C-A-E-S-A-R // Smart-alecky line about the haircut, less-than-smart spelling ability, undermines any authority behind any point that was attempted to be made. -30-

It's interesting... AC's post is a great example of how plans, upon execution, are not guaranteed to have the desired effect. Much in harmony with the content of the original "article". -30-

Not that Wikipedia is necessarily reliable, but it seems to give a good summary in this case ( source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ): // "The astronomer Carl Sagan, pondering the question of whether life on Earth could be easily detected from space, devised a set of experiments in the late 1980s using Galileo's remote sensing instruments during the mission's first Earth flyby in December 1990. After data acquisition and processing, Sagan et al. published a paper in Nature in 1993 detailing the results of the experiment. Galileo had indeed found what are now referred to as the "Sagan criteria for life". These included strong absorption of light at the red end of the visible spectrum (especially over continents) which was caused by absorption by chlorophyll in photosynthesizing plants, absorption bands of molecular oxygen which is also a result of plant activity, infrared absorption bands caused by the ~1 micromole per mole (mol/mol) of methane in Earth's atmosphere (a gas which must be replenished by either volcanic or biological activity), and modulated narrowband radio wave transmissions uncharacteristic of any known natural source. Galileo's experiments were thus the first ever controls in the newborn science of astrobiological remote sensing." // That sounds all techy and jargony, but the essence of it is that in the 1990s, we sent a spacecraft from Earth, and looked back at Earth searching for that things that were familiar to us, and cue Jim Nabors, suhprize suhprize suhprize, we found them. We got real geeky about what we were looking for, but we might as well have been looking for golden-arches signs and litter from people throwing Big Mac wrappers out their car windows. Just because we're able to see what we expect on Earth doesn't mean that we're going to find anything similar on another planet, whether it's a certain spectrum of light from Earth-like plants that we make into lettuce on Big Macs, or whether it's the actual store signs and food wrappers themselves. The geek factor does not legitimize bad logic. We can send spacecraft to other planets or point telescopes toward other planets or regions of space looking for those familiar things, and still arrive at the wrong conclusion, whether we find them or not. Lack of presence of familiar life does not shed light on whether or not there is unfamiliar life. And presence of things that might indicate familiar life do not indicate life, only similarity. Case in point, the methane mentioned above can indicate not just biological life, but could also be explained by volcanic activity, which might or might not co-exist with life, familiar to us or not. // Of note is that the experiment in the 1990s was conducted by the renowned astronomer Carl Sagan who did some great work on legitimate research before he got on TV in the 1980s and then by many accounts got lazy and sloppy with his work, including some real chicken-little antics during the gulf war saying we would all be doomed by clouds from burning oil. // Inconclusive studies based on nebulous experiements by dubious TV personalities used as a basis for assumptions about the universe... not so reliable. -30-