[HN Gopher] Water on Mars: discovery of three buried lakes intri...
___________________________________________________________________
Water on Mars: discovery of three buried lakes intrigues scientists
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 181 points
Date : 2020-09-28 17:01 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I immediately thought of Dr. Who -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waters_of_Mars
| Shared404 wrote:
| I don't put anything past 2020 any more.
|
| Jokes aside, If there is any life on other celestial bodies, I
| wonder if there will be diseases that we carry/they have that
| would prove destructive to us/them. Or perhaps the biology
| would be different enough that there wouldn't be a risk.
| woeirua wrote:
| IMO, I don't think it should be a surprise that we will
| eventually find signs of extraterrestial (but not necessarily
| intelligent) life in our solar system. The real question is: does
| it share any common building blocks with life on Earth or not?
| The answer to that question could dramatically change our
| understanding of our place in the universe as well as open up
| entire new fields of productive research in biochemistry.
| TLightful wrote:
| Secondly, are they a democracy?
| FooHentai wrote:
| Third, do they have any oil?
| tru3_power wrote:
| Serious question here, but are there any concerns about
| potentially finding some type of non-intelligent life that
| could threaten us? Some kind of bacteria like organism that
| could wreak havoc on mankind? I'm sure there are a ton of
| strict processes around returning samples back to earth but
| I've never really read anything mentioning this threat when it
| comes to finding life outside our planet.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I'd be _very_ surprised if something from a completely
| separate evolutionary line was (1) interested and (2) capable
| of attacking Earth organisms.
|
| I'd even be surprised, though less so, if they can even
| survive here.
|
| Of course we have zero empirical observations of such life,
| so predictions are guesswork.
|
| That said, if something managed to survive and multiply on
| Earth, I can imagine it could be a a huge nuisance without
| attacking our bodies directly.
| bleepblorp wrote:
| No one knows.
|
| One school of thought is that extraterrestrial pathogens
| could pose limited risk. Earthbound pathogens have co-evolved
| with humanity in order to harm us better, but xenobiological
| pathogens would not have this advantage and might not pose
| much of a threat.
|
| On the other hand, it's entirely possible that the random
| chances of evolution could create a xenovirus that's airborne
| in humans and bootstraps a fatal prion disease in everyone it
| infects.
| jandrese wrote:
| Something like a bacterial infection might pose a problem
| as it is just eating simple sugars and multiplying, but is
| completely novel to our immune system. A prion seems
| unlikely.
|
| A virus wound be absolutely shocking.
| Tepix wrote:
| Rocks have been exchanged between solar system bodies for
| millenia. We know that life can theoretically survive on
| these meteors. So it seems rather unlikely that a foreign
| life form that is not well adopted to life on Earth has a big
| chance of survival.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| It seems pretty unlikely, albeit not impossible. Life on
| Earth has evolved over an extremely long period, and advanced
| species have very robust immune systems against cellular
| life. When you consider that Earth already has viruses and
| bacteria that adapt very rapidly, that have spent eons
| competing with existing life -- I think it's unlikely we'd
| find an bacteria or virus that could successfully infect
| Earth based organisms in a way that threatens us.
| mdiesel wrote:
| "... slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the
| humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this
| earth." - I suspect this might be a more likely outcome
| (courtesy of Wells). A single strain or a novel virus is
| far more likely to have a predator on earth than be a
| predator to something we need to survive.
|
| That said, it would be prudent to take anything that may be
| living to the ISS first.
| ericmay wrote:
| I'd like to say that I disagree here with your assertion
| that this may be an unlikely scenario. I think it's more of
| an unknown. We don't know what unique capabilities an
| independent virus or bacteria may have generated. If you
| look at human history, contacts between peoples with
| different immune system resiliencies proved quite deadly.
| It's possible that we encounter a novel virus or bacteria
| and it may be extremely lethal or damaging with no ability
| for our immune system to fight off the infection, or it may
| not have an ability to interact with our cells and thus
| pass through without harm. Or anything in between. This
| goes both ways.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > If you look at human history, contacts between peoples
| with different immune system resiliencies proved quite
| deadly.
