Post 1/2
From the above:
Uh, the answer to my short-sighted question was already in the direct quote from Mayor that I pasted in the same post - yet another Duh moment:
Obviously our line of sight does not go through the tail of the latest potentially-habitable planet found. I.e. it does not transition around its star such that it comes in our "line of sight" from here on earth or our extended eyes in space (space telescopes). And which could explain why scientists concluded we don't yet know about its atmospheric composition.
Though we're too far away and our technology too backward to take us there in our lifetime (or for some thousands of years hence), knowing the "habitability" of other planets for forms of life such as our own, goes a significant way into proving that life could potentially evolve on other planets. Including intelligent life.**
BTW, have heard that they're going strike some missiles into Mars to rustle up some Mars-dust to check again for signs of life/molecular blue-print of life in Mars (such as under the crust).
** While Sagan was quite interested in contacting alien life, not all scientists share his optimism for encountering benign intelligent life. Some years back now, Hawking warned that we shouldn't be too eager to make contact. It was an intruiging argument. He spoke of how first contacts even in our own human experience weren't often the best of things for at least one of the parties involved, giving as an example European christians invading the Americas and making brutal repeat "contact". And that was a meeting between the same species, Hawking noted.
A fair argument I thought. Especially since he thinks a search for resources may be a driving force for alien civilisations as much as it is for our own. Rather than the argument in the film of Sagan's Contact about how superior alien civilisations would not gain by randomly destroy humans.
Hawking's point brought to mind something DA had stated in an interview: how humans have stopped evolving by natural selection aka natural rejection, seen in how "we [humans] no longer reject our children". He proceeded to repeat Dawkins that human evolution from here on is by memes. That got me worried about how the so-called "intelligent" life form on earth, the humans appear to be the only species on the planet that are prone to memetic diseases aka mindviruses like christoislamism. So the question that naturally follows when one thinks about it too long is whether other intelligent alien civilisations out there - who we can expect have also progressed past evolution by natural selection - also evolve by memetic transfer: transfer of ideas, which then implies the possibility of transfer of ideas by infection with mindvirus ideologies. And that's just a very freaky and scary thought.
Is there any other factor to govern evolution of intelligent species beyond memetic evolution? Will there at least be immunity to mindviruses in "highly evolved intelligent life forms"? Or is every such creature prone to infection by memetic diseases like missionary ideologies, the way every heathen nation - no matter how intelligent - has fallen one by one to the mentally-regressive christo-class mindvirus and proselytising of "Da Universal Truth" in general?
Because if it applies to all or even many intelligent life forms out there that we could come into contact with, I've decided I'd no longer want humans to meet with aliens (I used to get all excited about the prospect): we have enough memetic diseases on earth none of which we've ever learnt how to kill, don't want foreign mindviruses infecting our planet as well. Or the converse: humans infecting 'heathen' (un-infected) foreign aliens with christoislamoronism. If they are prone to memetic diseases as we are, then this remains a possibility. Soon we'll hear the story that jeebus was an alien from the stars sent by gawd to save all alien species not just humans. Etc. Etc.
Christos avidly reading the oxymoronic christian sci-fi (by Mormon madman and homophobe author of Ender's Game) already threatened - in a book review on an apologetic christo "sci-fi" work exhonerating Christopher Columbus by means of sci-fi time-travel to undo his genocidal mayhem in the new world and that which he spawned - christo readers already threatened that they are compelled by their religion to spread the word of gawd/babble aka "accepting jeebus" message to all and sundry, which means aliens too.
So there's the very real possibility that if we meet up with any 'intelligent' aliens that have an equal weakness for mindviruses, sooner or later some will get converted owing to the machinations of repeat attempts at conversion by initially-human missionaries. If the so-called 'intelligent' human species could fall for christo-class viruses, why can't other similarly intelligent species evolving by means memes also fall for it, no matter how obviously stupid these mindvirues are to the free insubvertible people.
After which initial sprees of conversions, said converted aliens will threaten the rest of the galaxy by wiping out any native heathenisms out there (memetic transfer works both ways: not just mindviruses/false ideologies, but the existence of locally-transferred native traditions after all, implying the existence of possibly very alien-seeming but yet natural heathenisms out there). Converted aliens may even double-back to earth and forcibly reconvert the last remaining heathens and other incovertibles like agnostics and atheists.
Scary, but a possibility.
Hawking was right. Not just a potential alien interest in resources but an equal propensity to be seized en-masse by mass-insanity could make contacting aliens a threat to humans and an enterprise that must be carefully considered and embarked on.
From the above:
Quote:Since Coustenis and Mayor some 1.5 decades ago already came up with what sounds to me like a reasonable method that could potentially tell us about the chemical composition of an exo-planet's atmosphere, is there a reason that - as per the CNN article further in this post - we don't know much/anything/sufficient info about the promising new planet's atmosphere and how habitable or not it may be for surface-dwelling earthlings?
