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New York, 9:42 AM
Sun Nov 29
17 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/03/09
11/03/09
Quickly Kodo, fetch newspaper. Podo, get some boiling water! #vtheseries
11/03/09
Where's the sweat?! Where are the motherfucking expletives?! #vtheseries
11/03/09
[instantrimshot.com] #vtheseries
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11/03/09
I mean, sure, this scene looks creepy and weird out of context, but if you'd seen the original, then...yeah, it really was gross. #vtheseries
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11/03/09
I swear, this should have been posted on io9...hope that helps!
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03/23/09
03/23/09
it's the only explanation i can come up with for the existence of bai ling.
03/23/09
That said: now that Kepler's been launched, we'll be finding potentially habitable planets by the dozens, and able to see whether they have biomarkers in their atmospheres within a decade. That's the kind of thing to get legitimately excited about!
03/23/09
first, we need to differentiate between: 1) extraterrestrial life; 2) intelligent extraterrestrial life; and 3) extraterrestrial visitation to earth. kepler is only dealing with 1) extraterrestrial life, life that may or may not be intelligent. it will also be limited in scope thus likely won't answer the question of visitation or e.t. intelligence either way .
second,as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, though as dr sagan notes, it is strongly suggestive. it should also be pointed out that stories of alien visitation to earth could also be something similarly mindblowing, yet not an example of extraterrestrial visitation (time travel, extra-dimensional, whatever). and also, just because we haven't thought of a rational explanation and a wayto test for it doesn't mean that an explanation doesn't exist, it just may be that explanation may not be part of our current worldview; off the radar, so to speak, just as atoms and quarks and dark matter and...radar.....were off the radar just a few hundred years ago, a blink of an eye in evolutionary or geological or astronomical terms. and last, it is also true that only ONE story of extraterrestrial visitation needs to be true to make the phenomena of extraterrestrial visitation to earth true.
and yes, it could also be wishful thinking, natural phenomena, genuine ignorance, mistaken conjecture, mental illness, hoaxes, or really bad drug experiences. in. every. single. case.
i have no opinion either way on the matter, i just like being an argumentative bish.
03/23/09
True enough that the scope of Kepler is limited. It alone is also incapable of finding biomarkers- it's only capability is the detection of rocky planets in the so-called habitable zone (where liquid water, if present, could exist). You'd need follow-up from a next generation instrument like the James Webb Space Telescope to detect something like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of that exoplanet (but finding them is always the first challenge). It's true that we don't have the capability yet to say whether biomarkers actually mean life exists, and if it does, if that life is intelligent.
The reason I brought up Kepler wasn't because it can confirm or disconfirm any alleged extraterrestrial here on Earth, but rather as a example in this discussion of what science looks like. Plenty of folks (here in this thread and elsewhere, of course) make claims about the existence of extraterrestrial life, but reliable evidence is not forthcoming for those claims (not a single piece, as Sagan said, which is probably telling). The science that will be accomplished with Kepler might sound limited in scope, but it will be solid stuff- testable, peer-reviewed, capable of follow-up investigation. That's why I think it's worth getting excited about.
And sure, alien visitations to Earth could happen through some extra dimension that we're not sensitive to. Maybe the aliens are only visible in the ultraviolet, so bees can see them, but humans can't! There are an absolute ton of ways to imagine that we're not sensitive to extraterrestrial encounters. But that's no reason to just abandon the requirement for evidence. To the contrary, like many of the examples you gave- dark matter, for one, we inferred its existence precisely because we refused to abandon our ideas about what gravity should do. A complete lack of evidence doesn't mean that extraterrestrials haven't visited earth, you're right. But I wanted to add Kepler to the discussion to give a flavor of how profoundly satisfying it can be to have some other argument for extraterrestrial life that's a declaration, not a double negative like "you can't tell me it DIDN'T happen." Surely folks must get tired of making that argument, and long for evidence that people can't dismiss.
03/23/09
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03/23/09
I'm mainly talking about people who've encountered. I live in Alabama, so if it isn't in the Bible, it doesn't exist.
03/23/09