|
| Between human species on Earth. Humans in the Americas
| were not genetically distinct from their European
| cousins, thus a European virus could readily infect an
| American human and vice versa (Europeans were not wiped
| out because the diseases they acquired were not as
| deadly, such as syphilis).
|
| Our immune systems are adaptive, but a bacteria/virus
| will be limited in it's ability to adapt. As such, it's
| pretty unlikely to be able to infect a complex,
| multicellular organism that it's never encountered
| before. The most likely vector for an attack is an alien
| bacteria that is able to rapidly transpose genetic code
| with earth-evolved bacteria and create a novel hybrid.
| Then you are dealing with a COV-19 type scenario.
| wahern wrote:
| If we assume that life readily emerges, that's evidence
| that the life that predominates on Earth is robust as
| presumably it has overcome many spontaneously emergent
| forms of alternative Earth life, and possibly even
| extraterrestrial life.
|
| But if life doesn't readily emerge, then we don't have
| any evidence one way or another. However, the likelihood
| of encountering extraterrestrial life is also diminished.
| ericmay wrote:
| I'm not sure that I understand your point here. Could you
| elaborate? I understand that life on Earth has gone
| through billions of years of intense competition for
| survival, but I'm not sure that we should assume any
| likelihood of how an interaction with an alien organism
| would go given we haven't found life outside of our
| planet and we can't be sure of the evolutionary path it
| may have taken.
| wahern wrote:
| If life is as common/likely as some believe (that is to
| say, "very likely" or even "inevitable if liquid water"),
| then it should be continually emerging on Earth in
| various forms. The persistence of life as we know it
| would therefore imply _something_ about its robustness--
| its ability to outcompete those alternative forms. Such
| evidence certainly wouldn 't be dispositive, but it would
| be _evidence_ nonetheless, the strength of which would be
| a function of the likelihood of spontaneous life.
|
| "But", someone replies, "I'm talking about life forced to
| evolve under extreme and alien circumstances." But Earth
| has plenty of extreme environments, both now and
| especially early on, and scientists optimistic about the
| likelihood of spontaneous life are constantly
| equivocating those environments to others in our Solar
| system and beyond. Plus, let's not forget that the
| modern, biologically created Earth atmosphere is
| something of an extreme environment of it own. So no
| matter how you spin it (I'm too lazy to put down several
| other scenarios I've had in mind), the more likely we are
| to encounter extraterrestrial life, the more robust Earth
| life likely is.
| ericmay wrote:
| Sorry, I should have been more clear in my post. I was
| responding to this comment specifically:
|
| > I think it's unlikely we'd find an bacteria or virus
| that could successfully infect Earth based organisms in a
| way that threatens us.
| wahern wrote:
| Not my comment. :) My argument is more general and
| doesn't make any hard assumptions about similarities to
| bacteria, viruses, or even DNA-based life.
| ericmay wrote:
| Yes but my post that you were responding to was a
| response to that comment specifically. I appreciate your
| comments here, I just want to make that clear.
| soperj wrote:
| We're going through a pandemic right now because a virus
| has successfully found a way to evade our robust immune
| systems.
|
| You can take a country as deadly as Australia and introduce
| something as innocuous as 24 rabbits, and it can have an
| absolutely devastating effect on the ecosystem.
|
| Frankly it's beyond hubris to suggest that we'd be fine
| just because of the way we've evolved.
| woeirua wrote:
| It really depends on what ET life looks like. If it
| shares a common set of DNA for example then it would be
| much more likely that it could be dangerous. But if it's
| not even Carbon based then it could be totally inert to
| us and vice versa. The biochemistry might literally
| prevent all interactions. We won't know until we can
| examine it up close.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Right, I just saw this after replying to a different
| comment, but I think a COV-19 type scenario is probably
| the most likely of a bunch of really unlikely scenarios.
| Its unlikely an alien virus would be able to interface
| with a human virus, but if they managed to exchange
| genetic material, then it's possible the hybrid could
| infect a human. The same reason makes these types of
| pandemics from local viruses nearly inevitable. The
| proximity accelerates how viruses evolve and jump
| species. We obviously don't know enough about life to
| know if viruses are a universal phenomenon such that they
| could interface on first contact.
