ALIENS!

[LaGoosh]

https://news.sky.com/story/signs-of-alien-life-detected-on-venus-12071625

This is very exciting! Evidence of alien microbes living in clouds above Venus. Hardly the discovery of alien life I always dreamed of being around for but still really, really cool.

Aliens exist! (maybe)

[SuperBacon]

They definitely exist.

[Mr Lawrence]

 

 

 

[ReturnOfTheMack]

2020 isn't the year to find out about aliens!

[Jazzy G]

Isn't it just the possibility, but they're not ruling out that it may be some hitherto unknown chemical reaction that takes place on the surface of Venus? 

It's still very interesting though. 

 

 

[westlondonmist]

3 hours ago, jazzygeofferz said:

Isn't it just the possibility, but they're not ruling out that it may be some hitherto unknown chemical reaction that takes place on the surface of Venus? 

It's still very interesting though. 

 

 

I think that is pretty much it. A lot of the people investigating it believe although the microbe lifeforms are possible it is extremely unlikely. 

This is however is what I expect life not on Earth would be (inside our solar system anyway) . Either microbes, fungi or plants rather than sentient beings. 

Edited September 15, 2020 by westlondonmist

[BomberPat]

5 hours ago, jazzygeofferz said:

Isn't it just the possibility, but they're not ruling out that it may be some hitherto unknown chemical reaction that takes place on the surface of Venus?

Yeah - I imagine if you look at the actual research, it will come down to pages and pages on this, and then a nod to, "this could be evidence of life" as one of many explanations as to what process is taking place.

[Mr_Danger]

As long as they know they’re only allowed to come here with 6 people on their spacecraft lololol.

I’ve always found it more unbelievable that life outside of our planet doesn’t exist. The thought that we might be the most advanced living sentient race out there is chilling!

[LaGoosh]

The existence of any form of alien life being discovered in my lifetime is basically my dream so I'm desperate for something exciting to come out of this rather than some shit about gases or whatever. 

[Surf Digby]

5 hours ago, jazzygeofferz said:

Isn't it just the possibility, but they're not ruling out that it may be some hitherto unknown chemical reaction that takes place on the surface of Venus? 

It's still very interesting though. 

 

 

No!

If you skim read the article properly like I did, you'll see it's something to do with penguins shitting in the upper atmosphere.

I'm fucked off. Everything we'd previously been told about Venus was clearly a lie. Fuck scientists. Scien-tits more like.

[Thunderplex]

Great, more of the bastards coming down here to anally probe us.  There’s no science behind it, they do it for shits and giggles.

[AndiRush]

Whatever it is it won't be anything too dissimilar to what we've seen on Earth in the past or present. The Universe is made of the same building blocks so bacteria or microorganisms wouldn't be that much of a shock. If anything it'll be a sign of what a dying Earth will look like.

 

[King Coconut]

That's an awfully bold statement. The building blocks of the physical universe will only get you up to the start of biology. From that point on we have no idea what is possible in the universe. 

[BomberPat]

13 hours ago, King Coconut said:

That's an awfully bold statement. The building blocks of the physical universe will only get you up to the start of biology. From that point on we have no idea what is possible in the universe. 

There's a few things going on here - first amongst them is that we really only have one case study. As far as we know, life has only ever evolved on Earth once and, for the time being, we don't know if it ever evolved anywhere else either. So we don't know if the biology of Earth is the only way that life can end up, or if it's one of many directions evolution could have taken it. If we could discover an instance of life having sprung into being on Earth independently of the evolution of life as we know it - that would make the likelihood of life existing elsewhere in the universe an order of magnitude higher, and would also give us a better idea of whether life inevitably evolves in certain directions. But as it stands, we only know of life ever having "happened" once - it might be the biggest, strangest, freak accident in the history of the universe. 

I used to be someone who would have agreed that life on other planets would be all but unrecognisable to us, as it seemed like there would be infinite possibilities, and the likelihood of it corresponding with something on Earth seemed minuscule. But now I take an almost opposite view, just by looking at examples of convergent evolution on Earth - from a molecular level up to the largest vertebrates, life has evolved along similar paths to interact with its environment; the most famous example being eyes. An octopus eye functions very similarly to a vertebrate eye, but evolved entirely separately. 

Assuming no paranormal stuff like telekinesis or telepathy, any alien life would need to evolve ways to interact with the physical world around it - any complex life would need senses to perceive the world, which would include some form of sight and hearing at least, would most likely be capable of movement, and have some kind of extremities capable of manipulating objects. Some 99% of animals on Earth have bilateral symmetry, and many of those that don't have radial symmetry, and I would assume the same of life anywhere else - there's innate evolutionary advantages, physically, to symmetry. Unless we're looking at a planet of anemones and sea slugs.

They would need to be capable of some kind of metabolism - whether by digestion, photosynthesis, or some other process; it may be that another planet with different proximity to the Sun, and a different atmosphere, could allow animals to exist through photosynthesis in ways impossible on Earth, and it may be that it's in the processing of energy that life there would differ most drastically from us.

In terms of the inevitability of life elsewhere, that's another thing I used to believe wholeheartedly in because the universe is so impossibly huge that it must exist. But, again, we only know of life existing in one place ever, so we don't know that it was even inevitable here. It might be a one-off. And even if life is a process that repeated elsewhere, we have to remember that the universe isn't just impossibly huge but impossibly old - so life could have evolved, gone through whatever cycle it goes through, and died off completely a million years before Earth cooled down enough to allow life to evolve here. Or it might evolve elsewhere a million years after we're gone. 

[simonworden]

On 9/15/2020 at 11:46 PM, Thunderplex said:

Great, more of the bastards coming down here to anally probe us.  There’s no science behind it, they do it for shits and giggles.

If we're lucky they'll have a read of the shitting thread and all UKFFers will be crossed off their list through sheer alien disgust.