Why I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Finds Nothing: http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf
tl;dr: "Because it means life is not incredibly unlikely (after all, it occurred on two planets in our own solar system); ergo what must instead be incredibly unlikely is the ability for life to progress to the point where it can spread across the galaxy (after all, no other life form has contacted us); ergo we are doomed."
How often do you stop and try to communicate with the queen of a particular anthill?
If the ants were to one day take note of the living creatures around them they would most certainly come to the conclusion that they are not alone.
It never goes well for the less advanced civilization.
:-)
... on Earth. Let's be optimists for a change. :)
A bit far-fetched, but it could also mean we are the first. If there were/are sufficiently advanced civilizations in the past that could engineer on the scale of star systems or above (singularity hypothesis), there would be a certain probability that we would detect that (so far or in the future), no?
2. The probability of panspermia will still not be 1, or even approaching 1. That leaves enough room to avoid "bullshit argument" in favor of "questionable argument," which is a caveat Bostrom (and Hanson, in his Great Filter) would happily agree to.
3. Even if single-origin life has seeded multiple planets, if the seeding occurred far enough in the past and widely enough, that still leaves us with an anthropic filter problem.
And if nothing else, it helps to close a gap (well... turn a big one into two smaller ones) for those who like to make leaps of faith between points of understanding instead of looking for answers in the middle.
That said, I'd think it'll be much less spectacular, possibly yet another condition added to the pre-requisites required for life.
What's interesting though, is that if they actually find evidence for microbial life on another planet far away, then it's mighty likely that said planet already has far more complex life on it (taking into account the time it takes for light to travel through space, we'd be viewing outdated information).
Though I am curious: why are they announcing this via a press conference? It seems as though they would publish a paper to be peer-reviewed or something first.
Although saying that if something truly ground breaking were discovered it wouldn't surprise me if it were announced in the same way.
They did. The link mentions that it is under embargo until the time of the conference. It says "Science Journal" so I'm guessing that is an odd way of referring to the journal Science.
The italics are a bit off to me. Maybe they meant "Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 11 a.m. PST On Dec. 2"
Could there be some analysis of Mars rover data? Or of Mars meteorites?
Telescopes aren't good enough yet to get absorption spectra for relatively complex molecules in atmospheres?
You are not the target audience. This is a press release. Before the existence of the web you would have never heard about the announcement unless you are a science journalist. (The vast majority of people will never hear about this announcement. Reading HN or other places where this announcement might conceivably pop up is clearly not normal.) You really shouldn’t be annoyed about something that is not even directed at you.
* The media outlets can assign people to cover it.
* It's fun for the researchers.
edit - source: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1998/as...