|
| It's super unlikely that a virus that evolved outside of
| Earth would (on its own) have a mechanism to infect cells
| they hadn't encountered before in order to propagate.
| Again, nothing is impossible, but physics, chemistry and
| biology would all have to line up in a very specific way
| for that virus to infect a human cell.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| A virus that co-evolved along with us, specifically being
| able to infect complex cellular life in the way it has
| evolved on earth. Anything from another planet wouldn't
| have developed in a way that lets it get past our immune
| system not because or complexity, but because of lacking
| the shared evolutionary history.
|
| Something that represented a danger to us from another
| planet would have to be an issue in how simplistic it
| was...like mad cow disease style prions, or a parasite
| that happens to attack us in a novel way. Something virus
| like just wouldn't be an issue.
| soperj wrote:
| >Anything from another planet wouldn't have developed in
| a way that lets it get past our immune system not because
| or complexity, but because of lacking the shared
| evolutionary history.
|
| Based on? Rabbits didn't co-evolve with australia's
| deadly fauna, and yet...
| jamiek88 wrote:
| They did if you go back far enough.
|
| We are talking compatibility on a protein level.
| woeirua wrote:
| Frankly we won't know until we find ET life. If we're talking
| about something that is relatively similar to a Terran
| bacteria then perhaps it could interact with our cells.
|
| Alternatively, it is probably far more likely that life from
| Earth would rapidly evolve to kill or replace any extant life
| on other worlds, especially microscopic life. We know that
| Terran life is tenacious. It readily thrives in hostile
| environments and has evolved under extreme adversarial
| pressures on Earth. It's not a stretch to imagine that it
| could become the apex predator in an ecosystem devoid of such
| extreme evolutionary pressure.
| issa wrote:
| I think the opposite is actually a much larger concern. It
| seems more likely that introduced Earth organisms would
| destroy native extraterrestrial ones. Or at the very least
| contaminate any samples.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Yeah, if it's really similar it will blow brains for one
| reason, and if it's really different for another.
|
| I hope it's really different. I don't want to be that special.
| marcusverus wrote:
| There are so many fascinating possibilities.
|
| 1) DNA based life with genetic overlap (potentially
| indicating that Mars life seeded earth life, or vs.vs).
|
| 2) DNA based life with no genetic overlap (possibly
| indicating original life on mars, or a common seed source for
| Earth and Mars)
|
| 3) Radical, non DNA based life (indicating original life on
| mars)
|
| 4) E. coli (indicating that NASA needs to fire their
| sterilization team).
|
| I'm sure there are more fascinating possibilities that I'm
| not aware of!
| dogma1138 wrote:
| DNA with different chirality (would likely prove distinct
| origins better than genetic overlap, if life was seeded
| from the same origin billions of years ago there could be
| no overlap today, and some overlap doesn't prove origin
| either since gene can develop independently even very
| specific mutations), proto-life - RNA world/self
| replicating proteins...
|
| Both of those would likely be a "more interesting" thing to
| study.
|
| The most boring part would likely be finding DNA life which
| is quite similar, I'm not sure it would point to any
| specific origin and if it's metabolically going to be quite
| similar to some life we can find on earth the overall new
| science from it might be fairly limited.
| hnracer wrote:
| I hope it's the same, because if it's different it suggests
| our impending extinction. At least according to the logic of
| Bostrom's Great Filter.
| klysm wrote:
| Conversely wouldn't imply the other life's impending
| extinction symmetrically?
| MiroF wrote:
| > Conversely wouldn't imply the other life's impending
| extinction symmetrically?
|
| Yes and?
| klysm wrote:
| Just wanted to clarify that the implication arrow pointed
| both ways if it pointed one way, so I guess and that?
| hnracer wrote:
| It would imply their extinction far into the future,
| after they've evolved to our level of intelligence, since
| our existence implies that the Great Filter exists ahead
| of us, not behind us
| pharke wrote:
| I don't think we know enough to say that for sure. If you
| are defining the great filter as the cause of the Fermi
| Paradox then it very well could be in our past. For
| example, the conditions or specific mutation that gave
| rise to multi-cellular life could be the great filter
| meaning that single celled life could be incredibly
| common but multicellular life might be almost entirely
| non-existent.
