NASA finds Titan's lakes may be creating vesicles with primitive cell walls

Among other things, it contains details on what amphiphiles might actually be present on Titan, a very nice set of diagrams explaining their proposed process, and proposals for lab experiments to verify whether the process is possible. I've had a soft spot for the vesicle-first theory of abiogenesis since I first heard of it, so I hope someone runs the experiments. But as far as I can tell, this is all theoretical so far.

Once you have an enclosure you have potential for osmosis and other differentials across the boundary. It's not life Jim, but it's one hell of a building block/precursor.

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem on the topic of Ocean is Conscious.

It makes absolutely no sense that the code would precede the hardware, and the hardware needs shielding.

I.e.: they don’t carry high power microscopes because apparently there’s no room for one on a 900kg rover the size of a car.

But no traces of life were found ever.

If there is life on Mars, it is hidden underground in vulcanic active areas and alike and no mission we can do today, could conclude with certainty that there is no life on Mars. But we have been looking real hard.

But in german and no idea if it was ever translated, but I assume similar books exist in english.

They do though:

"The WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) is a reflight of the MAHLI (MArs Hand Lens Imager) that is a part of the Curiosity rover (Edgett et al., 2012). WATSON obtains full-color images from microscopic scales (∼13 μm/pixel) to infinity and is used for initial textural analysis of rock and regolith targets, as well as to assess potential proximity science targets and the safety of robotic arm activities (Edgett et al., 2012). The ACI (Autofocus Contextual Imager) is a fixed field, 10.1 μm/pixel resolution grayscale imager used to obtain best-focus and colocate laser spots with surface feature analyzed during SHERLOC spectroscopic investigations (Bhartia et al., 2021)."

From: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022EA00...

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseverance_(rover)#Instrumen...

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/scie...

10-13 μm per pixel is nowhere near good enough when a typical bacterium is 0.5 - 5.0 μm in size!

I remember the discussions around the mission plan for both Opportunity and Curiosity where NASA kept making "mumbly" noises about why they can't ship decent optics with these things.

Anything that would definitely eliminate (not just "potentially find") the presence of either life or water is never included. It's always omitted, for "reasons".

Water and life must forever remain possible things for the funding to keep flowing.

I don't object to this explanation of the world, but I reckon it's an uphill battle convincing people that all of the living natural world, and all of human history, their culture, their religions and their science and all the beliefs in-between had their origin in some electrostatic forces. I'm of the opinion that even well-informed people of science haven't had time to fully adjust their world-view during the handful of decades we have known this much.

A good enough microscope can easily tell the difference between life and non-life, especially in the presence of water. If it moves on its own, it is almost certainly alive!

Certain kinds of chromatographs can conclusively determine that no complex chemicals are present, the kind essential to life. I.e.: if only simple metal oxides and the like are present, then you have only a rock.

Water isn't an abstract possibility on Mars. It's a reality. They've found minerals that only form in water, they've found ice, they've observed erosion. We don't understand the hydrology of Mars but it isn't some kind of conspiracy. It's a laborious process, which they continue to chug away at.

Looking for life isn't the primary mission of Mars rovers. They're remote controlled geologists. The search for life really has nothing to do with funding for Mars missions. No one expects to find it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrombolite

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spongiostromata

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oncolite

They are still arguing over this one three decades later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7905

" Inorganic precipitation processes are capable of producing a wide range of morphological outputs. This range includes shapes with both crystallographic and non-crystallographic symmetry elements. Among the latter, morphologies that mimic primitive living organisms are easily obtained under different physico-chemical conditions including those that are geochemically plausible. The application of this information to the problem of deciphering primitive life on the early Earth and Mars is discussed. It is concluded that morphology cannot be used unambiguously as a tool for primitive life detection. "

https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of...

NASA (and also the Soviet Union and ESA) have repeatedly designed Mars sample return missions, but have not done them for budgetary reasons; it would be tremendously difficult and expensive.

