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NASA News Conference 12/2 This could be something big
Saiga
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http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_M10-167_Astrobiology.htmlNASA wrote:MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-167
NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2
WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.
The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency's website at http://www.nasa.gov.
Participants are:
- Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington
- Felisa Wolfe-Simon, NASA astrobiology research fellow, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif.
- Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
- Steven Benner, distinguished fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Gainesville, Fla.
- James Elser, professor, Arizona State University, Tempe
Media representatives may attend the conference or ask questions by phone or from participating NASA locations. To obtain dial-in information, journalists must send their name, affiliation and telephone number to Steve Cole at stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov or call 202-358-0918 by noon Dec. 2.
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My money is on tribbles.
Jeff Goldblum intercepted a signal, he's going to tell us all about it.
What if they intercepted a message from beyond the stars that they were able to decode, which revealed a picture of an alien species
Anything more than this and the nerds wouldnt be allowed to make the announcement.
Unless they are using the time to confirm, double confirm, and triple confirm their findings because of the extreme gravity of the findings themselves
Even if it was "just" life on another planet, I don't think they could wait three days for a press conference. Nerds would be too giddy over it to keep it a secret.
I don’t generally like to talk about NASA press conferences before they happen because I don’t want to promote baseless rumor-mongering. In this case, though, I feel I have to write something to prevent speculation! Here’s the scoop: NASA released the news that a press conference will be held on Thursday at 14:00 ET, saying that the conference will "discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life."
That, of course, set everyone speculating. The very popular news site Kottke.org actually has a decent line of evidence on the topic of the conference, though a sensational headline of "Has NASA discovered extraterrestrial life?" Gawker has a post up about this as well, and social networks like reddit have a lot of people talking, too. Other examples abound.
So what’s the press conference about? I don’t know, to be honest, beyond what’s in the announcement. The scientists on the panel are interesting, including noted astrobiologists and geologists who work on solar system objects like Mars and Titan. So this is most likely going to be something about conditions on another moon or planet conducive for life.
Of course, the speculation is that NASA will announce the discovery for life. Maybe. I can’t rule that out, but it seems really unlikely; I don’t think they would announce it in this way. It would’ve been under tighter wraps, or one thing. It’s more likely they’ve found a new way life can exist and that evidence for these conditions exists on other worlds. But without more info, I won’t speculate any farther than that.
As for the public reaction, well, we’ve seen this type of thing before. Just last June, JPL had a press release about a surprising lack of acetylene in Titan’s atmosphere, with the title "What Is Consuming Hydrogen & Acetylene on Titan?" That sparked vast speculation, and even though the press release was clear enough it was misleadingly reported as NASA finding signs of life on Titan. It got so silly that I wound up writing a post about it, and a NASA scientist went so far as to write an article to clear up the rumors of life on Titan.
I can’t really blame NASA, the press outlets, or the public about this. When scientists have newsworthy findings that are published in a journal, there may be a press conference about them. But some journals have embargoes; they don’t want the news released until the issue is published. Fair enough. So NASA schedules a press conference for the time the issue publishes, and sends out a notice to the press about it. I got just such an email for this one, for example. They have to say something in the email so the press can decide whether to cover it or not, and NASA doesn’t want give too much away. So they give some minimal line about findings that’ll have an impact on the search for life, and those of us who’ve dealt with it before know what that means.
But the public is naturally more inclined to interpret that line as NASA having found life, or at least solid evidence of it. That’s not surprising at all. But it can lead to "news letdown", where the reality is something less than the speculation. And that leads to news fatigue, which is worse. If people keep expecting really exciting news and don’t get it, well, there you go.