| MiroF wrote:
| > the conditions or specific mutation that gave rise to
| multi-cellular life
|
| Doubtful, given that we've been able to recreate
| multicellularity evolving in the lab. The initial jump to
| life, not so much.
| hnracer wrote:
| We might want to say that our existence is some evidence
| that the filter is ahead of us but it could certainly be
| behind us (in which case the logic of the Great Filter
| doesn't apply for our civilization)
| vkou wrote:
| Would it actually change our understanding?
|
| We know that if we apply an energy gradient through a soup of
| ammonia, methane, and water vapour, we get the fundamental
| building blocks of Earth life.
|
| If we discovered these same blocks on another planet, that has
| all of these pre-conditions, what would it tell us?
| airstrike wrote:
| I think the parent is arguing that if we discovered
| _different_ building blocks, it would change everything.
|
| Random link from Google https://www.astrobio.net/news-
| exclusive/possibility-silicon-...
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Anyone who has tried to keep their culture plates sterile in a
| lab will probably appreciate panspermia more than regular
| people. I'll personally put all my money into life being found
| at least fossilized not just in Mars but in europa and anywhere
| with liquid water, and sharing the same fundamental dna-
| protein-genetic code makeup as us (but probably little else).
| The way I see it, once life forms on one planet, it probably
| starts spreading seeds on a cosmic scale quite promiscuously.
| The speed at which life arose in earth as soon as conditions
| were right suggests that there's always microbes floating into
| the planet ready to take advantage.
|
| This also would mean that there's no opportunity for any other
| form of life to develop in the same conditions - dna based life
| probably has a monopoly on water based planets throughout the
| galaxy
| MiroF wrote:
| I think you are substantially underestimating the scale of
| the galaxy and the vastness of space to make a claim like
| "dna based life probably has a monopoly on water based
| planets throughout the galaxy"
| calmworm wrote:
| Speaking as a non-scientist, I too am intrigued.
| ionwake wrote:
| Ive always loved this photo
|
| http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/ima...
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Beautiful! I guess it's mostly CO2
|
| Edit: holy shit someone else commented that it's water ice.
| Amazing. I didn't know there was actual water on the surface!
| chuckwnelson wrote:
| TIL as well. That's pretty cool.
| NortySpock wrote:
| Wouldn't it sublime away within months or weeks in the low-
| pressure atmosphere?
| heyitsguay wrote:
| Very cool! What's the story there?
| blocked_again wrote:
| Residual water ice in Vastitas Borealis Crater pillars :)
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| Any idea of the scale of that image? What is the diameter of
| the crater?
| Isinlor wrote:
| 2000 km, so I guess somewhere around the size of India.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vastitas_Borealis
|
| @edit - 2000km is the size of the whole region, crater is 35
| km wide. See below.
| ckarmann wrote:
| 2000km is the size of the whole Vastitas Borealis region.
| The photo depicts only a single unnamed crater inside it.
| Isinlor wrote:
| Indeed, my bad.
|
| Seems to be easy to confuse since the crater seems to
| have the same name "Vastitas Borealis Crater" [0].
|
| Do you know if it's actually called "Vastitas Borealis
| Crater" or is it just simply a crater in the region
| Vastitas Borealis?
|
| > The 35-kilometre-wide crater sits 70deg north of the
| martian equator, in a low-lying region known as Vastitas
| Borealis. Previous orbiters have spotted ice deposits in
| craters, but the High Resolution Stereo Camera on board
| the European probe is the first to return a three-
| dimensional colour image of an icy spot. The ice may be
| up to 200 metres thick, and lies over a dune field that
| has formed in the sediment on the crater's floor. The
| data were collected on 2 February, and this image was
| created for Nature last week. [1]
|
| [0] http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2006/10/Resi
| dual_wa...