Here's the current one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA-ESA_Mars_Sample_Return - however, given that it was hitting funding problems even _before_ ol' minihands gutted NASA funding, it seems destined to become yet another NASA/ESA canceled program (there's a bit of a history of ambitious NASA/ESA collaborations which die when one side or the other pulls the budgetary plug; JWST was likely lucky to escape this fate, say).

This puts it in a particularly weird place, as the earth return section is already built and due to launch on an Ariane 6 in two years (it will then proceed, slowly, to Mars using an ion drive, and await the lander and Mars launcher, which will presumably never arrive because budgets).

It’s all a case of dynamic equilibrium in complex systems and emergence. Finality doesn’t really come into it.

Physics very much matters to matter.

For development of any information storage systems made of molecules, there must be a supportive development environment.

To even start the process of doing anything like what we see happening in a cell, homeostasis must be achieved first, and not inelegantly, its not good enough to have a complete cell wall if it has no ports for entry and exit of nutrients and waste product, thats also known as a coffin.

Both the walls and the gates and the information / physical systems to reliably exploit those features must be present at the same time to enable abiogenesis.

We know so little about this, that we can't even begin to estimate the probabilities. It seems like other things are known potential dangers to us, no?

This isn't some crackpot theory, they've been having congressional hearings about it and congresspeople say it's real. You can think they are or aren't credible or being lied to, but, if congresspeople are part of or victims of some sort of psy-op with vague parameters and goals, our entire system of government is basically forfeit.

I realize this is difficult to deal with but it's a pretty well-established fact at this point.

We don't need to go anywhere for this information.

And you're asserting that this cannot possibly be the case? "For that which must not be, cannot be"?

I'd love to know more (even your mundane explanation of "there's a psy-op on congresspeople for some reason" - if so, why?) but it's been decided that we're not allowed.

One problem is that we haven't gotten a "UAP Snowden". Such a person has seen a serious chilling effect.

Thought it could be a useful precision.

I think I'd pick this one as being the simplest and most likely explanation if my other options are "psy-op[s] with vague parameters" and non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us. Congress people believing falsehoods is nothing new.

It's a good read, and I still think about the concept of origin of life in these terms every now and then.

We unlocked the secrets of the atom and gained within it the capability of ending all life on earth trivially. Other secrets being locked behind physics isn't a radical speculation. In fact, it's surprising that we haven't really seen any since.

Congresspeople also say Jewish space lasers are a thing.

> You can think they are or aren't credible or being lied to

Yes, I do. The current GOP party is not interested in any way in scientific fact.

We already know major GOP leaders court votes by pushing absurd ideas that are rejected by the scientific establishment. "Injecting bleach can cure Covid" is one from the highest-ranking GOP elected official. "No vaccines are safe" is from a top health official.

If you play around with soap bubbles carefully you can observe phenomena like this.

<looks at America's current government>

Yep, that seems accurate. Like it or not, the current US government is full of crackpot theories.

The "evidence" of "aliens" inevitably turns out to be blurry footage where people with bias tell you what you're supposed to think it is.

As for the U.S. Congress, you're talking about a body that has been avoiding it's own responsibilities for decades, particularly so right now. Invoking "Congressional hearings" here is an appeal to an unqualified authority. (Congressional representatives presumably has some experience with laws. I do not believe they are qualified for video forensics.)

Technically, a one-foot diameter dog's vomit slime mold is a single cell.

If that's so, I can produce a sample of material from the center of the Amazon rain forest that will conclusively prove to you that Earth is also lifeless.

To be fair, the conditions that were ubiquitous on Earth when life first formed are now extraordinarily rare, if they exist anywhere at all on the planet.

I'm very prepared to look at evidence of aliens visiting Earth, but it better be damned good evidence.

you should go work for spacex and show them how to do the sample return. they've thought about it for at least a decade now and haven't yet. so you can go there and show them how since it's so easy. you'll be millionaire real quick i promise.

Have you watched a congressional hearing? They serve primarily as evidence that politicians like to hear themselves speak.

