Negative pressure is to keep what’s inside from getting out, not to keep what’s outside from getting in. Keeping clean air in does not keep contaminants out. Furthermore, to maintain negative pressure, air has to be removed, not “filtered in”. Presumably, the air removed is sanitized.
Think about it. If you wanted to keep a room clean and from contaminants that were outside, would you pump clean air out and let dirty air leak in, or would you carefully clean air first, pump it in, and let the clean air leak out? The former is negative pressure. The latter is positive pressure.
I have no idea what NASA was using, though; my guess is it was positive pressure, if the intent was to keep the rooms clean (rather that to keep nasty stuff from leaking into the environment). My guess is the reporter got it backwards. Be careful not to make the same mistake yourself and think clearly rather than jumping on whatever supports what you want to be true.
No, the correct name of the systems are negative air pressure rooms, phrasing is correct. Once access to the room is closed, its sealed and slight negative pressure is applied. The air circulates through a filter that can filter out minute microbes. The ventilation system is a separate closed system from the rest of the building. The air in the room is recirculated once filtered. If you put a room under positive pressure it would blow whatever contaminate in the room out any possible access point.
That is good advice, except in this case, I don’t believe any mistake was made. I actually did a little reading on the matter before posting my previous comment. I did, however, mistake the “new” air getting filtered in. It is simply recirculated air.
Bingo: this is why negative pressure would be used in a room with a dangerous microbe: to keep the bad stuff in. It would not be used in a clean room, where the intent is to keep the bad stuff out.
Regardless, your original post mentioning the microbes in a clean room is very interesting, and a great case in point about how opportunistic and adaptive life is. It doesn’t speak directly to origins, but one might extend it to illuminate that by analogy, possibly.
In any case, your belief that life must exist out there isn’t mathematical, because we don’t know enough of the numbers to do the math, unless we assume that the early occurrence of life on Earth is statistically significant. It’s a reasonable position to hold, though not a mathematically rigorous one.
In addition, you’re dead right that the only kind of life we know about (and can even begin to talk numbers about) is the kind we have here. Our ignorance of other possible life forms is vast. However, our ignorance proves nothing. But I’d be surprised if I were suddenly made omniscient (through some miracle) and learned that life as we know (carbon/protein/DNA-based) it is the only kind that ever was or will be.
I doubt it, despite the conclusion of Well’s War of the Worlds. But with an important caveat.
Here’s why I doubt it. Most germs depend dramatically on the specific nature of the host.
Caveat: that applies to “germs” but not plants, and organisms that don’t invade hosts or prey on other living things, but rather, build what they need from raw materials.
For example, predators would be out of luck, unless they happened to share the same amino acids as our forms of life. Even if they’re chemically very similar to us, chances are perhaps 50/50 that they’d have followed the “R” rather than “L” branch of common amino acid stereoisomers. Once you go down that evolutionary path, there’s no turning back. They couldn’t eat us; we couldn’t eat them.
I have no idea how universal our set of amino acids might be. (Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. We’d all have different proteins, but that’s not a problem; we digest those down to amino acids anyway. In general.) If the set we ended up with is largely “accidental”, then we’d be incompatible as predator/prey. If the set is dictated by some reality of what makes good building blocks, then we’d be compatible. My wild guess is the truth is somewhere between; we’d share a few (especially the simplest) amino acids, but wouldn’t share others. Would we share enough for a predator/prey relationship to be viable? No way to answer.
But certain kinds of plants and bacteria don’t need much from other living things other than a supply of fairly simple raw ingredients (carbon, water, minerals, energy); they synthesize what they need. For the reasons mentioned above, they might not have any natural predators here on Earth, but might love our soil! That would not be a pretty picture.
Whether you are arguing for or against ET you must first throw anything we know about Earth life out of the equation. The only reason life here on Earth is the way it is, is because it formed here. The Earth did not form the way it did because it needed to provide a place for a specific form of life. Life formed the way it did because it had no other choice here. On another much different planet it would go the same way, if at all. The chances that we would even recognize it as life might be very slim.
We don’t throw out everything we know about life on Earth. But we do keep in mind that life on Earth may be a reflection of the conditions on Earth in addition to the requirements for life. Furthermore, life on Earth may be only one of many possibilities that might have arisen on Earth.
The point is we can’t be limited by the specifics of life on Earth, which was a crucial part of YoungKusher’s original post. I don’t think there’s any argument here on that point.
I’m not exactly sure where. I would guess, that in the filtration system, there is a second and maybe a third chamber containing “clean” air that is used to maintain pressure in the main room by constantly removing more air than is allowed in.
No, you don’t really need a cite, I realize that hospitals use rooms like these to quarantine. I suppose this means that NASA feels more confident in keeping the room contaminant free by filtering the air and recirculating it. I’m not an engineer, but I’m not sure how positive pressure would work better than negative pressure unless you were to expel all the air from a room. And that would make working on a space craft much more difficult because you would have to be wearing a special suit.
Yes, if we can figure out how likely it is for life to form during a planets lifetime, we can apply this idea to how likely that life might be to remain on that planet. Based on what we’ve seen on our own planet, I would imagine it’s impossible to exterminate all life on a planet once it has a foothold. Barring a collision with an object large enough to eject the planets core and assuming the planets sun hasn’t died yet that is.
