Perserverance safely lands on Mars!

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-nasa-rover-mars-ancient-life.html

Science in earnest to start in a few weeks after shakedown. The autopilot was smart enough to navigate to a safe flat landing field with no human help.

@sonhouse said
https://phys.org/news/2021-02-nasa-rover-mars-ancient-life.html

Science in earnest to start in a few weeks after shakedown. The autopilot was smart enough to navigate to a safe flat landing field with no human help.

A human on board would be so much more exciting.

@wildgrass said
A human on board would be so much more exciting.

Since that spacecraft had no life support on board, 'exciting' wouldn't exactly be the word that would come to my mind.

@wildgrass
Each landing gets closer to the question of whether there is life on other planets in our own solar system with Mars high on the list, along with some of the outer moons like Europa.

That is exciting in its own right.

The bacteria they find and bring back will kill us all 😮

@Phil-A-Dork
Sure and we will deserve it. Humans are a blight on the planet Earth anyway. Earth can get along quite well without a single human on the planet. Better, in fact.

@sonhouse

Agreed.

@Phil-A-Dork
The only problem with that theory is if microbes are found alive on Mars, they would not be able to attack our cells since we have had billions of years of completely different evolutionary drivers.

My question about life on Mars and anywhere else, the outer moons with the underground seas, if we actually find life there, is it based on our idea of DNA, double helix? Or could it have a completely different information coding system, maybe a triangle ladder with cross members or some such, there must be a thousand ways to store info in DNA like setups. And if we find the DNA is like Earthy DNA, maybe that would point to a common cause of life here in the solar system, a prebiotic cloud passing through the solar system seeding prebiotic life molecules over every planet and moon in the system.
So it will be exciting one way or the other.
Here is a bit on the origins of life here on Earth:

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-life-darwinian-evolution.html

That article is too smart for me.

I absolutely do not believe that microbes/bacteria from other planets can't hurt us.
We are pretty vulnerable as a species.

@Phil-A-Dork
The only way an alien microbe can hurt us is if there was absolute parallel evolution on both Earth and Mars or the outer moons.
Chances of that happening are pretty much zero, the microbes attacking say Mars life would be fine tuned to attack THAT life form but the internal shapes would be very different with a totally different evolutionary system. It is those exact shapes that microbes and viruses emulate to facilitate entry into the cell.

Wrong shape probes, it is useless.

Very interesting 🤔

That reminds me of a book I read that was saying communication with alien life would be impossible because we are too different.
It would be like a human trying to talk to a fly.
Their is a word for it 🤔 but I can't remember...

I found it.
God bless the internet 🤗

Anthropomorphism

"Beyond religion and philosophy, we find the term also used for any tendency to give non-humans the attributes of humans, i.e. to act as if animals have emotions, attitudes, intentions, goals, and characteristics of human beings. In folk tales, myths etc. we find crows, foxes, other animals being given voices, and they talk and act like humans.

In science, especially the study of biology and animal behavior, anthropomorphism is something to be avoided---biologists should not act as if they find human-like behaviors among animals, i.e. the vervid monkey is not resenting certain treatment, or does not feel shame etc. or remorse because these are human emotions. Biologists must avoid, in other words, attributing these motivations to the animals, because we cannot know what their thought process is."

So...
I think talking to aliens might be impossible...
Ants are very efficient and intelligent but they will never understand what I am saying and we are obviously a lesser lifeform than a space traveling alien so we could be the dumb ones who can't understand them.

There is of course a lot of philosophical thought on the problem. And a lot of Science Fiction authors addressed the problem also.

We could be able to communicate with other life forms under ceratin conditions:

* both sides WANT to communicate. here the Point that space-faring travelers would be uninterested to talk to us is a valid point.
* we find a means to find an appropriate method. So Spider Robinson wrote a nice novel, wehre dance is the means. Since we do have good knowledge about the whole range of electromagnetism we could also communicate with aliens, who, for example communicate in the UV (which is we can't access by our natural senses, even less create signals.) The same is of course true for the other site (if they are an advanced species)
* There is anything interesting to communicate about. Lem wrote a nice novel, weher humans exchange math problems with aliens. We can use that kind, of what we think "objectively true", information to establish communication. If we can advance from there to something which we would feel more tangible (like design plans or something) is not a given.
*We probably never can reach "soul connection" to a really alien species, so talking about emotion will probably only be possible if those aliens have a remarkably similar psyche.

@Ponderable

I agree with all of that. 😉

The book was "Winter Moon" by Dean Koontz.
(Horror, Thriller, Sci-Fi)
It was a black blob lifeform with many tentacles and mouths and it would take a dead animal or human and attach itself to the corpse and use it like a puppet and try to act human but communication was impossible.

@phil-a-dork said
That article is too smart for me.

I absolutely do not believe that microbes/bacteria from other planets can't hurt us.
We are pretty vulnerable as a species.

The catch is whether or not microbes from other planets can hurt us more than microbes from our own planet. The Black Plague successfully wiped out half of humanity TWICE, and that's only in recorded history.