What if the radio telescopes we build discover that signals are being “broadcasted”(not reflected) from that planet of reruns of the I Love Lucy show? What if further analysis of their broadcast signals indicate that the people of that planet are savages and are constantly at war continually building weapons and endlessly killing and maiming each other ?
They already know about us since they obviously have received our I Love Lucy shows and are rebroadcasting them.
They are potentially extremely dangerous to earth beings since they continually kill each other and have endless wars.
What do we do?
Send probes. Every year, send an updated version of the probe, with daisy-chaining data return ability. Keep sending them until we get a response from the first to orbit the planet. Within 100 years, I expect these probes to either be AI or uploaded humans.
Send manned slowships as soon as we are able. Previous threads on one-way missions to Mars have made it clear there’d be no shortage of volunteers.
No offence, but this sounds like the setup to a joke where a nerd is at a cocktail party. He sits on the edge because no one wants to talk about mathmatics while people talk about many other topics some deep, some petty.
My guess is that organic matter they have or may find on the moon in the future is ejecta from earth.
The K-T impact certainly threw rocks into space, and certainly some of them probably eventually landed on the moon. There may even be dinosaur fossils in a couple of them.
Would the rocks show signs of having been blown into space - melted, or something? Or is the chemical make up of the moon sufficiently different that it would be obvious?
Let me know if you would prefer a thread in GQ or whatever.
I don’t know, honestly. I do know when ‘they’ identify a meteorite as being of Martian origin it’s because of its chemical makeup, its texture, and its oxidation.
I’m speculating. But it seems to me a certainty that there are earth rocks on the moon, and a fair guess that when they find organic matter on the moon, that’s what they found.
No sooner do we detect bacterial “fossils” and methane on Mars and scientists pop up and propose abiotic explanations. Even if we detected “chlorophyll” green, I’m pretty sure it would be inconclusive until we sent a probe that could Google Earth the place. I really don’t think people are as excited about bacteria as they used to be. Various space programs will get a couple extra billion for a few years, but mostly the we-should-feed-the-poor-firsters would make sure it was as big a priority as manned Mars bases are now.
Wouldn’t it be boring if we found life based on water, oxygen, and chlorophyll out there? I’d rather see the discovery of life based on something we haven’t thought of, in a place that’s totally inhospitable to us (and vice versa). If we knew how to find this kind of life, we might find it a lot sooner than simply looking for a clone of Earth.
That said, I imagine they might have something akin to a red edge; finding such a spectral feature at any wavelength (within the star’s spectrum at least) could be evidence of some form of life.
The first step: “get an environmental impact statement from God.”
I can’t take credit for that. I blame it on the Doper: Attack from the Third Dimension in answer to a question I asked about why we don’t seed Mars with lichens and radish seeds.