Except there is no "logic" to thinking a leak just hasn't happened "yet".

There's no "logic" to thinking that the absence of a leak implies there is information to be leaked.

Note that my post was designed to be agnostic. Leaking a psy-op, or leaking the extensive, close-up details of UAP phenomena which we do have (president Obama himself said there are confirmed unknown phenomena, taking him at his word on this topic), is still a Snowden style leak, especially if they continue to do this dog and pony show in congress and elsewhere.

There's also not a nuclear physics Snowden, or F-47 Snowden, do you think there's nothing to leak?

I don't really get excited for theoretical predictions like this - I want experimental observations!

There might be, but even if there was, a leak in those fields would still have no bearing on whether or not there are actual things to leak regarding UAPs.

Maybe the info is simply not public because publishing it would let the very likely other humans responsible for said UAPs know that we do and don't know what they're up to.

And it could also be that that info on UAPs isn't leaked because (unlike the Snowden leaks), they aren't actually relevant to Americans and to their liberties, and so the people who have access to that info see no point in leaking it.

The available-to-me evidence suggests that technologically advanced species are exceedingly rare, and the only such species we're aware of emits an overwhelming number of artifacts that would serve as evidence for its existence, so it would be very much not mundane to discover that another one has been living under our noses this whole time.

I am not making a truth claim here, as in "it's definitively untrue that there are non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us," I'm just arguing that it's an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence - grainy footage and hearsay isn't enough for me.

What isn't in contention is that there are unexplained phenomena to varying levels of description (president Obama confirmed the lowest level of description, i.e. that they exist and that they cannot be definitively explained).

A common additive to this contention is that these phenomena have intelligence and motives. You needent accept this, in fact I encourage you to not trivially accept it, but there is growing evidence that it is true. Is this a complete mind-fuck? Yes. Does that 'matter' in any real sense of the term? No, not really.

An additionally common follow-on from here is that the motives of the aforementioned intelligence aren't good and we cannot counter them using our technology, and this justifies the veil of secrecy. A lot of people seem very convinced by this. I can plausibly come up with some scenarios where this might be true, i.e. scenarios where knowledge would completely collapse the government, but I still think I'd prefer to have the information than not.

Anyways, the very concept you're highlighting is actually what is in the accepted UAP record. Theories, inconclusive evidence as to origin.

I have a feeling that the actual phenomenon relates to physics and the mystery of dark matter, and it's also probably a still very very small part of an even infinitely more complex, "higher" noumenal world, but I'm just speculating.

This is precisely the point. You aren't aware of these mysteries, despite the earnest attempts of many to bring them to your direct attention.

There is no longer any attempt to hide the mysteries categorically, so this lack of information is now on you.

>I am not making a truth claim here, as in "it's definitively untrue that there are non-human intelligences sharing the planet with us," I'm just arguing that it's an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence - grainy footage and hearsay isn't enough for me.

Yes, that's why the correct scenario is wide declassification of the premises that are asserted in this regard, i.e. to make general knowledge of unidentifiable phenomena which have no definitive known cause or origin, communication with these entities, capture of their technology, etc. All of these things could be explained by various competing theories, some of them "simple" (funny how Occam's razor is always just what I prefer), but this information, which has been trickling out from credible sources, needs to be brought into the public space and then we get to decide what it implies or doesn't imply.

Right now there is a deliberate veil of secrecy and serious mysteries that aren't denied by anybody serious. They definitively exist.

These phenomena have been documented, in-depth, for many, many decades. Credible sources note that certain materials and devices (I don't want to use the term 'craft') have been in government possession for going on 90 years, since the end of WW2. The notion that some country had achieved technical supremacy such that we still find their technology unidentifiable for 90 years isn't tenable.

Everyone involved in what the public knows about this are largely credible people who have undergone a classification briefing of what information they have, carefully vetting what they're able to share. They seem to feel that this topic is relevant to Americans and their civil liberties, they simply don't want to go to jail. I would tend to agree with these people.

