Jabberwock xeno said:
ZephrC said:
Jabberwock xeno said:
BBBBUUUUUULLLLLL CCCCCCRRRRAAAAAAPPP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I cannot express my ANGER at this mountain of pathethic, vile words they call a significant discovery in words!
It is utterly pretentious and naive to assume that just because all life that we knew of required water, or had certain elements composing their bodies that all life in the UNIVERSE does!
As a 10 YEAR OLD CHILD I scoffed at NASA taking any minute signs as water as a sign of life, and ignoring everything else! I had wrongly assumed that they had enough COMMON SENSE to look further!
This embarrasses, no, shames, no, DISGUSTS me that we spent millions of dollars and over 45 years, to come to a conclusion that I MYSELF HAD MADE YEARS AGO!
Ugh, I am so enraged right now, I need to go maim something. (In a video game, mind you, so don't go send SWAT teams on my ass please.)
/END RANT
It's all well and good to say you thought of something like this years ago. Guess what? People have been thinking of it since before you were even born.
But you see, in the world of science proof is the only thing that matters, and now we have real proof.
If you don't think that's a big deal, well, that's your loss, but to be enraged that we spent our time and money to learn something for certain instead of just having a bunch of nerds brainstorm a bit and call it science fact belittles everything science stands for, and you are dangerously ignorant.
It's just that there was nothing ever suggesting that life without water or whatever WASN'T possible, ins't that the entire basis for the scientific theory? Hypothesis, and throw the idea away when something disproves it, not throw it away without proof for it? (in laymans terms anyways)
The whole field of astrobiology is largely speculative anyways, yet NASA limited their own potential and use with their tech and skills in space exploration by limiting the search for ET life to earth like environments.
I understand the importance of this finding towards NORMAL biology, but doesn't expanding the field to space kind of throw most known rules for life out of the book by default? it's the UNIVERSE for gods sake, we don't even know if our definition of life is acceptable for the most part.
For all we know, there could be a sentient race of what looks like a cross between a octopus and a venus flytrap made of Ionized Hydrogen or something, that is born spontaneously and doesn't reproduce! Hell, that could be the most common form of "life" in the universe and we would have no way of knowing!
None of that explains why you might be enraged at us researching this to prove it's possible. Do you think nobody has ever looked for anything besides life exactly like us? We tend to concentrate our effort where it would be most likely though, and now we know to broaden that a bit.
In particular your earlier example of looking for water being a bad idea is just wrong. Water is useful in biology for a lot more reasons than that it simply is a liquid. It's probably
possible for life to use other liquids, or even no liquid at all, but H2O is one of the most common compounds in the universe and it's also chemically neutral, which allows it to be used to carry other chemicals around our systems without any kind of special protections. That's a lot of stuff for life to find other ways of replicating, especially considering that it's going to take a lot of things that are all less common than water.
Sure, maybe life has found a way in places where there is no liquid water. Life is good at that, but we have no idea what it might look like, or how to go about finding it, so what good does that possibility do us? It makes a lot more sense to look where we know what we're looking for. Every bit of real knowledge we can gain about how other life might actually work expands our ability to search. Screaming that it's obvious that we don't know everything is unhelpful and, well, obvious.
