Atheist Ireland Forum

NASA has called a press conference for this Thursday at 2 pm EST.

Apparently, they haven't found ET life, rather evidence for life on Saturn's moon, Titan.

You can read it here at NASA, Fox News (apologies!), PCWORLD, and at Gawker

Personally, I can't help but get the feeling that NASA may be making a big thing of something small, especially given the worldwide recession they may be fearful of US Government cuts. But with an announcement like this concerning ET life, they might hope for fairer cut.

We'll know Thursday I suppose...

NASA are attention whores when it comes to making announcements, they are just pulling their usual stunt for maximizing media coverage when they make the announcement.

To be fair they probably have to do this to ensure they get any attention to what will be really amazing science.

Starts With a Bang is an astronomy blog I follow regularly and he wrote an interesting piece on this announcement, worth a read. He's not speculating on what he thinks the announcement will be, but its an easy to understand background piece on the "building blocks" in space.

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang ... he_bui.php

I'd hazard a guess that it in some way relates to the evidence for life on Titan announced back in June.

Whats 2pm EST in real time?

I would be surprised if it has anything to do with Titan when they announce it. It is just as likely that they are all excited about the life in Yellowstone Park in the arsenic pools and what this means for the probability of finding life on other planets and the number of planets we previously estimated as potentially life supporting.

Not that that is not exciting stuff too. It is massively exciting, just like the recent discovery of life based on chemosynthesis rather than photosynthesis.

All guess work of course, I await agog to hear what it really is about. I hope it IS titan because even the most exciting finds here on earth will still not capture the public imagination being as it is only hear on earth.

And it's an arsenic life-form from...... earth.

Wired.com report

Phil Plait's anaysis

Ed Yong's analysis

I think we'll all agree though that it's still pretty exciting news...

And on the 4.54 Billionth day, God created arsenic life.

+1 to AZG

Another interesting point is raised at science blog The Loom :

Had to post this: http://xkcd.com/829/

It is interesting to look at how this story is covered in various media out there. In the spirit of the sensationalist style of attention seeking by NASA's press office, a lot of slightly misleading stuff is being bandied about.

It is not actually "re-writing textbooks"... in spite of what the rather over-excitable Michio Kaku said. It is not even an example of natural evolution, in as much as these bacteria are not found in the wild, but are a product of a lab experiment. They are not even arsenic-based as many articles suggested. They have evolved to eat arsenic and use it in place of phosphorus and are able to incorporate it into their DNA-building processes. (Although as the Loom article I linked to above points out, this needs to be reproduced still, it's not 100% proven).

See what Richard Dawkins says here and PZ Myers says here.

It kind of bugs me that a genuinely important science institution like NASA uses hype to promote interest in a project that while it is very interesting is not really quite what it is being made out to be. Maybe the hype will be good in that it gets the message to the public that life can exist in extreme conditions and doesn't have to necessarily have to be like us chemically. But this particular experiment has not really shown anything dramatically new, at least not new in the way the hype would lead you to believe. There is already a large body of literature on extremophiles and this life-form is based on carbon like the rest of us. Arsenic or silicon based life might very well be possible, but this isn't "news" either.

Maybe this sort of media-circus style release does no harm, but I fear that it might turn some people off as over and over again this great so-called earth-shattering discoveries turn out to be over-hyped oversell of an interesting but not that dramatic piece of research (remember Ida from last year)?

I don't know about that.. it is pretty new that it incoperates it in the DNA and if it replicates DNA with the arsenic in it that means the whole metabolism is different. I would like to see this study a bit more detail and hope they publish it soon, So far I only find press releases. It should be up for peer review I presume or did they already do that?

edit: ok first read the links and then post.... Thanks for that link Ygern. Very interesting and the paper it self was in Dawkins post.

I can't stand that guy. He'll say anything to get his mug on tv. He's like a cheap, tacky, las vegas version of Carl Sagan.



I wouldn't be too had on them. Look at the culture that funds them. The USA is nothing but hype and NASA find themselves in a constant battle to keep their funding on a backdrop of funders who care more about religion and Britney Spears's latest hair cut than science.



Yeah I agree. It also leads to mainstream media mis-reporting just about ever science related story every published.

Larry Moran from excellent blog Sandwalk summarizes the problems with this announcement succinctly.



If anyone still has the stamina, there is a highly detailed analysis of the paper and its flaws here on the RRResearch blog.

a good critique here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWAYBgl69gw

Another damning blow: "This Paper Should Not Have Been Published" by Carl Zimmer

I still have to wonder: what on earth was NASA thinking when they decided to pump up the hype and blitz the media with claims that were on shaky ground at best? Why on earth didn't they run the paper past a few other biologists first? Not only is this paper not about arsenic-based life, they didn't even conclusively prove that the bacteria were incorporating it into their own chemistry.

Perhaps the general public doesn't care either way and has already forgotten the story. In fact the general public was probably rather mystified at the initial story anyway. But those that have followed this story are now probably feeling a little wary of scientists. Well done, NASA.