I don’t want to blame anyone, but I do sometimes wish the press folks at NASA were more aware of what kind of cascade a line like that provokes (like the one from a few weeks ago which said it was about "an exceptional object in our cosmic neighborhood" but it turned out to be a supernova/black hole 50 million light years away). When announcements like these go public, it’s bound to be disappointing when the actual news gets out and it’s not a black hole right next door or actual life on Mars. And that’s too bad, because the news is usually pretty interesting and scientifically exciting. As soon as I got this latest announcement, my first flood of thoughts literally were: "Sounds like cool news/I bet there will be tons of over-the-top speculation/I hope people aren’t disappointed when the real news comes out/I wonder if I’ll have to make a post a couple of days before to cool off rumors?"
That last one wouldn’t win me Randi’s million bucks, unfortunately, even though you’re reading the outcome of it.
Anyway, I’m not sure what can be done about this type of thing, though. As I laid out above, the press needs to know in advance about news items, but how do you do it in such a way that it doesn’t spark wild speculation?
Note that NASA posts these announcements on their site, as they should. Maybe just a more careful wording would help. I’m open to suggestions. Seriously: if anyone has good ideas, I’m planning on sending a note to the press division at NASA about this.
And as to this next conference on Thursday, stay tuned. I’ll be on the phone listening in, as will my colleagues at other astronomy news sites. I’m sure there will be plenty of coverage of the actual story once we get the real information.
I am NOT going to get my self set up for a letdown. I will not sell all my belongings to barter a ride to the closest concentration of blue-skinned space bitches.
The nerds really need a better PR department.
Depends.
Is it sexy, and can we have sex with it?
twitch.tv/Taramoor
@TaramoorPlays
Taramoor on Youtube
I think that is exactly what we dont need to do.
We can barely make it into orbit of our own planet, What chance do we have if our constant HEY HEY ALIENS LOOK OVER HERE HEY HEY LOOK LOOK AT US LOOK AT US GOD DAMN YOU to the stars draws the attention of some malevolent civilization that would like nothing more than to have the primitive ape men as slaves, or as burning ash.
Apparently, some journalist says he's seen the paper, and it's not about aliens.
The page I provided a link to seems to conclude, due to the participants' recent papers, that it's about how life could use arsenic instead of phosphorus.
If they are advanced enough to have a space fairing empire chances are they've had more time than humanity to figure out how to get somewhere within a reasonable time frame.
basically what I'm saying is, when it comes to extra-terrestrial extra-solar life, We need to keep ourselves hidden at least until we have colonies on other extra-solar planets so a malevolent force wouldn't be able to wipe out humanity in one fell swoop.
Please. Have you learned nothing from science fiction?
If we wait till we have our own space empire, we will just get dragged into a morally gray, decades long war of attrition with no clear winner.
If we get them to invade us now, sure, lots of people might die, but their entire race will be wiped out by our plucky rag-tag resistance movement, and we will plunder their technology leading to a new golden age.
Why would we want extraterrestrial life to find us?
Why does everything assume extra terrestrial life will be benevolent.
I'm sure that's what the Aztecs thought.
So what's the deal with the embargo? I don't know why but that part stuck out at me more than anything else.
Hopefully this is something awesome, would be a big letdown to me to have this buildup then find out they may have found a molecule that may have been part of a hypothetical life form.
Awesome like it was for Native Americans when Europeans found them?
Edit: damn it Deebaser
But the smart thing to do would be to send us infected blankets so they can just come take whatever they want at their leisure.
It would take a minimum of decades to get here even assuming near light speed travel.
Haven't we been sending out "HEY ALIENS WE'RE ON EARTH COME FIND US" messages out at random for decades?
I mean, personally I think there's zero chance that any of them were picked up, but if they WERE picked up by extraterrestrials who are not very nice, it wouldn't make much sense for them to tell us "Hey dudes, we're on our way, see you in a hundred years." They'd just show up.
And after decades, they would get here and do what? Raping us for natural resources would be way to costly, and they would be very unlikely to be able to survive on this planet.
orbital bombardment followed by collection and processing of all our neatly extracted and purified resources would hardly be hard.
No, what they'll really want from us is to eat our flesh. We are delicious!
Or maybe they just want suitable lands for colonies. Good thing we're fucking ours up.