True, it is still an assumption, of more than a few things, to believe that life exists out there, but there is little if any evidence to suggest that it doesn’t. In regards to basic life that is; complex or intelligent life is another story.
Yes, I do not doubt that life can form in completely foreign ways. DNA is a very specific complex way for life to reproduce. It’s very possible that there are other ways that chemistry would allow for complex life to exist. Although, it is not likely that complex life could arise from a different elemental basis other than carbon.
Not necessarily, because even though we don’t know what the probability is, we do know that the more planets there are, the higher the odds are. Much of the other evidence I have presented does the same thing, it serves to increase the probability that life exists. Even though we do not know what the exact probability is, I don’t think it’s right to dismiss all current clues and indicators as “irrelevant.” I think it is significant, that in this preliminary stage of exploration, we have only found indicators that increase the probability of life elsewhere in the universe. I don’t here people adding information that specifically reduces the probability for life to exist in the universe, and I would still find that relevant to the discussion if it were presented.
I’m not denying anything, and how is it relevant if I was? The reason I said you were being obnoxious is because of the way you were doing it, not what you were doing per se. Was it necessary for you to ask the same loaded question over and over again when it was clear that there was no answer? No. Once would have been sufficient to make that point.
On the other hand, I found it necessary to add all of the different factors that increase the odds of life being out there, and the fact that Stephen Hawking and the official White House representative support the idea that it is likely that life is out there.
Clean rooms are positively pressurized with filtered air. Think about it: negative pressure would pull a vacuum. Any leaks, and there are always leaks, will draw unfiltered air and contaminates into the clean room, as already posted by Learjeff.
I assumed NASA, of all organizations, would be able to manufacture a room that wouldn’t leak. It certainly is possible to do so. And there are negatively pressurized clean rooms, but are usually only used with harmful chemicals or biological agents.
You are right though, I researched it further(specifically NASA clean rooms) because I thought NASA may have needed to do things differently for some reason. And I had been given the impression from other things I read that it was, in fact, a negatively pressurized room. But, you guys are right, they are in fact positively pressurized. I found this article about the Webb Telescope currently being built which goes in to much more detail about the parameters of NASA clean rooms:
On a side note, this article is pretty interesting as this telescope is much more powerful than the Hubble and will be able give us an even more extensive viewing range.
And what were the original odds? You don’t know. Without knowing that, the additional knowledge is irrelevant.
You claim to know that the probability is high enough so that you seem to be pretty confident that there is life elsewhere. That is far from “preliminary.”
Was it necessary for you to make the same flawed argument over and over, albeit with slightly different wording?
Right, because the evidence you gather at a crime scene is irrelevant until you know who committed the crime. No, more like you carefully consider what evidence is important and what evidence is not, and so far, the evidence we have is intuitively significant, because it could paint a very different picture. If there were only a million earth-like planets, I wouldn’t bet money on life. But, as it turns out, there is likely more earth-like planets out there than there is grains of sand on this planet. If it had taken life 90% of earth’s life span to develop, then I would imagine it can be pretty difficult for the correct conditions for life to arise. But that’s not the case. It points directly to life existing out there, but does not prove it.
I never claimed I knew that, I said I believe that.
That’s not really what I did, and that is completely different from what you did.
It is my topic after all, that also happens to be in the great debates section of this message board. So yes, I feel as though it was perfectly necessary to continue to provide NEW information to support my point. This topic isn’t just for you and I either, someone else might want to know what reasons have led me to this belief. And you basically asked for those reasons when you were asking for the math over and over again, I was simply trying to provide the next best thing.
Why are you dragging this out? Is it because you are trying to somehow show that you were not being obnoxious? Because I don’t think that is going to get you anywhere. Or is it that you can’t allow me to walk away with my belief intact? You certainly have made me reevaluate my belief in this discussion, but my belief remains regardless of not knowing what “n” is.
It depends what the evidence is. In this case, the relevance of the evidence is dependent on facts which you admit you do not know.
:shrug: You claim to believe that the probability is high enough so that you seem to be pretty confident that there is life elsewhere. That is far from “preliminary.”
Unless of course, you admit that your belief is just speculation or wishful thinking.
Lol, yes it is. See below.
Your “NEW” information entailed the same flaw.
I have a rule about meta-debate:
If you ask me why I am debating something, you first need to tell me (1) why you are debating it; and (2) why you wish to have a meta-discussion.
Which is why I said the information is simply an indicator and does not prove anything.
Like I said before, my belief is essentially a guess.
That’s still much different than saying the same exact statement over and over again. My additions to the discussion were much more worthy of entry than the same redundant/obnoxious statement you were making. They were new in the sense that they had not been specifically addressed yet, so whatever “flaw” they may share, does not make them obnoxiously redundant.
You misinterpret. The act of asking, “Why are you dragging this out?,” is an indicator that this meta-discussion is already past it’s expiration date, not an indicator that it is time to define and then truly begin this meta-discussion.
I have already conceded plenty to your main point and that’s essentially the bottom line. Your last several posts seem to be just a counter-productive effort to show why my argument is equally obnoxious as your one statement. Or at least your posts carry those intonations. Even though I think I’ve shown sufficient evidence that given the context of my posts, they were still productively contributing to the discussion by adding reinforcing information; conclusion aside. Your post where you asked me to “show the math” for the fourth time after I already conceded that there is no such math, was not in any way productively contributing to the conversation and was perceived by me as an antagonistic sort of statement.