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/435723b
| ckarmann wrote:
| I don't think this one has a specific name. There are a
| lot of unnamed craters on Mars, even much bigger than
| this one. [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_craters_on_Mars
| SEJeff wrote:
| That's going to make SpaceX's eventual ISRU methalox production
| massively easier. This is great news.
| noncoml wrote:
| When searching for extra-terrestrial life, why do we assume that
| it can only be based on organic chemistry?
|
| Wouldn't it be possible to have life that is not based on carbon,
| water, etc..?
| gameswithgo wrote:
| carbon is unique among elements in the number of molecules it
| can form. silicon is a distant second and everything else is
| pretty much a non starter.
|
| water is less of a requirement but you need some kind of liquid
| for the reactions to occur in and their arent many candidate
| liquids at plausible temperatures
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| Possible? Yes.
|
| Likely? No, especially given that most of the solar system is
| composed of material in similar quantities. It's possible we
| could find different forms of life-producing chemistry in star
| systems with different proportions of elements.
| BelleOfTheBall wrote:
| > It's thought that any underground lakes on Mars must have a
| reasonably high salt content for the water to remain liquid.
|
| This means that any lifeforms in that water are unlikely but is
| it possible that the water remains liquid through something other
| than salt? Because the other alternative would be a lifeform that
| isn't influenced by salt as much as any that we know.
| koeng wrote:
| Halophiles are a thing on earth and they live in extremely high
| salt content areas
| [deleted]
| qchris wrote:
| I know halophiles typically refer to organisms like bacteria,
| but one of my personal favourites in that category is the
| Devil's Hole pupfish, a species found exclusively in Death
| Valley. They live in water so salty (4x the saline
| concentration as most other fish) that they actually have to
| drink the water around them and process the salt internally.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_pupfish
|
| [2] https://travelnevada.com/wildlife/10-things-you-need-to-
| know...
| tectonic wrote:
| So much of astronomy and planetary science focuses on water right
| now. Here are some more recent results about water:
|
| - The bright, salty deposits that NASA's Dawn spacecraft spotted
| on Ceres likely come from briny water escaping from a 418 km
| across underground reservoir 48 km below the surface
| (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1138-8). Two
| reservoirs were spotted by analyzing the dwarf planet's
| gravitational field. The salt deposits are young, suggesting that
| Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system, is still an
| active world. Ceres joins the growing list of solar system bodies
| that likely host hidden oceans: Enceladus (now with recently
| detected fresh interior ice), Europa, Ganymede, Pluto, and
| subglacial lakes on Mars.
|
| - Some of Earth's water may have come from the breakdown of
| organic space-born molecules
| (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64815-6), while the
| rest could have come from hydrogen locked up in enstatite
| chondrite meteorites
| (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6507/1110), instead
| of being delivered by comets and carbonaceous chondrite
| meteorites that formed beyond the snow line, as has been
| previously assumed.
|
| - Juno took the first image of Ganymede's north pole
| (https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/news/nasa-juno-takes-
| first-...). Ganymede, a moon larger than the planet Mercury, is
| made mostly of water ice. The ice near its north pole appears to
| have been altered by Jupiter's intense radiation to become an
| amorphous material without crystalline structure.
|
| Oh, and here's a recently-released mission poster for NASA's
| upcoming Europa Clipper mission to study the Jovian moon's icy
| shell and liquid saltwater ocean:
| https://europa.nasa.gov/resources/173/europa-clipper-journey...
|
| Our next issue of Orbital Index (https://orbitalindex.com) is
| coincidentally all about water.
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Subscribed. Anywhere to set up monthly payments for your
| newsletter ?
| tectonic wrote:
| And fresh geysers on Enceladus:
| https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/saturns-moon-enceladus-shows-f...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _NASA's upcoming Europa Clipper mission_
|
| As long as it stays in orbit. I'm pretty sure we're not
| supposed to land on Europa. Some monolith mentioned it.
| jrussino wrote:
| https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/europa-lander/ ;-)
| BbzzbB wrote:
| It will perform "45 flybys of Europa at closest-approach
| altitudes varying from 1700 miles to 16 miles (2700
| kilometers to 25 kilometers) above the surface", so there's
| no plan of landing to my knowledge. I also recall a mission
| to fly through the geysers, but am not if that's the one. I
| for one however am eager that we start digging in there once
| we're ready.
