Life?

[Smivs]

NASA have a press conference sheduled for 2nd Dec to discuss an Astrobiological finding.

[Cody]

Hmm… interesting. I hope my connection is live, as I’m switching ISPs tomorrow.
They’ve assured me that there will no interruption to my service, but I have my doubts… we shall see.

[Commander McLane]

"... and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!"

[Cody]

Thanks McLane... I hadn't seen that in years.

[Commander McLane]

You're welcome.

And it's very nice that the Pythons have their own Youtube channel now. No danger anymore of content being removed (although I'm not sure whether that happened to Python content before; but it's generally happening on Youtube).

[Kaks]

Tsk, terrible thing, derailing threads!

Case in point:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiVOG199X2c

But yes, hopefully the press conference won't turn out to be a damp squib...

[Disembodied]

It's probably going to be somewhere in between "We've found some amino acids" and "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Zarg would like to say a few words" ... for preference I'm leaning towards the latter (although not so much if that bit begins "Tremble, puny humans!" or something similar).

[Smivs]

OMG, they might have discovered...

[Kaks]

Amino acids in nebulae is kind of old news, so I tend to think it should be a bit more than them finding some organic molecules...

[Cody]

Gleaned this from Nasa Watch:

Reliable sources within the Astrobiology community tell me that the announcement does indeed concern Arsenic-based biochemistry and the implications for the origin of life on Earth, how it may have happened more than once on our planet, and the implications for life arising elsewhere in the universe.

[Darkbee]

El-leee-ott

[ClymAngus]

Ooo they allow you to ask questions! Cool! This is the one I sent:

Given that the vast majority of the matter needed for galaxies to be "as they are" (eg gravitationally) is not visible (dark matter) and the founding moments of the universe involved a battle of annihilation between matter and antimatter. Might there possibly be a relationship between the two?

As in a product from that annihilation event that has left a hither too undetectable (yet gravitationally significant) particle/residue?

I realise that given the ratio of anti-matter to matter at the beginning of the universe and comparing it to the necessary dark matter needed to mirror "what we see" are fairly diverse but you know; laymen + ideas = dumb questions.

Thank you in advance.

Clym

[Commander McLane]

It's probably going to be somewhere in between "We've found some amino acids" and "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Zarg would like to say a few words" ... for preference I'm leaning towards the latter (although not so much if that bit begins "Eat bats, human disco poets!" or something similar).

Fixed that for you.

[drew]

Personally I reckon dark energy and dark matter don't actually exist and somewhere we've forgotten to carry a 2 during late night long multiplication.

Cheers,

Drew.

[snork]

Given that the vast majority of the matter needed for galaxies to be "as they are" (eg gravitationally) is not visible (dark matter) and the founding moments of the universe involved a battle of annihilation between matter and antimatter. Might there possibly be a relationship between the two?

As in a product from that annihilation event that has left a hither too undetectable (yet gravitationally significant) particle/residue?

I realise that given the ratio of anti-matter to matter at the beginning of the universe and comparing it to the necessary dark matter needed to mirror "what we see" are fairly diverse but you know; laymen + ideas = dumb questions.

But what does that have to do with exo-biology ?