Uh, the answer to my short-sighted question was already in the direct quote from Mayor that I pasted in the same post - yet another Duh moment:
Quote:Michel: "The interaction between the wind of the star [its stellar/solar wind] and the atmosphere of the planet create a big tail flowing away from the planet [similar to comet tails], and IF the line of sight goes through this tail, you have access to the chemistry of the planet."
Obviously our line of sight does not go through the tail of the latest potentially-habitable planet found. I.e. it does not transition around its star such that it comes in our "line of sight" from here on earth or our extended eyes in space (space telescopes). And which could explain why scientists concluded we don't yet know about its atmospheric composition.
Though we're too far away and our technology too backward to take us there in our lifetime (or for some thousands of years hence), knowing the "habitability" of other planets for forms of life such as our own, goes a significant way into proving that life could potentially evolve on other planets. Including intelligent life.**
BTW, have heard that they're going strike some missiles into Mars to rustle up some Mars-dust to check again for signs of life/molecular blue-print of life in Mars (such as under the crust).
** While Sagan was quite interested in contacting alien life, not all scientists share his optimism for encountering benign intelligent life. Some years back now, Hawking warned that we shouldn't be too eager to make contact. It was an intruiging argument. He spoke of how first contacts even in our own human experience weren't often the best of things for at least one of the parties involved, giving as an example European christians invading the Americas and making brutal repeat "contact". And that was a meeting between the same species, Hawking noted.
A fair argument I thought. Especially since he thinks a search for resources may be a driving force for alien civilisations as much as it is for our own. Rather than the argument in the film of Sagan's Contact about how superior alien civilisations would not gain by randomly destroy humans.
Hawking's point brought to mind something DA had stated in an interview: how humans have stopped evolving by natural selection aka natural rejection, seen in how "we [humans] no longer reject our children". He proceeded to repeat Dawkins that human evolution from here on is by memes. That got me worried about how the so-called "intelligent" life form on earth, the humans appear to be the only species on the planet that are prone to memetic diseases aka mindviruses like christoislamism. So the question that naturally follows when one thinks about it too long is whether other intelligent alien civilisations out there - who we can expect have also progressed past evolution by natural selection - also evolve by memetic transfer: transfer of ideas, which then implies the possibility of transfer of ideas by infection with mindvirus ideologies. And that's just a very freaky and scary thought.
Is there any other factor to govern evolution of intelligent species beyond memetic evolution? Will there at least be immunity to mindviruses in "highly evolved intelligent life forms"? Or is every such creature prone to infection by memetic diseases like missionary ideologies, the way every heathen nation - no matter how intelligent - has fallen one by one to the mentally-regressive christo-class mindvirus and proselytising of "Da Universal Truth" in general?
Because if it applies to all or even many intelligent life forms out there that we could come into contact with, I've decided I'd no longer want humans to meet with aliens (I used to get all excited about the prospect): we have enough memetic diseases on earth none of which we've ever learnt how to kill, don't want foreign mindviruses infecting our planet as well. Or the converse: humans infecting 'heathen' (un-infected) foreign aliens with christoislamoronism. If they are prone to memetic diseases as we are, then this remains a possibility. Soon we'll hear the story that jeebus was an alien from the stars sent by gawd to save all alien species not just humans. Etc. Etc.
Christos avidly reading the oxymoronic christian sci-fi (by Mormon madman and homophobe author of Ender's Game) already threatened - in a book review on an apologetic christo "sci-fi" work exhonerating Christopher Columbus by means of sci-fi time-travel to undo his genocidal mayhem in the new world and that which he spawned - christo readers already threatened that they are compelled by their religion to spread the word of gawd/babble aka "accepting jeebus" message to all and sundry, which means aliens too.
So there's the very real possibility that if we meet up with any 'intelligent' aliens that have an equal weakness for mindviruses, sooner or later some will get converted owing to the machinations of repeat attempts at conversion by initially-human missionaries. If the so-called 'intelligent' human species could fall for christo-class viruses, why can't other similarly intelligent species evolving by means memes also fall for it, no matter how obviously stupid these mindvirues are to the free insubvertible people.
After which initial sprees of conversions, said converted aliens will threaten the rest of the galaxy by wiping out any native heathenisms out there (memetic transfer works both ways: not just mindviruses/false ideologies, but the existence of locally-transferred native traditions after all, implying the existence of possibly very alien-seeming but yet natural heathenisms out there). Converted aliens may even double-back to earth and forcibly reconvert the last remaining heathens and other incovertibles like agnostics and atheists.
Scary, but a possibility.
Hawking was right. Not just a potential alien interest in resources but an equal propensity to be seized en-masse by mass-insanity could make contacting aliens a threat to humans and an enterprise that must be carefully considered and embarked on.