Now, the government can actually just say whatever Dave Grusch knows about these entities can be declassified. Just say, "Dave is not bound by classification for any claims relating to contact with entities, deals with entities, specific information about entities, etc." This would instantly discredit his claims, because he'd be free to make outlandish and absurd claims without being able to hide behind the veil of "it's classified, we have to discuss this in a SCIF".

If they don't exist, what's the problem? This is a man we know was at the highest levels of the actual stuff he's talking about. He's a credible source. If he's making outlandish claims, just lift the veil of secrecy.

Of course they don't do that because it is classified.

They're not mutually exclusive. You could have various kinds of autocatalytic sets of molecules, including RNA, inside and outside lipid vesicles, and some of them might have re-produced better than others. Anything that could have happened in an open ocean of nuleotides and amino acids could also take place within a lipid vesicle, just that within some vesicle maybe the right concentrations of molecules had at some point emerged that could more easily reproduce itself than in the open ocean where the particular autocatalytic set could be washed away by the surrounding molecular chaos.

Does that mean the most common forms of intelligent life in the universe may be very small too? Or is there a minimum body size required for "intelligence"?

OK, I get that you're a cryptozoology/"aliens walk among us!" kinda person, but...

A lack of evidence against a theory is never evidence for the theory. It's very hard to prove a negative.

So, by one POTUS admitting that we don't already know everything about everything, that proves aliens are here and they look like little grayskinned ET's?

I have seen that one, as it happens. I am not an expert, but it looks to me like the asserted Hellfire hits a cruise missile and knocks some pieces off as the Hellfire fails to detonate, and the cruise missile then course corrects from getting knocked around.

The best way to determine that would be to have a number of experts independently assess the footage without being primed as to its provenance. A presentation by someone who is already convinced it's aliens to some congresscritters in need of a distraction is hardly that.

I would encourage people to stake their life on it, let's put it that way.

You're seeing a grainy video for a reason. It would be trivial for you to have every piece of data related to an incident but if you did, that might be problematic for multiple reasons, one of them being it would expose capability. Usually, multi-million dollar missiles aren't used on unknown targets with unknown capabilities for unknown reasons. Thus, more information is required.

So, where are we left? With you demanding inaccessible information to draw a conclusion. Given that you can't have it, you're essentially just throwing your hands up and saying "well, I guess we can't know". Fine, but untrue, as we can simply demand to know.

That is what people are doing. If you're at all concerned by any of this, you should be in this camp as well.

Regarding "distraction", how is this a "good" distraction if it's not a widely credibly held position and can clearly damage your reputation? This is just a nonsense idea. There's no reason to believe these people are lying.

If the research doesn't interest or impress you, there's plenty of other articles.

It sounds to me like you and I see the same expansive hole where the evidence should be. My preference would be to say "show me a claim without a hole or stop wasting my time," you appear to assume that the evidence exists - because someone "credible" said it's so - and demand that the hole be filled immediately.

To claim there exists a grand conspiracy and web of well-kept secrets, ironically, is to try to explain away the first substanceless claim with a new one.

Nobody denies David Grusch is exactly who he says he is with the access he says he had. His lawyer was the former inspector general of the intelligence community for God's sake.

I find "conspiracies can't be true" a tiresome point. Any secret is a conspiracy and many are kept. Are the technical details of the F-47 or nuclear physics not true because these secrets have been kept? Nuclear physics have been classified and protected for going on 90 years now.

You can transform your claim to accommodate this, but it becomes suspicious.

Why would "things that are most likely drones" moving with intent be a "mind fuck"? We see it every day in the trenches of Ukraine.

If I wanted to make a compelling argument for my conspiracy theory, I would not only want to explain how the government has managed to keep this profound secret about unicorns, I'd want to to explain why it was theirs to keep in the first place. In a world with many sovereign nations with a vast array of publicly and privately-funded research institutions, camera-toting citizens, security cameras, wildlife cameras, etc., why is the U.S. government holding all of the compelling evidence? Or is not just the U.S.? Maybe we explain this with more conspiracies? Or maybe one really big conspiracy? Do you think it's likely that the government could keep narwhals a secret?

