Extra terrestrial life

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Why doesn't Nasa admit that they have found proof of ET life?

Because no such proof has been found. On general principles it would seem unlikely that earth is the only place in the cosmos where replicating chemical entities are found. Living matter is made of ordinary atoms which should exist in many places. And it seems very likely there are planets which are rich in liquid water revolving about other stars, if not in our galaxy than in the billyuns and billyuns of other galaxies.

Even so, no direct and overwhelming evidence of extraterrestrial has been found yet.

ruveyn

You obviously haven't been proselytized to by the Raelians yet!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mZsCnHy3rA

Umm, it's not Nasa, it's NASA.
NASA is an acronym, an abbreviation, so each letter is capitalized - National Aeronautics and Space Administration


Just for grins, here's their home page http://www.nasa.gov/
And a Wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA

There simply isn't any proof (yet). But there are looking...oh boy are they looking. There are several moons in our own solar system that they are looking intensely at as potential canidates for mircrobial life, Europa being the favorite right now, I think. And we are finding hundreds of new extrasolar planets every year. The problem is that we can only detect them by the effect they have on their parent star (a sort of wobble or flicker effect in the light coming from the star as the planet passes between it and us). Our instruments are only sensitive enough right now to detect the large, Jupiter-like (or bigger) gas giants. They've used a few fancy tricks here and there to find smaller, rocky world, but none in the so-called "Goldilocks Zone", and all of them are still much larger than Earth.
We are really just waiting on intruments that can detect the light from small Earth-sized planets and separate it from the light of the parent star. As somebody once said, it is like trying to see a candle sitting next to a spot light from a 100 miles away with the naked eye. Once we can detect that light though, we can run it through a mass spectrometer and determine the chemical makeup of the planet, and from that we can determine the presence of liquid water and other tell-tale signs of life. Not E.T., maybe, since intelligence could still be a unique occurance, but something.

So just be patient, it will come.

Because they haven't. They're looking, and it seems probable that other life exists somewhere out there, but you can't be too shocked that we don't have a next-door neighbor on Mars.

Have not found any yet.

Think about it from a different standpoint:

You're the head of a governmental agency that's had it's budget slashed repeatedly over the years, your moon and Mars missions were promoted by the 'wrong' president (hence politically unviable...yes, people can be this petty).

Your shuttle fleet is to be retired in only a few years, they're considering retiring the space station, and the US will be unable to launch manned flights for 7 years (going cap in hand to the Russians to get to the Space Station).

You have potentially the most shocking, intriguing, and important information in a century...and you're going to sit on it?...

Always follow the money.

That being said, there are so many stars, and so many galaxies, that no matter how many times you say '1 in a billion chance', there's got to be life out there. I've always flipped this question around; why is it so important that there not be any other life in the Universe?...

The problem a lot of people forget is the inverse-square law; by the time our signals get out to about Pluto, the competition from cosmic radiation from the sun, etc., has wiped it out. Maybe more study on the 21cm (I think) band might help.

Very well said. And I agree, the numbers alone push the probably WAY in the favor of extraterrestial life. The numbers aren't, however, in favor of finding it. Needle in a haystack is WAY understating things, but there could still be billions upon billions of needles out there, just too much freaking hay!

And as far as why it is so important that there NOT be life out there... Well I think that is important to those that don't want the ego of their Great Sky Pixie bruised, since he didn't bother to mention E.T. in any of his/her/its books...

Life isn't even the most exciting thing to see out there right now, anyway. I mean, you've got super-massive black holes, galaxies colliding, mysterious things happening all over the place! A recent discovery, for example, shows that the universe may be structured like a 3D holographic projection from a 2D surface at its edge (not that it actually IS a hologram, don't misunderstand me) with the Planck unit behing like 1 "pixel". I find that very interesting.

They have not found proof of the existence of extraterrestrial life. As I recall, they thought that they found evidence of on Mars some years ago. This was based on microscopic structures found in Martian meteorite and thought to be fossilized microbial life. The scientists later thought that they could be the result of back contamination with microbial life on Earth, however.

Yes, I remember that. That was exciting for its 15 minutes in the spotlight.

Now we have this mysterious production of methane going on, which could primarily only be explained by either some sort of biological process or sub-surface volcanic activity, both of which Mars is supposed to lack. She's a tease of planet, she is.

Because if they admitted that they found one, everyone would want one.

There was also an incident that really chapped the hide of the man-in-space advocates. When the second Viking lander arrived on Mars and began running test on the soil, it had three preprogrammed tests to look for biological life. Two came up negative; the third was inconclusive. Man-in-space advocates will still point out, when the topic is raised, that a person on the scene could have come up with some further experiment to either confirm or deny the existence of microbes in the third test, while an automated probe is restricted to whatever its creators could imagine and design when it was launched (which, for outer-system probes, could have been years earlier).

One thing limiting the search for extraterrestrial life is that the current method we have for finding extrasolar planets (watching for wobbles in stellar orbits) is best for locating "hot Jupiters", gas-giant planets in close orbit around their home stars (like Bellerophon around 51 Pegasi, which would seem to mass about twice as much as Jupiter and be orbiting about as far out from 51 Peg as Venus is from our Sun). This limitation is due in large part to distortions introduced by the gravity well of the Sun. NASA has proposed a network of deep-space telescopes out past the orbit of Jupiter, which would be able to detect the wobble induced by planets as small as Mars, but of course nobody wants to fund that...

The problem is that making a mission man-safe (safe in going, landing and coming back) increases the cost by two orders of magnitude. Are the taxpayers willing to stand the cost of a manned mission to Mars which may bring back nothing of significance?

ruveyn

Although the use of in-situ resources would greatly reduce the cost. I thought NASA came up with their own design plan that includes using in-situ resources based on Robert Zubrin's proposal. That is, using the CO2 in the Martian atmosphere to manufacture oxygen for breathing, water and rocket propellant.

Where is the water on Mars. Does it exist NOW?

ruveyn