FINALLY, it’s going to launch this week. Of course, the launch date was changed twice just this month, and we’ve been waiting for decades at this point.
It’s currently in French Guiana, undergoing final preparations (after yet more oopsies). Fingers crossed… please work…
With the way it’s progressed over the last 20 years of rotten luck, I won’t be surprised if I watch people’s entire life’s work explode somewhere in the air.
And the average person who does know what they are, can’t articulate what they are. IMO, they are best explained by believing in magic. I can’t think of a better explanation for a point far out in deep space where nothing material exists that a satellite can be placed in orbit about.
Proof of life would be actually finding a living organism (or even a fossilized organism, showing that there USED TO BE life) somewhere.
The existence of all the perfect conditions to sustain life wouldn’t be positive proof of life actually taking hold there.
On the flip side, we are assuming that certain conditions are required to sustain life. That’s true for life as we know it. But what’s to say that some other life form couldn’t exist under some different conditions? The atomic properties of silicon are similar to carbon for instance. What’s to say that there couldn’t be a silicon-based biology? And that all life forms there are semi-transparent – like glass? (Just brainstorming out loud there…)