Is this the big one?

MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-167

NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery;

Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m.

EST On Dec. 2 WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency's website at http://www.nasa.gov.

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_M10-167_Astrobiology.html

My guess...

There's a huge tranche of extrasolar planet candidates been discovered by transit method by that new Kepler ? telescope that looks set to double existing count promptly, and re-double it within months.

My guess is they've found a terrestrial-type, ie rocky not gas-giant, planet in a nearby star's 'goldilocks' zone. And, perhaps, they've got a spectrum of atmosphere...

Better than that and I'd be jumping higher with glee...

Nik

(BSc FBIS)

I think it's going to be related to Kepler too, but I feel it's more likely that the discovery is of solar systems where the Gas Giants are in orbits like in our Solar System (as opposed to baking close to the sun).

It's gotta be this:

http://www.aolnews.com/weird-news/article/will-proof-of-extraterrestrial-life-be-revealed-at-a-michigan-ramada-inn/19735919

A Michigan man claiming to possess an ice meteorite rich in extraterrestrial organisms will announce in a news conference Tuesday that alien life, at long last, has been found. The announcement will take place at a Ramada Inn in South Haven, Mich.

"I prayed for Jesus to send me an ice meteorite, because I knew it would be quite valuable," Duane P. Snyder, 65, said of the chunk of ice he found on a South Haven roadway in 2000.

Click to expand...

It's a pity that in today's popular culture, saying "I want to believe" makes you the hero and survivor, but if you say "I want to know", you're the villain and blown into atoms.

Interesting to be sure. A thought: Earth has countless and yet undiscovered life forms. Could it be that Earth is the depository for every life form in the universe? -SP

"an ice meteorite rich in extraterrestrial organisms"

Uh, perchance did it have a smell & stain of aircraft toilet disinfectant ?? IIRC, villages around Heathrow (UK) used to be pelted by lumps of, uh, stuff that had frozen onto drain-pipe, then fell off as flightpath descended through warmer air...

I'm told 'modern' aircraft have a septic tank and ground handling equipment to prevent such...

my guess, one of mars rover overrun some mars bug...

scenarios:

1.
They have nothing to report. The 'impact' wording may be nothing more than an attempt to gain interest in their press conference. Though the word 'impact' to me is negative, maybe they mean that the searches are no longer needed?

2.
On Mars one of the Rovers has identified one molecule that is less than one part per trillion that may indicate life.

3.
Mold has started appearing on one of the rovers. This may be of extra terrestrial origin or maybe the NASA clean rooms are not so clean after all. Maybe MASA will apolagize for accicently seeding another planet.

4.
Fossils have been found in a martan rock. Ruins maybe?

5.
Signs of life on another planet far far away have been detected. Would such a thing have been detected by any of the other space agencies? If so then I would think that they would be involved in the press conference but as it is the conference is NASA only so the findings have to be from NASA only projects.

6.
Venus was once a living planet that was destroyed by a nuclear war.

7.
Anne Robinson is an alien.

any other ideas?

http://kottke.org/10/11/has-nasa-discovered-extraterrestrial-life

I'm still curious however.

Abraham Gubler said:

to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

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It could be something as mundane as new study shows that life is possible in extra terrestrial environments but we haven't found any... In which case NASA's pre-release hot air generation will result in a lot of deflation...

Agreed.

It sounds wierd that a writer for The Atlantic (if I have that right) is
taking the wind out of an upcoming NASA technical announcement.

Thus, I'm still curious.

List of candidate for Life in Solarsystem
Venus: bacteria or even a ecosystem in higher atmosphere
Mars: bacteria or even higher lifeforms in soil
Jupiter's moon Europa was liquid water under his Icesheet
Saturn's moon Enceladus with warm water fountain in his Icesheet.
Saturn's moon Titan has a ecosystem around it volcano's (they more warm water fountain )

Maybe they'll explain WTF the X-37B has been doing the past seven months.

SOC said:

Maybe they'll explain WTF the X-37B has been doing the past seven months.

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Clearly it's been having a secret rendezvous with aliens but someone forgot to tell NASA it's a secret.

They found intelligent life in North-Korea?

Reminds me of

Q: Why have 5 million Americans been abducted by aliens?
A: The aliens are looking for signs of intelligent life...

overscan said:

".....5 million Americans been abducted by aliens"

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And those are just the ones the aliens have given back :

Regards & all,

Thomas L. Nielsen
Luxembourg

Apologies in advance to our American friends ;D

NASA watch
http://nasawatch.com/archives/2010/11/mediablogger-ex.html

Might be a new kind of life form... down on Earth. A bit like the giant tube worms found in 1977 near black smockers.

overscan said:

Apologies in advance to our American friends ;D

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Why? A good joke is a good joke, and that's a good joke.

In any event, the reason why the aliens abduct a disproportionately large number of Americans is because they are looking for intelligent life. What, are they gonna look for it in Britain? Pffff. They've seen Benny Hill.

Orionblamblam said:

In any event, the reason why the aliens abduct a disproportionately large number of Americans is because they are looking for intelligent life. What, are they gonna look for it in Britain? Pffff. They've seen Benny Hill.

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I think the point here is that there is no evidence that the aliens abduct a disproportionately large number of Americans, but rather that a disproportionately large number of Americans are returned after the aliens have experimented on them.

I won't try to guess at the possible alien logic behind this, however....... :

Regards & all,

Thomas L. Nielsen
Luxembourg

There's plenty of alien life left to discover right here on planet earth.

