Fermi's Paradox

[Charles_McG]

So the story goes.

 

[Winston]

Complex organics like sugars and proteins can be "right or left handed." It's called chirality. Here on Earth, we use "right handed" versions of most things ( a somewhat arbitrary designation, since molecules can have chirality but they don't have hands!). It could just as easily have gone the other way, with the result being proteins and sugars being chemically identical otherwise, but incompatible with Earth life. Read here for more info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(chemistry)

Yes, and the Rosetta lander was supposed to test for that:

https://www.nature.com/news/philae-s-64-hours-of-comet-science-yield-rich-data-1.16374

"Shortly after touchdown, organic molecules were detected in samples of the comet’s surface, courtesy of COSAC, the Cometary Sampling and Composition experiment. It is designed to probe for such molecules and test whether their handedness, or chirality, matches with chemical signatures on Earth. But COSAC had to wait until the final hours of Philae’s battery life before attempting to probe the sub-surface because of fears that the drill action would cause the unanchored lander to tip over. After mission control finally gave the signal to bore down, Philae was able to send back data, which the COSAC team are now scouring for molecules, says co-investigator Uwe Meierhenrich, an analytical chemist at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis in France.

Low power meant that the Ptolemy instrument, which is designed to analyse chemicals and the relative abundance of isotopes, did not get a chance to study a sub-surface sample. But the team is cautiously optimistic about its surface measurements. If they are lucky, by comparison with data from Earth, both Ptolemy and COSAC could help to reveal whether comets brought substances to Earth that are necessary for life, such as amino acids and water. And like the magnetic measurements, Ptolemy could benefit from Philae’s cross-comet journey. “It’s a possibility that we got samples from at least two, possibly three, landing sites,” says Grady.

I can find nothing on any results via a Google search. Hopefully that just means they're still working on it.

 

[Pem Tech]

I have to say, I'm going to be a bit disappointed if our species finally gets it together enough to traverse the vast reaches of space, and all we find when we get there is a bunch of aliens sitting on their fat alien asses, playing Alien Grand Theft Auto and Alien Call of Duty and watching Alien Online Porn. We thought you were better than this, aliens!

 

[cherokeej]

This thread is hilarious. Thanks for the laugh, guys.