Are Aliens Hiding Beneath the Ice Moons? Garry Nolan and Avi Loeb

You know, I mean, I think we're all looking at the under-ice oceans around the larger planets here. I would bet any amount of money that we're going to find something under there. I mean, all the necessary requirements for the kind of life that we think of are going to be there. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Life on Earth should have disseminated throughout our solar system. And over the billions of years, you are absolutely right, the origin of life, you know better than me, we believe started about four billion years ago. In other words, it's just a few hundred million years after this meteorite was created in the same proto-solar system, right? The fact is we don't observe any evidence for life in our solar system. To what extent can we use in a Bayesian framework the lack of observation of any trace of any existence of life on a meteorite, on another planet, as some constraint on the facundity argument that life should be ubiquitous? We haven't done the real test, first of all. I mean, so we sent, I mean, actually the department that I got my PhD in here at Stanford, the genetics department, they actually built the experiments that were done on Mars and the Viking landers. And, you know, there's actually been a lot of post hoc analysis of that original data that said, you know what, this actually probably was evidence of life. But strangely, and I don't understand this, I'm not saying that it's a conspiracy or anything, they keep sending back microscopes that look at rocks, but they don't send back a growth media or anything to try to see if something, if they were to drop a piece, some dirt from Martian soil in it, if any critters grow, bacteria or what have you. So, you know, so first of all, the experiment has been done. So you can't populate the priors in the Bayesian inference there. Second, well, Venus, at least from the viewpoint of the kind of life that we would be looking for, is not a not a nice place to be if you're if you're life. But, you know, I mean, I think we're all looking at the at the under ice oceans around the larger planets here. And I would I would bet any amount of money that we're going to find something under there. I mean, all the necessary requirements for the kind of life that we think of are going to be there. Water, heat and probably things like hydrogen sulfide or other redox related chemicals that would be sufficient for growing, let's say, the even primitive life will will be there. Well, I guess, you know, my point in bringing this up is that, you know, you either have two different conjectures. One is that the day after we discover unequivocal evidence for the existence of life outside of the Earth, that will transform everything. And I sometimes feel like that stands in direct contradistinction to the fact pattern that we've already seen. In 1996, late 1996, early 1997, President Bill Clinton stood on the White House lawn and announced the discovery of meteorites not unlike this in Antarctica, where I've been twice and I've spent about a month of my life there. And it's a barren place. It's a frozen, dead continent, just like the ice planet Hoth. I love the people there, but I wouldn't want to live there. Right now, that was never falsified. In fact, there were in order to get a NASA press conference on the White House lawn, it had to be peer reviewed. Right, Avi? And and that peer review process took place. And it's never been anti-peer reviewed. It's never been retracted formally in the general public has already been through this. They don't know it's been retracted. If the general public, you know, really hasn't gotten up in arms about this discovery, which in their minds is still valid, is still a actual scientific discovery. What makes us think that if you come up with proof or Avi comes up with some discovery that anything will be different 20 years from now? Well, you know, I said this before. I think if it doesn't affect kitchen table issues or doesn't challenge somebody's religion or their status in the in the world, they probably will just ignore it until it, I think, ekes out in and leaks out into into the general scientific framework so that it becomes, as of many things, it now is an accepted fact. And two years ago, it wasn't. I'm perfectly fine with the public not agreeing with the conclusions or any conclusions at any point in time. I'm only interested in convincing a sufficient cadre of scientists that something is worth studying so that, you know, continued research can be done on it. You can be spending so much of your time on a no and you've wasted, you know, as many months or years of your life as possible. Sometimes it's easy enough to just switch the mode of the question around so that it's a Zen outcome, this whole subject matter. It doesn't matter what the answer is. If it's if it's no, it's maybe disappointing, but that's still interesting because that means life on Earth is unique. But if it's yes, if it's yes, that there is life even in our own solar system doesn't prove there are UFOs or UAPs, but it is at least a step in the direction of saying, well, it could have been. I'm convinced that no matter what we find on Mars or under the oceans of Titan or what have you are is going to be, you know, is going to be related to us, whether it started there and came here or vice versa. I don't really necessarily care.