Last Item on BBC 10 o'clock News: "Likely We Are Not Alone"

I was just channel flipping and came across the tail end of the last item on the BBC news, which dealt with (and I only caught the very last few seconds) some kind of evidence that increases the chance of life in the universe.

The last segment is usually lighter in tone, but the few seconds I saw seemed to be taking a measured tone.

Now, on the one hand, we could look at this as a simple, gradual waking up to an obvious truth. OTOH, we could see it as another step in the gradual move to... that dwead word, "disclosure."

If anyone can help with this, it'd be great. I looked in the science section of the BBC News website, but there was nothing relevant. However, I then dug up this article in the Times which seems to provide some clues.

The date of the article is February this year...

Nasa’s Kepler spacecraft, which will be launched next month to seek Earth-like worlds, is expected to find thousands of rocky planets in the patch of sky it surveys, Dr Boss told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago.

There's also this:

His expectation was that 85 per cent of Sun-like stars had one Earth-like planet, and that some could have many more. Given that there are 100 billion Sun-like stars in the galaxy, and 100 billion galaxies in the Universe, there may be 10 billion trillion planets that are good candidates for life. That is a one followed by 22 noughts.

With a habitable world sitting for five or ten billion years around another star, it was inevitable that some sort of life would form, Dr Boss said. If you had a planet with the right temperature and water for billions of years, you were bound to get life. Comets carrying the organic building blocks of life regularly bombard planets, he said.

If Kepler, and a European planet-finder called Corot, do find Earth-like worlds, the next step will be to launch space-based telescopes to study them. “If we find the signature of oxygen, that would be pretty strong proof that not only are they habitable, but they are inhabited,” Dr Boss said.

Of course, the Kepler results have to come through NASA. On Aug 6 they released a briefing about a test run in which Kepler's detectors were tested on a known planet: it produced apparently very clean data. Kepler results briefing

Of course, if the news item turns out not to be about this, I'll look a bit stupid.

COROT wiki

If anyone actually saw it, do post.

Cheers,

r

reply to post by rich23


Excellent, Kepler should provide some stunning insight on Earth-like planets. It is a very large step, even though we will not know for sure if there is life (only a probability) and will not know if it is intelligent, but none-the-less it is a GREAT mission that many others and myself have extremely high hopes for. Thank you for sharing this.

news.bbc.co.uk...

There you go mate

reply to post by rich23

Of course, the Kepler results have to come through NASA.

Nail in Coffin...

reply to post by rich23



it was probably this story here that you caught the tail end of. news.bbc.co.uk...

"The discovery of glycine in a comet supports the idea that the fundamental building blocks of life are prevalent in space, and strengthens the argument that life in the Universe may be common rather than rare," commented Dr Carl Pilcher

[edit on 19-8-2009 by yeti101]

It would be foolish to assume we are alone with the thousands and thousands of planets in this universe.

Thanks for the links... I actually caught it later on News 24 - it's the results of the Stardust probe:

NASA home page for the probe

Wiki

A good article in The Times

Well, NASA are releasing the results.

I have to say that back in the eighties I read Evolution From Space by Chandra Wickramsinghe and Fred Hoyle (The Astronomer Royal).

It suggested, to some contemporary derision and controversy, that evolution might be kicked along by comet-borne or even space-borne retroviruses.

Its main point was, however, that life is spread throughout the universe, in comets but also perhaps even in free protein molecules iirc.

It's usually lumped in with the panspermia theory, but actually, it's closer to the idea behind The Starseed Transmissions which were mentioned in, I think, Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson. I haven't found a link (it's late, bed soon) that shows those ideas because the phrase seems to have been co-opted by people to describe what others have called "walk-ins" or "indigo children."

When I first came across it, it was supposed to be a series of channelled messages for the people of Earth, but it did posit aliens seeding the universe with life.

reply to post by logicalfallacy


I have trouble believe NASA as well, but why would they send Kepler up there, and TELL US they're sending Kepler out there?

I don't know. Either way, I am beyond stoked to see what Kepler will find.
I have been on the edge of my seat ever since it was launched.

reply to post by impaired


yes your right these nasa bashers are clueless. Why would they spend $1 billion on kepler , tell evryone about it then hide the results? The kepler team is quite small with 4 scientists from the SETI institute on the team.

It looks like they will be the first to find a terrestrial planet in the HZ which is a major breakthrough for exoplanet hunters. They will have the bragging rights and will go down in history. Of course the nasa bashers think they dont want that

just FYI it will be 3 years before they can confirm a terrestrial planet in the HZ. So we need to wait a while for the good stuff.





[edit on 20-8-2009 by yeti101]

reply to post by yeti101

Exactly.

People seem to forget that most of what we know about the possibilities of life elsewhere has come from research that NASA has done.

NASA isn't hiding the clues that life may exist elsewhere -- they are the ones leading the discussion of life elsewhere

- NASA is the people who discovered the ocean under Europa and has openly talked about the possibility of life there. They are the people who started all the talk about possible life on Europa.

- NASA are the ones who discovered the geysers of Saturn's moon Enceladus and the possibility of a warm salty ocean under that moon's surface.

- They are the ones who discovered the organic compounds in the water coming from Enceladus and were the first to openly discuss the possibilities of life there.

- NASA is the people who sent the "Stardust" spacecraft to catch samples of a comet, and it was just recently discovered that the comet contained amino acids -- the building blocks of life. NASA has openly discussed what that means for the possibility of life being common.

- NASA is the people who have openly discussed the possibilities of life existing in the clouds of Venus and have done the scientific research in the quest to find out more.

- NASA is the ones who discovered water on Mars. They were the ones who found the salt deposits on Mars and talked about the implications of that discovery for life there.

It seems to that that a great majority of what we know about the possibilities of life elsewhere has come from data obtained by NASA.

Have any of the NASA bashers actually read any of the research papers done by NASA astrobiologists? NASA is doing cutting-edge speculative science on the potential for life to be found in our solar system and elsewhere. They have some pretty wild and speculative hypotheses about ET life. NASA is doing this when so few others are doing so.

NASA has spearheaded the search for life elsewhere and has almost single handedly kept the discussion of ET life on the minds of the average person. If they wanted to hide the fact that life may exist elsewhere, they are doing a really, really bad job of downplaying it.



[edit on 8/20/2009 by Soylent Green Is People]

reply to post by otto octavius


Billions and billions my friend. And the universe is ever-expanding. We would be fools to think we are alone.

yes, with billion of billions of billions galaxies, with hundreds of billions of stars in them, with the possibility of hundred upon hundreds of billions of planets around these stars, it's almost statistically impossible that there is life on only 1 of the planets orbiting 1 of the stars orbiting 1 of the galaxies. it's almost irresponsible as a sentient being to think so

reply to post by Paladin327


True, but that same positive that makes it near impossible for us to be all alone in the universe also makes it very unlikely that we have ever been visited or will in the future by intelligent ET. The sheer size of the universe is both a negative and positive in that regard. Although i think we will find microbial life soon which would be one of the greatest moments in our history!