) he's not a crackpot, but rather, a respected physicist. But I think the way that article is written, it's easy to take it out of context and interpret it to have a different meaning than which I think was intended.
 
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How about the bottom of the oceans? There's plenty of weird crap down there we haven't discovered yet.

deepcreepy.jpg
 
I think the guy in the cubicle next to me is an alien. I'll poke him with a stick this afternoon as a test.
 
This is just more, "See this thing exists, soooo that other thing might exist too"! "Never mind the fact that even if that other thing exists, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with this thing".

It's like we're still trying to convince ourselves to look. I can guess that on a planet rich with life, there will be a spectrum of living conditions in which life can be found. By necessity, the life on one end of that spectrum will be markedly different from the life on the other end. Still, it's just extremes of the same thing. If you looked far enough back, we'd be related to it. It's an exercise that's sure to turn up some interesting critters, but I fail to see how it lends any support to the idea of alien life.
 
Genx87 said:
The idea is if microbes on Earth can survive in such harsh conditions they may be able to survive on other planets under the same conditions. I personally think Europa right now holds the best possibility of life elsewhere.
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This. He's saying we should get to know the extremes in which life is present on earth, under the harshest conditions, so that when we look at other planets, we have a wider perspective of what we know could survive.
 
Genx87 said:
The idea is if microbes on Earth can survive in such harsh conditions they may be able to survive on other planets under the same conditions. I personally think Europa right now holds the best possibility of life elsewhere.
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Agreed.
A big subsurface ocean which may have a few times more water than Earth's oceans, shielding from radiation courtesy of the water itself, and of the thick crust of ice, and a constant source of tidal heating - we've got plenty of weird things living around deep sea vents in our own oceans. It doesn't seem like much a stretch to envision something developing on Europa.
 
Personally, it seems the biggest flaw in our search for extraterrestrial life is our assumption that it follows rules laid down by how we define terrestrial life.
 
Sahakiel said:
Personally, it seems the biggest flaw in our search for extraterrestrial life is our assumption that it follows rules laid down by how we define terrestrial life.
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It's our only reference point. You have to narrow the search down somehow. You can't just search for everything.
 
A civilization as advanced as ours once existed on Mars. It was destroyed over a billion years ago as metrosexual, liberal, pussies took control and ran the planet into the ground. A billion years of decay and space dust has covered up any remains but will one day be uncovered by a Mars rover.
Everyone knows this.
 
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