Based on this I don’t think unmanned probes traveling between solar systems can be ruled out. In fact, it is conceivable that an alien species with a longer life span could do much longer manned(aliened?) missions than humans can, since we know humans have only a fraction of the lifespan possible for an animal https://www.livescience.com/what-is-oldest-shark-llm.html
Here’s actual quotes from them: “You believe that rubbish and you probably believe we landed on Ganymede! And you’re an idiot, so there’s no hope for you.”
What are they trying to say, exactly?
They also don’t always have cited sources. IDK if all of their articles are like this but… they don’t seem very reputable.
*I am not saying alien species do not exist, it is something where, as I don’t fully understand it, I try not to have an extreme opinion on it.
I concur that the guardian is not a reliable source, but that’s a really weird article from 9 years ago that I don’t think is representative of the site, usually the bias is to a lesser degree and in the other direction. In fact the donation ad at the bottom of all their articles makes it very clear that this is a liberal publication and that they do believe in climate change
To clarify I am not suggesting that belief in climate change is biased, I think they are unreliable becasue of their history of false statements https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/
I just finished reading The Oceans by Ellen Prager. A bit more elementary than my level, but that just means that I’m not their target reader. Anyway, toward the end, they ask us to consider how much better we would understand the oceans if as much had been spent on oceanic research as has been spent on space research.
This brings to mind the movie, “The Abyss”
spoiler alert
A civilization of intelligent deep-ocean life
In some ways, UFOs today are analogous to the sea monsters of ancient times – early explorations of a vast, unknown, and hazardous realm that we barely understand, and our imaginations easily fill in the blanks when we encounter novel or unfamiliar phenomena. The irony is that, given the disparity in research dollars, our understanding of space may be said to have advanced further than our understanding of the ocean. Maybe the lack of sea monsters today is not because we have a better understanding of what is down there, but because the oceans simply have less life of all kinds now than they did before large scale pollution and overexploitation.
Ah. I am not familiar with this site so I didn’t know what the rest of the site looked like, and honestly didn’t want to find out if it was anything like that one article, lol.
Check the reliability of the sources you do rely on?
I see their articles updated, when mistakes are picked up.
MANY articles every day means a mistake can creep in here and there.
Competing for eyeballs promotes clickbait titles, while the content is more thoughtful.
I also wonder what you searched for?
‘Query deserves freshness’ so a 9 year old article must have had a focused search term. Or you scrolled back a long way?
The Guardian is a newspaper, equivalent to the NY Times or Washington Post or … skewed to local politics.
This discussion is getting off topic. The the original intent is to discuss how extraterrestrial life would classified taxonomically, and that’s outside the realm of reliable new sources. Please stay on the origina topic. Thanks!
Apparently higher-level taxonomy has changed since I got out of school. Here’s an interesting article that discusses the taxonomic ranks of World, Domain, and Empire that are all above the rank of Kingdom (see Table 2 in the article). World includes all cells and possibly viruses and is roughly equivalent to what I called Biota in an earlier message here. Presumably if life was discovered on another planet and it was found to have arisen independent of our own forms of life on Earth, it would be classified in a different World (or Biota).
Interestingly, at the NASA UFO/UAP press conference today, one of the NASA folks actually suggested using something like iNat for UAPs:
"Nasa wants the public to get involved in UAP research.
“There’s a wealth of data that cell phones take,” said David Spergel, the chair of the UAP independent study team, in response to one of a question.
He suggested that apps could collect phone data and help researchers. It’s “an opportunity to engage the broader public in doing science,” Spergel said."
Modern taxonomy increasingly de-emphasizes ranks at these higher levels, in favor of the understanding that observed phylogenetic branching (and in some cases recombining) is not well described by a small number of nested ranked taxa. In other words, the series of evolutionary splits, endosymbioses, hybridizations, etc. over the last few billion years that have led to any living population today is far more complicated than can be described with a couple of dozen ranks. Also how complicated that story is will vary very much between different taxa, and between what we know about a species now and what we might know about it five years from now.
The number of ranks in use has certainly increased (Domain, Supergroup, Subdivision, etc.) but there is no consensus on standardizing these, nor any push to do so, as there is fundamentally no biological reasoning for it. Each individual project (like iNat) has to decide which taxonomic levels it wants to include in its data structure, and the answer is a matter of convenience. So some biologists use World, Domain, and Empire, others use other ranks at similar levels, and many don’t bother naming ranks up there at all.
I don’t disagree with what you’re describing, although the majority of taxonomists still seem to favor the Linnaean system of boxes within boxes. But there is also the PhyloCode (which is far less dependent on ranks but hasn’t really caught on) and the recent book on Phylonyms based on the PhyloCode system, which I have not looked at.
I’m not saying people don’t use Linnaean ranks, just that there is no complete set of ranks that all, or even most, taxonomists use. Each project chooses their own set of ranks for convenience, and ranks above Kingdom are particularly variable, or often absent.
