It’s ultimately going to take multiple lines of evidence. Yes, there are compounds that we think are strong indicators of life; we don’t know how to explain them except for life. However, we can never rule out some other abiotic origin for that compound exists that we simply haven’t discovered yet. We don’t know what we don’t know. Abundant life however is likely to cause all sorts of these biosignature compounds to be present in an atmosphere. If we find a planet with many of these compounds, we’ll have many independent lines of evidence pointing at life being present there. That is how we are likely to finally accept that life has indeed been detected.

Another pathway that may result in the acceptance of a detection of life is us learning more about the origins of life. It’s possible as we learn more about how life started on Earth, we will discover that mechanisms to get it going make it a near inevitability where the necessary conditions exist. That would make its detection much easier to accept.

I mean isn’t soil like…already ashes?

Pina colada, not to be confused with a pollo colada, which substitutes the pineapple for raw chicken.

Oh just have a heart attack already, you old coot.

Do they still give out membership cards? The only reason I might want to join the ACP is so I can literally be a card-carrying Communist.

Hmm, I have one blahaj. What if I had a whole school of blahajes?

“Can you give me a third eye?”

Reminder that there are no moral billionaires. There are no rich men in the Kingdom of Heaven. Rich people don’t go to Heaven. There are no billionaires in Paradise. If you hoard enough wealth for a thousand lifetimes, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars, you’re going to the Pit. If there is a Hell beyond this world, then every single billionaire ends up there, no exceptions. When I see Trump and his cabinet, I see a carnival of the damned.

I suppose there’s also a timeline where they sent 1980s Trump up as a publicity stunt.

Little known fact. In the lead up to the Challenger launch, NASA considered sending Big Bird up on that flight, full sized puppet, puppeteer and all. There is an alternate timeline where Big Bird died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

No. Because you are not the same person.

No man can walk through the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and it is not the same man.

I don’t know. I had mine origamied into a vulva. I highly recommend it.

Zambonist.

Exactly. Consider one observation about Earth life. We know that life started pretty early in Earth’s history. It happened within a few hundred million years of Earth no longer being a ball of molten slag. But I can explain that observation with completely opposite conclusions:

1. Life may be easy to start. It happened so soon, that life must form nearly anywhere once conditions are sufficient for it. Simple bacterial life is an inevitable process. It’s likely our own solar system is brimming with life, with every deep Martian aquifer and outer system ice shell moon overflowing with simple life forms at a minimum.

2. Life may be incredibly difficult to start. You’ll have to scour a billion galaxies before you find a planet with life as complex as Earth has. But we can only exist on one of those lucky oddballs. The only chance complex intelligent life has of forming on a planet is if everything goes absolutely perfect. If the evolution of life were delayed by a billion years, we wouldn’t exist. Within a billion years the warming Sun will boil away Earth’s oceans. Our evolutionary time frame is freakishly fast compared to the average. The fact that life started so early is simply a selection effect. We can only exist on a world that evolved complex intelligent life, and that required breakneck pace evolution.

Even this one observation, that life started early, can be explained with completely opposite conclusions. The simple truth is, as you note, we can’t know anything about life’s prevalence with a sample of only one. That’s why we really should work hard to search the solar system for present or past life. It’s one of the few shots we have short of interstellar travel of actually determining the prevalence of life.

I’m also skeptical that we’ll ever be able to prove life via chemical detections like this one. The problem is that while we may not know of a way for a compound to be produced without life, we can’t ever be certain that there isn’t some unknown non-biological route for that compound’s synthesis. It’s an unknown unknown. Maybe dimethyl sulfide can form without life, but in some odd conditions that just don’t exist on our planet. We can’t prove there isn’t some non-biological way to form it. There are really only two ways to prove that a planet has life on it:

1. Physically go there or bring back samples. Find said life, examine it with your own eyes or under a microscope, and directly observe it reproducing, reacting to its environment, etc.

2. Detect radio or other signals or signatures of a clearly technological origin.

This is why I’m a big proponent of SETI. Even beyond the prospect of making contact, detecting technosignatures is one of the few ways we could have truly unambiguous evidence of alien life. If you find some loud laser or radio beacon belching out long strings of prime numbers, well, you’ve just proven beyond any doubt that life exists outside of Earth. Maybe that life is long dead. Maybe the life forms were replaced by machines. Who knows. But if you find something clearly technological out there, you can know for certain that there had to be life involved somewhere along the chain from dead random matter to interstellar beacon.

Yup. “Autism” is simply the new “Untermensch.”

I’m in your home right now. I can hear you breathing. You’ll never find me.

Please. At least use his full and proper name, Secretary of Transportation Booty Judge.

It sounds like he’s confusing autism with cerebral palsy or severe Down syndrome.

Seriously. Look at this: https://archive.is/itNDE A WSJ article describing how Bukele is already planning to double the size of his concentration camp.

I am fully convinced that he has signed his own death warrant at this point. Eventually, one way or another, the Trump regime will end. And building a concentration camp for American citizens is not something people will forgive or forget. Cries will go out to depose him like we have countless Central American leaders before, except this time we’ll actually be on the side of the angels for once. Bukele is going to get the Osama Bin Ladin treatment by the time this is all over. He has signed his own death warrant.