NFUN

When I was alt-tabbing back to this thread I read the topic title as "JWST: it's dead!" and I about had a heart attack

That's a good question with a very interesting answer! The fee for this information is 120,000 Credits.

let's not

so it's a good trade to destroy the planet which we are adapted to survive on in order to scrape by on a planet that's hostile to us?

Obscure?

Foundation, Wheel of Time, final Expanse Book... if the next GoT or Kingkiller released this year that'd round off the bingo

No

Zero, but he was aware of the lizard people, as well as being a personal guest of honor to the Edenites living inside the hollow Earth

This. This is a huge unfounded assumption. Us having no idea the characteristics of the great filter is why the idea has proven so compelling. If we find that the filter is after the advent of life, epistemologically we still have no idea if the filter lies before or ahead of our current technological development as a species. We just know that it's after the advent of life. Now, perhaps we have somehow already narrowed down the terms of the Drake equation and know it's either before life develops or after where we are, then this would be meaningfully helpful. Otherwise... wait, you're getting it backwards again. If you're being fast and loose with logic you might intuit that because you've eliminated some terms of the equation (those happening at or before biogenesis), the odds of the remaining terms being the filter is higher... which includes the term after intelligent life develops, ie, where we are now. This is "not even wrong" territory! Like, the rest of your post is incomprehensible. You subscribe to the idea of a great filter, one requirement that leads to advanced life being apparently uncommon in the galaxy... and then say that it'd be "incredible" if there was one filter much more difficult than the others! All I can think to say to the rest of your post is to look up how long humans have been around vs how long life on Earth has been around

just follow the example of any media that has this. Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner, Star Control, etc. Sure, they triedtried to wipe out humans, but their failure passes your condition!

There are some areas where it's negligible to non-existent IIRC, as well as parts of the McMurdo dry valleys

The "cold" here is above freezing, and they use hydrocarbons are food; they didn't base their entire biochemistry on them. There is a big big big big big big big difference between that and living on Titan. It's like pointing out that some people can hold their breath for ten minutes, so maybe with enough training they could live on the Moon.

If most of what we find is basic life, we don't know if we can't find intelligent life because the filter is that it's difficult to develop or if it's that intelligent life blows itself up eventually after getting the technology to do so. Merely finding basic life everywhere means the filter lies after the development of life; you're making a huge unfounded and unvoiced assumption to say otherwise And if this happened with Mars, we're back to a datapoint of one and have no more idea of how common life is than we do now, which was exactly my point. If we find life on Europa, suddenly a single biogenesis event in the solar system looks much less likely. If we find life on Titan, it's impossible. You again heroically missed my point. If we find life on Mars, life as we know it is still likely life as we know it. You have to see that it'd be insane to posit that life on Mars is evidence that there'd be life on the Sun, and it'd be nearly as crazy to say it's evidence of life on Titan. To say it exists in either place now is pure speculation, and life as we know it absolutely could not survive on Titan.

Earth is one data point, and the question isn't "is it too extreme for life to exist? ", it's "is it hospitable to life developing in the first place?". We already know life is tenacious, and if we only cared about whether it could survive on Mars, we wouldn't be worried about contamination. If Mars has life that came from Earth, that says nothing. If Mars has life that didn't come from Earth, that says life perhaps readily forms on Earth-like planets. It does not say that life can form under miles of ice or in a non-polar environment; may as well say life can live on the Sun with your logic

If there is/was life on Mars, it likely just tells us that there was life on Earth and Mars. No other body is really comparable except maybe ancient Venus, and even that is unlikely. Maybe you could get a little more optimistic if you could be sure that life evolved independently, but it's still not too much better than the data point of one that we have unless it's completely different somehow. Only Titan would really tell us with confidence that life is almost assuredly common in the universe, since it'd be by necessity reliant on a totally alien biochemistry and we'd know both that it had unique origins and that there are multiple pathways to life.

didn't we already have this exact scenario?

given how it was phrased, he could just as easily meant that the odds of such a mutation having occurred to be those odds, not the odds of a single bacterium to have such a mutation in... some time frame in the attorney's mind. The "expert" was ambiguous, but the attorney made a few assumptions instead of asking for clarification. of course, you may have been paraphrasing, but the wording you have was what I was referring to edit: actually, given how the "expert" gave a timeframe, my alternate interpretation is more reasonable than the attorney's assumption

it sounds like the attorney here was being deliberately obtuse tbqh

Eris was once the minor planet discovered further away than any other. Then they discovered one even farther out... which was named "FarOut". Then they discovered one even farther out than that... which was named "FarFarOut"

this is a pretzel of logic

I'm stoked

it's the core

isnt the sun a star with a white dwarf at its core, along with almost all other stars?

The climax of Angels and Demons. Wow.