The delay in communication makes ambitious manoeuvres challenging - perhaps advances in AI (and by extension robotics) helps build much more autonomous space rovers. This could enable us, for example, to evaluate the samples by sending wet microscopes with the rover itself.
The era of AI makes me realize that if we ever get visited by aliens: it will probably not be actual aliens -- just an AI probe. And the idea of it really intrigues me.
Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing. And it would likely be better at figuring out how to communicate with us (than the human-equivalent might).
We need some new sci fi movies like that!
Why? Why would you expect it to be any more benevolent or any less murderous than the actual aliens visiting? Presumably it would be trained on their values, not ours.
Everybody looking at the wrong targets. Mars is a dead, radiation cooked, burned, poisonous place. Forget about it, leave it to the trillionaires.
Europa's water is an excellent radiation shield.
NASA doesn't want to find life on Mars. They want to find evidence, so that the next probe can be more complex and more expensive than the previous one.
NASA will never send wet microscope to Mars, you know, the kind you used in school to show bacteria in dirty water. As that would instantly prove life on Mars and make ever more expensive probes hard to justify.
I think there has been evidence of life in the Venusian atmosphere since the 80s and on/in Mars since the 70s.
To imply there would be a conspiracy to cover up such discoveries because you think the opposite would happen is such an odd way to think about things.
I suspect that NASA knows this full well, as do Mars scientists, and I suspect that they are being very careful to make sure that definitive proof does not appear until they understand all sorts of other stuff about the planet.
It also doesn't make sense from any kind of financial perspective. The budget for NASA would explode for all kinds of missions. They would have free reign to go wherever and do anything.
The discovery team would instantly create brand new fields of study and career paths, and anyone on the team that discovered life would become experts in the field with unlimited investment opportunities to continue their research.
The other reason is planetary protection. The best places to send a microscope are low lying areas where there may be brines near the surface. Those specific areas have been designated high on the list of protection sites. Earth microbes are really resilient, so even with intense sterilization procedures we can't be 100% sure. We don't want to contaminate the most valuable scientific find ever, and so we're approaching it carefully.
But I think the first reason I gave is the most significant one. It's technically pretty hard and not definitive. The surface of Mars is probably mostly sterile even if there is life. If it survives, it's probably underground.
I also disagree that NASA would not want to find life. If anything, finding life would make their budget explode. They could suddenly make a strong case for a Europa submersible, a submarine to visit Titan's methane lakes, huge space-based SETI radio telescope arrays, huge space telescopes to try to find more exoplanets and characterize their atmospheres, all kinds of things, since we'd know for a fact there's life out there.
If life emerged in two places in one solar system, we'd know that the universe is teeming with it. Maybe not complex intelligent life -- there's still reasons to think Earth may be kind of special for that. But life, certainly.
Citation needed
> NASA will never
Citation needed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkR2hnXR0SM
Also, "just an AI probe" and "It would be amazing" in the context of Blindsight... <insert mad laughter>.
But I generally wouldn't expect aliens to be "murderous" at all. Why send a group or probe lightyears away just to kill or enslave a primitive species? If they have the ability to do that, we wouldn't really have anything of interest for them.
"Why are we not spending that money on more social housing?" : Because this is the greatest mystery of our time... (nods all round)
"Why are we doing science?": I don't know and I don't care, cut my taxes! (Cheering and mocking comments about nerds.)
Conspiracies that NASA already found alien life and is suppressing it to continue funding.
Or you know the far more likely case:
No one has ever found any evidence of life anywhere and exaggerating tiny findings adjacent to it keep funding flowing.
No it couldn’t be that.
/S
>>What is odd is that there hasn't been a single other mission that's carried any experiment that has the objective of creating that result.
>>If the objective is to find life, why isn't anyone actually looking?
>>Tell me if what I've said above is in any way factually incorrect.
So... you tell me. Why no experiment? Not one in 50 years?
In the meantime we've learned a lot about the Martian atmosphere, it's climate, it's history, it's geology, the evolution of it's surface. I would argue that if a Viking 3 had flown with a revised kit that produced a definitive signal we wouldn't have got any of that.
What is odd is that there hasn't been a single other mission that's carried any experiment that has the objective of creating that result.
If the objective is to find life, why isn't anyone actually looking?
Tell me if what I've said above is in any way factually incorrect.