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Jellyfish-like aliens exist.

Did The Telegraph just make a serious scientist into a crank by twisting her words and/or taking them out of context?
 
That is a good catch. For many like me who were unaware of her work, this article could give them the impression that she is nuts. Looking deeper, I see that she is giving an alternative to the green alien idea, because of her work with silicon. I am interested to see her ebook when it comes out.
 
Vortigern99 said:
The headline does not match the contents of the article. Nowhere does she say they exist.
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There's that attempt at sensationalism again. As one other poster pointed out in another thread, perhaps the writer doesn't decide what the headlines are. The body of the story could go either way, with sentences like "she also believes as many as four intelligent extraterrestrial civilisations could exist in our galaxy, the Milky Way. But they are so far away it is unlikely we will ever meet them."
 
A potentially interesting article ruined by sensationalism. Sad. Speculation about what non-Earth-like life could look like is always interesting; however, it seems we have to keep reminding publishers of that word "speculation".
 
It's starting to seem like media outlets are purposefully posting scientific articles which make science look uncertain and fallible.
 
Halfcentaur said:
It's starting to seem like media outlets are purposefully posting scientific articles which make science look uncertain and fallible.
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Well I don't see what the purpose of.....

OMG, it is all clear to me now. How long do you think they will keep this up before phase II, where they start referring to all these articles and convince the public to change the curriculum to creationism? :jaw-dropp
 
Careyp74 said:
Well I don't see what the purpose of.....

OMG, it is all clear to me now. How long do you think they will keep this up before phase II, where they start referring to all these articles and convince the public to change the curriculum to creationism? :jaw-dropp
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The purpose is to get more people to click the links to their articles.
 
What a ridiculous headline. If jellyfish-like aliens do exist I'll bet they can write a better article than that.

It's interesting to speculate on whether different forms of life exist but I'm also interested in whether different... and this is the problem, there's no word for it... different material arrangements exist.

What I mean is, we can examine as much dust and rock and gas as we like and I think I'm right in saying there is not yet any defined path between this non-life and what we call life. We can take life as a starting point and make some guesses about how it arose from non-life, but if we start with non-life and put the concept of life out of our minds there's no way we could predict it. This being so, why couldn't there be something else? Nothing remotely woo or spooky, just another aspect of matter that's as different from a rock and a human as the human is from the rock. Maybe dark matter is a case in point, who knows?
 
Careyp74 said:
That is the purpose to sensationalism in general.
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Yeah, so? Currently its popular as sensationalism to imply that science is wishy washy. It's a recent addition to subjects that are currently employed in sensationalist tactics.
 
baron said:
It's interesting to speculate on whether different forms of life exist but I'm also interested in whether different... and this is the problem, there's no word for it... different material arrangements exist.
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Sure, it's an interesting idea, but highly speculative. Is a silicon-based replicator even possible? We've never seen one, despite the presence of plenty of silicon on Earth.
 
Puppycow said:
Sure, it's an interesting idea, but highly speculative. Is a silicon-based replicator even possible? We've never seen one, despite the presence of plenty of silicon on Earth.
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I suspect that once on type of replicator got going, it would outcompete (or at least fatally disturb) the early stages of another type.

I think that a bigger problem for silicon-based life is that while silicon may have the same valency as carbon, it doesn't have the same capacity for stable double bonds, so the range of potential molecular structures available is far more limited.
 
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Mojo said:
I think that a bigger problem for silicon-based life is that while silicon may have the same valency as carbon, it doesn't have the same capacity for stable double bonds, so the range of potential molecular structures available is far more limited.
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There are a few other problems with silicon as well. The most promising alternative to carbon that I've read so far is a boron-ammonia system in a high-pressure/low temperature environment. Some hurdles there as well, but nearly as many as for silicon-based chemistry.
 
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