Lauge said:

a disproportionately large number of Americans are returned after the aliens have experimented on them.

I won't try to guess at the possible alien logic behind this, however....... :

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They are returned and their memories wiped so that nobody knows that they were abducted.

They're just not very good at it.

Anyway...


If this turns out to be terrestrial-life-form news, I'm'a gonna be PO'ed.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3253913/NASA-researchers-find-life-in-poisonous-arsenic-lake-in-USA.html

Friggen YAWN.

XB-70 Guy said:

There's plenty of alien life left to discover right here on planet earth.

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One's neighbours f.e.

The stuck rover has seen evidence of recent shallow subsurface water in its tracks. Recent geologically speaking probably.

mz said:

The stuck rover has seen evidence of recent shallow subsurface water in its tracks. Recent geologically speaking probably.

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http://marsrover.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20101028a.html
possible

while poking around that page and clicking links at random i came accross this
http://planetary.org/programs/projects/seti_optical_searches/

Lauge said:

Orionblamblam said:

In any event, the reason why the aliens abduct a disproportionately large number of Americans is because they are looking for intelligent life. What, are they gonna look for it in Britain? Pffff. They've seen Benny Hill.

Click to expand...

I think the point here is that there is no evidence that the aliens abduct a disproportionately large number of Americans, but rather that a disproportionately large number of Americans are returned after the aliens have experimented on them.

I won't try to guess at the possible alien logic behind this, however....... :

Regards & all,

Thomas L. Nielsen
Luxembourg

Click to expand...

The French ones they took went on strike and missed the return shuttles...?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11888362
story on the beeb from yesterday. "'Trillions' of Earths orbit red stars in older galaxies"
to me the picture on the right in this article shows nothing more than noise from a long exposure. The picture on the left is simply the corrected one. There is no mention of NASA in the article.

The picture on the right is an artist's impression.

SOC said:

Maybe they'll explain WTF the X-37B has been doing the past seven months.

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Maybe the X-37 disappeared for a brief moment and, after recovery, was found to be piloted by a talking monkey...

Looks like it is an extremophile found in a California lake.

Looks like it is an extremophile found in a California lake.

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http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/12/02/mono-lake-bacteria-build-their-dna-using-arsenic-and-no-this-isnt-about-aliens/

NASA info is at http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html although the server seemed a little busy when I just tried to connect ...

Update - got through now:

NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical

NASA-funded astrobiology research has changed the fundamental knowledge about what comprises all known life on Earth.

Researchers conducting tests in the harsh environment of Mono Lake in California have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. The microorganism substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in its cell components.

"The definition of life has just expanded," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it."

[...]

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Arsenic for Phosphorous...

I'm impressed, as Arsenic, like Carbon Monoxide, has a way of bollixing metabolisms. Even so, I don't think it merited such hype...

Provided, of course, that the entire ecosystem isn't geared that way, like the naturally contaminated arsenious aquifers in eg India-- That would be a bit of a blow to settlement on an otherwise 'Earth-like' planet...

Finding that several galaxies surveyed had *thrice* the previously reported number of stars, mostly as red & brown dwarfs, is much more interesting, IMHO.

As an AMERICAN, I find the joke about finding intelligent life in America insulting and degrading. There IS intelligent life in America, unfortunately it has all emigrated to Australia!

There IS NO INTELLEGENT LIFE IN WASHINGTON, DC!

OH! Look at the pretty lights in the sky! They are coming closer! They are so pretty! OH! There are some people within the lights and they want me to come with them!

AARRGGHH! ITS THE JUDGES FROM DANCING WITH THE STARS!!!! HHEELLPP!!

;D ;D ;D : :

So it just might be sloppy science, oops

Scientists see fatal flaws in the NASA study of arsenic-based life.

As soon as Redfield started to read the paper, she was shocked. "I was outraged at how bad the science was," she told me.

Redfield blogged a scathing attack on Saturday. Over the weekend, a few other scientists took to the Internet as well. Was this merely a case of a few isolated cranks? To find out, I reached out to a dozen experts on Monday. Almost unanimously, they think the NASA scientists have failed to make their case. "It would be really cool if such a bug existed," said San Diego State University's Forest Rohwer, a microbiologist who looks for new species of bacteria and viruses in coral reefs. But, he added, "none of the arguments are very convincing on their own." That was about as positive as the critics could get. "This paper should not have been published," said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado.

None of the scientists I spoke to ruled out the possibility that such weird bacteria might exist. Indeed, some of them were co-authors of a 2007 report for the National Academies of Sciences on alien life that called for research into, among other things, arsenic-based biology. But almost to a person, they felt that the NASA team had failed to take some basic precautions to avoid misleading results.

When the NASA scientists took the DNA out of the bacteria, for example, they ought to have taken extra steps to wash away any other kinds of molecules. Without these precautions, arsenic could have simply glommed to the DNA, like gum on a shoe. "It is pretty trivial to do a much better job," said Rohwer.

In fact, says Harvard microbiologist Alex Bradley, the NASA scientists unknowingly demonstrated the flaws in their own experiment. They immersed the DNA in water as they analyzed it, he points out. Arsenic compounds fall apart quickly in water, so if it really was in the microbe's genes, it should have broken into fragments, Bradley wrote Sunday in a guest post on the blog We, Beasties. But the DNA remained in large chunks—presumably because it was made of durable phosphate. Bradley got his Ph.D. under MIT professor Roger Summons, who co-authored the 2007 weird-life report. Summons backs his former student's critique.

http://www.slate.com/id/2276919/pagenum/all/