I haven't/wouldn't make any claims about David Grusch being who he says is, I haven't intentionally made any truth claims at all here; that said, whatever titles Grusch formerly held, and whatever title his lawyers formerly held, those titles don't, in my view, grant him credibility in perpetuity, maybe one could argue that they didn't grant much in the first place. The same goes for members of Congress. Should we believe Marjorie Taylor Greene if she tells us "The Jews" are starting forest fires with their space lasers to serve their malicious globalist agendas, on the basis that she's a congresswoman?

If you or anyone else has evidence, I'd urge them to be agents of truth and go update Grusch's Wikipedia article, at the time of writing this it states: > No evidence supporting Grusch's UFO claims has been presented and they have been dismissed by multiple, independent experts.

Or, perhaps we go searching for explanations as to why Wikipedia or the news organizations it accepts citations from are mere puppets of the conspirators, but at that point, who's being tiresome?

2. Because you're a fan of Occam's razor, can you take your razor and say "Shucks, this guy Luis Elizondo was confirmed as a legitimate knowledgeable operator by former senate majority leader Harry Reid, a member of gang of eight, privy to the most classified intelligence in the United States, full stop, there isn't a higher position except for the president of the united states. This guy Dave Grusch has as his lawyer the former inspector general of the US intelligence communities. For some reason he's also outlining a scenario where we know about non human intelligences and they pose a serious existential threat to humanity, that's odd. Ah, well, can't be anything!"? The thing is, something deeply, deeply, deeply odd is going on and the shape of the leaks (something you should LOVE if you love Occam and 'debunking', because you've already predicted leaks in your no conspiracies modality) is consistent and absolutely disturbing, concerning, and a clear matter worthy of sustained attention. Why are all of these people at the highest level of our government talking about this? You're not at all concerned or curious, you're merely drifting through life, confident you passively have the answers? I find this incredible.

3. The US government hasn't kept the secret, as explicated. Just like the nuclear program, certain things have leaked.

4. If you continue to see mounting credible operators repeating the same story with absolutely no curiosity, no desire to know more, certainty that the entire thing is impossible or somehow debunked due to your meager cognitive abilities and patterns of thought that you don't even own, I don't know what to tell you. It's literally impossible for you to come across this information because you've immunized yourself to it. The fact that it's here and we're facing an overwhelming, nauseating story from the highest levels of government is worthy of serious consideration and we do not require your assessment to make that basic, obvious determination.

>If you or anyone else has evidence, I'd urge them to be agents of truth and go update Grusch's Wikipedia article, at the time of writing this it states: > No evidence supporting Grusch's UFO claims has been presented and they have been dismissed by multiple, independent experts.

I'd love to collect on this debt somehow when you're proven wrong in our lifetimes.

Did anyone even ask about larger radar tracks for this "UFO"?

A Hellfire masses less than 50kg. A Tomahawk cruise missile, for example, weighs over 1000kg. The impact is clearly glancing - the Hellfire retains much of its own speed.

Sorry, this is a thread on an internet forum, I'm afraid I don't owe you anything.

If you want to engage with the actual points I've endeavored to make, in good faith, instead of telling me how ignorant you think I am and doubling down on appeals to authority, I would gladly continue this conversation. For what it's worth: I'd love to see proof that you're right, sneaky non-human intelligences living and crashing known-physics defying spaceships in the shadows would be beyond interesting! However, I don't really feel like I can be "proven wrong" because I'm not really making claims here. You asserted something to be "basically fact", and I haven't told you that you're wrong, my argument was that your theories seem implausible, though possible.

Researcher: “with this new device we think we can attempt to create a gravity wave in the lab” Professor: “we should consider whether this might violate the 2028 embargo on dark forest beacon technology”