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Again, all those worlds are yours, except Europa .
| Tepix wrote:
| The more we learn about our place in the universe, the more we
| realize how insignificant we are.
|
| I'm now expecting life to be ubiquitous and intelligent life to
| be rare, yet not unusual. If only 0.001% of the hundreds of
| billions of galaxies in the observable universe contain
| intelligent life and moving from one galaxy to another is
| prohibitive, that would mean 1 million instances of intelligent
| life scattered across the universe. We wouldn't be special, but
| we could hardly detect or even interact with other intelligent
| life.
| jcims wrote:
| >The more we learn about our place in the universe, the more we
| realize how insignificant we are.
|
| Insignificant and unremarkable in scale, position and effect
| certainly. Given that, it seems likely that the presence of
| life is also insignificant and unremarkable.
|
| That said, it's pretty difficult to overstate the complexity of
| the mechanisms of life as we know them on Earth. Despite the
| vastness of space and time, it's also trivial to generate
| circumstances that are almost certainly unique across
| tremendous spans of both. So it's entirely probable that we're
| not alone, and it's also entirely possible that we are. In the
| latter case, we're still insignificant to a universe that
| doesn't know we're here, but we'd be sitting in a much more
| precious place in history.
| thecopy wrote:
| You are looking only at one dimension: space. But you are
| forgetting time. Intelligent life on Earth has existed a
| minuscule amount of time in the span of the universe. You need
| also to take into the probabilities that we would overlap with
| another intelligent life on the timeline.
| Tepix wrote:
| Good point. Perhaps we ourselves originated from von Neumann
| probes in the form of single cell organisms, flung into space
| in all directions by a long gone, highly developed
| civilization?
|
| We don't know how long intelligent life lasts on average.
| Looking at our current trajectory i'd say chances are that
| technical civilizations are rather short-lived.
|
| PS The Paleozoic began with the Cambrian explosion 541
| million year ago, that's quite a long timespan with
| intelligent life (not a technical civilization, however) even
| in galactic timescales.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Consider how long life existed before the Cambrian
| explosion happened though. What are the chances that
| metazoans evolve from a given planet's microorganisms? One
| in eight per billion years?
| untog wrote:
| I wouldn't recommend it as an exploration of the topic but
| the movie Prometheus touches on this theory.
| Erlich_Bachman wrote:
| What is the reason and goal of this thinking?
|
| The term "significant" stems from the person using it, from
| what they are trying to convey. There are many different ways
| to think about significance. Significant to whom? For what
| reason?
|
| Another popular and yet abused argument is saying that human
| body is "mostly empty space", because the size of the atomic
| nucleus or an electron is so small compared to the space
| between them. But so what? It is the interaction between the
| atoms that matters, that produces all the results including our
| consciousness, not how much space is between the atoms.
|
| What if we are one of the most significant phenomena and
| results of the universe, regardless of how little or much space
| we occupy? Or at the very least, what if the rare occurences of
| the conscious life are the most significant things in the
| universe, regardless of how many dead planets or galaxies or
| space is between them.
|
| Is it really that hard to see that significance can easily be
| based on something much more interesting and useful than the
| banal notion of comparative linear space?
|
| This definition of "significance" is not any more or less
| truthful by any objective standard, so I am wondering why did
| you choose to use your definition? What does thinking that way
| achieve for you in your life?
| luhn wrote:
| I think you've drastically misunderstood OP, they're not
| talking about our spacial significance. They're considering
| given the size of the universe, human-level intelligence (or
| greater!) most likely exists many times over and is not
| unique to Earth.
|
| Also I'm not sure why thinking needs to have a "reason" or
| further some life goal.
| Erlich_Bachman wrote:
| > likely exists many times over and is not unique to Earth.
|
| And that is supposed to make it less significant to us?
| luhn wrote:
| I think you're reading too much into OP's use of
| "insignificant." I don't think OP is advocating nihilism.
| darepublic wrote:
| I think you're right but technically we haven't hit paydirt yet
| in terms of finding life off earth. Maybe the Venusian probe
| will be the big breakthrough
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-09-28 23:00 UTC)