Posted inAstrobiology Life Philosophy
Why the term ‘life’ is useless in astrobiology
A post to make you laugh and then perhaps think about the meaninglessness of ‘life’ as a scientific term.
Posted inAstrobiology Single Scoops
NASA’s “Standards” White Paper. Does NASA’s drive for consensus make young scientists susceptible to being trampled by mastodons?
Survival in the Ice Age required youth who were able to balance instruction from their elders with a rebellious streak sufficient to reject their instructions when survival required adaptation. Does NASA's need for consensus upset this balance?
Posted inAstrobiology Life Philosophy
Why astrobiologists should NOT get rid of the term ‘life’
Carol Cleland rebuts Spacek's argument about uselessness of the term 'life' to astrobiologists. According to her 'life' is useful despite our inability to define it.
Posted inAstrobiology Life
Cleland & Grinspoon response to Benner: Do synthetic microbes provide another example of life?
The NfoLD's White Paper on Standards of Evidence in Life Detection opened a discussion on this blog. In this piece Carol Cleland and David Grinspoon tear down Benner's "second example" of life.
Posted inAstrobiology Life Origin of Life
Finding Life, the Universal Way
Lee Cronin's contribution to our ongoing discussion about the universal agnostic biosignatures: The assembly theory is the key.
Posted inAstrobiology Life on Mars NASA
How to Search for Life on Mars
This post provides additional discussion and references for How to Search for Life on Mars (Robert Zubrin, Steven Benner, and Jan Spacek, submitted to Scientific American)
Posted inAstrobiology Synthetic Biology
But We Have More Than One Example …
Carol despairs of having truly agnostic biosignatures to detect alien life, as it is impossible to extrapolate from the one example of life that we know. But that is the gift of synthetic biology, inductive logic, and reductionism. We induce agnostic biosignatures by understanding the chemistry required for biology.
Posted inAstrobiology Life
The Problem with Agnostic Biosignatures
Agnostic criteria, which are currently very popular among NASA scientists, are not truly agnostic and share many of the same problems with a definitional approach for searching for unfamiliar forms of life.
Posted inAstrobiology Life
Grave Expectations
The problem with trying to codify an official protocol for recognizing biosignatures:
We can try to devise rules for how detecting alien life should unfold, but E.T. might not play along.
Posted inAstrobiology NASA
Is ignorance bliss? NASA’s NfoLD Workshop
Cite as: Benner, S. A. (2022) "Is ignorance bliss? NASA’s NfoLD Workshop". Primordial Scoop, e20220403. https://doi.org/10.52400/TMUG1175 One approach to find new ways to solve an old problem begins by throwing…
Posted inAstrobiology Life NASA
2022 State of NASA Address: Astrobiology at NASA no longer looks for life on Mars
NASA gave up on looking for life on Mars, while planning to irreversibly biologically contaminate its surface. It is now up to private philanthropists to support life searching missions, while Mars is still biologically pristine. We know how to do it.
Posted inAstrobiology NASA
Science traceability matrices. Organized thinking, or organized biases?
NASA's workshop this week seeks to use STMs to speed the creation of new ideas to guide missions to detect life in the Solar System. But do STMs simply provide a veneer of respectability to old ideas, blocking the emergence of the new?