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A comment on NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's salty ocean. Parent comment

Re:NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's ... by sandworm101 on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @07:52AM (#41646290)
That's what it says today. Had Wikipedia been around in the 1800s it would have said that canals on Mars indicated an agricultural civilization. The point is that society has already processed the concept of alien life. We know how people will react because we can look to how they reacted in the past when scientists told them about alien life.

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

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Re:NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's ... by Mistletoe on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @08:00AM (#41646364)
Yes I remember children’s books I had as a child saying exactly this.
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Re:NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's ... by diggan on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @08:19AM (#41646530)
Finding something that "indicated" something is very different than "We went digging in Europa and found these alive creatures that look like Dolphins under the surface that live on Ammonia"

Society hasn't processed something we have no evidence of (yet), that doesn't make much sense. Ask "society" at large if they believe there are other species out there and most of them will say "I don't know" or "Probably not". In many places, religion is likely to be more believable to people than multi-cell life somewhere else than Earth.

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Re:NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's ... by shmeeed on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @10:32AM (#41647979)
That's an interesting take, but I'm not sold. It sounds a bit like claiming to be a family of firefighters because your grandpa participated in a drill once, passing along empty buckets.
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Re:NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's ... by nsxwolf on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @11:23AM (#41648508)
My impression was that it seemed like a big intriguing maybe, not something like a verified fact.
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Re:NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's ... by sandworm101 on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @11:29AM (#41648557)
A healthy chunk of the population believed, enough to impact national policies. Some of the first efforts at what we now call radio astronomy were attempts to listen for Mars signals. Just over a century ago "the big listen" saw large parts of the planet, including the military, turn off their transmitters in order to listen for Martians.
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