We've seen a slow trickle of articles like this, in both credible and non-credible media, over the past 3 years.
What's the probability of a working group of space agencies having convincing evidence of extraterrestrial life, and slowly seeding mass media with these articles to create a soft landing for the definitive announcement?
At this point, I think that's a pretty high probability.
It would be more credible if they found only bacteria-like formations. I think that bacteria-like is almost inevitable with the right conditions, but every step after that is difficult. But it's far from settled science.
The fungus-like and lichen-like things may be some weird association of bacterias-like.
From the article:
> Scientists believe they have spotted fossilised [...], shrimp, crabs, sea spiders, scorpions and a translucent millipede in photos of the planet
These animals, ... they need a lot of steps to evolve, because they need a hard exoskeleton and a neural system, and probably a blood system and surelly oxygen to burn the food fast enough, so some other thing must have developed photosynthesis before. It's not clear that it's possible to develop muscles or neurons without mitochondria, that are also difficult because it must evolve as an isolated entity, and then the ancient cell must reorganize as a eukariota-like and absorb the mitochondria.
Those steps are difficult. We are probably lucky. I'd expect to find only bacteria-like in most places.
Try to track which team is publishing each type of finding, and follow only the ones that publish boring stuff like bobs of putty. Just cross out the teams publishing about crabs in Mars, because that unrealistic.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 36.9 ms ] threadWhat's the probability of a working group of space agencies having convincing evidence of extraterrestrial life, and slowly seeding mass media with these articles to create a soft landing for the definitive announcement?
At this point, I think that's a pretty high probability.
The fungus-like and lichen-like things may be some weird association of bacterias-like.
From the article:
> Scientists believe they have spotted fossilised [...], shrimp, crabs, sea spiders, scorpions and a translucent millipede in photos of the planet
These animals, ... they need a lot of steps to evolve, because they need a hard exoskeleton and a neural system, and probably a blood system and surelly oxygen to burn the food fast enough, so some other thing must have developed photosynthesis before. It's not clear that it's possible to develop muscles or neurons without mitochondria, that are also difficult because it must evolve as an isolated entity, and then the ancient cell must reorganize as a eukariota-like and absorb the mitochondria.
Take a looks at the graph at the top right of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_evolutionary_h...
Those steps are difficult. We are probably lucky. I'd expect to find only bacteria-like in most places.
Try to track which team is publishing each type of finding, and follow only the ones that publish boring stuff like bobs of putty. Just cross out the teams publishing about crabs in Mars, because that unrealistic.