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Cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov suspects an extraterrestrial origin for bacteria found on the exterior of the ISS:
A Russian cosmonaut claims to have caught aliens. Cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov says he found bacteria clinging to the external surface of the International Space Station that didn't come from the surface of Earth.
Shkaplerov told the Russian news agency that cosmonauts collected the bacteria by swabbing the outside of the space station during space walks years ago.
"And now it turns out that somehow these swabs reveal bacteria that were absent during the launch of the ISS module," Shkapkerov told TASS. "That is, they have come from outer space and settled along the external surface. They are being studied so far and it seems that they pose no danger."
A recent study suggests that interplanetary dust can transport microbes to or from Earth:
Astronomers have long believed that asteroid (or comet) impacts were the only natural way to transport life between planets. However, a new study published November 6 in Astrobiology suggests otherwise.
The study, authored by Professor Arjun Berera from the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy, suggests that life on Earth may have begun when fast-moving streams of space dust carried microscopic organisms to our planet. Berera found that these streams of interplanetary dust are not only capable of transporting particles to Earth, but also from it.
Space Dust Collisions as a Planetary Escape Mechanism (DOI: 10.1089/ast.2017.1662) (DX) (arXiv link above)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @11:48AM (10 children)
Next they will tell us Aliens do exist and the universe is teeming with intelligent life. Not necessarily material in nature, but life. "Finding" bacteria is the first step. The trivial issues we are told about are just cover for what happens behind closed doors. There is 100% cooperation between U.S and Russia about Aliens and Alien technology and they both agreed to keep it under wraps. Alien technology and Human technology can solve all our energy and food problems but some people are keen on keeping us all slaves and reducing our population so the New World Order can be implemented. The NWO Army will be armed with exotic weapons using both Alien and Human technology and the soldiers will be brainwashed to get compliance. They are waiting for Humans to make better killing robots so Humans can be used less and less and eventually wiped out. I say let us put all those who make such heinous plots in prisons specifically designed and built for them.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @12:14PM (1 child)
The 1%'ers ( the banking elite ) could crash the entire system, sans them, anytime they want to right now. They've got everyone in debt. Just call the debt.
Instant civil war between the middle class and lower class, with the upper class absconding to underground shelter to wait out the melee.
Probably take three to five years for the aboveground melee to sort itself out, leaving maybe 1% of the original population. And of those surviving, they will have street fighting skills, not building skills. The type that hoard ammo, not tools. I believe that in a survival scenario, those best at taking other people's stuff will be better suited for short time survival than those who build stuff. Those who build stuff won't build because there won't be much sense building anything that someone else is going to take. The building class will probably suffer the worst, so when the melee is over, what the elite have to work with is people who are hell-bent on killing for survival, and will be pretty hard to manage. People who will shoot them in the back at the first chance they get. Like today in some "bad areas" of some of our previously prosperous cities.
So there won't be anyone left to do the grunt work of building all their fancy things, running the infrastructure, and preparing the elite all their fancy foods. When they run out of their stored cache of goods, its stone age again for the elite as well. Look at the Biblical account of the Kings of the Earth of the day. I believe all of us today live a better life than even the King of old. I believe few Kings want to regress to that kind of lifestyle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @02:01PM
Offtopic, sure.
Calling the debt but without enforcement of the call means no one will give back anything. All debts will go to zero all of a sudden and we can all start fresh. If some rat-faced banker shows up wanting his money back, he will be hanged from the nearest tree.
Humans when left to their own devices are quite smart and adapt quickly. Turn off the television and the population's I.Q jumps many points (over a period of time).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday November 29 2017, @12:38PM (6 children)
I would prefer for this scenario to be true, because it would likely (not necessarily) mean that faster-than-light travel is real, and it would mean that we have usable alien technological advances in our grasp that could solve a lot of problems and make colonizing every rock in the solar system a cinch. Defeating this global elite holding onto the technology would not be impossible. 100% cooperation between nations is probably more like 90%, and there is internal dissent.
Another scenario is that the U.S. and other nations did get a hold of crashed UFOs, but have kept the benefits secret and in-house (Air Force) out of a misguided protocol rather than an evil plot to dominate humanity. Maybe they have an alien power source, or at least an advanced alien version of EmDrive. If you read some of Roger Shawyer's EmDrive 2.0 and EmDrive 3.0 claims, you can gather that the flying cars and other stuff that would be enabled could be very destabilizing for humanity.
Back to reality, we have population likely cruising to 10-11 billion, a low skilled jobs crisis that will be made very apparent by AI and automation (no, all of the fry cooks in the world can't simply educate themselves and become engineers and lifestyle consultants), and individuals on the ground capable of a lot of destruction using small arms, explosives, or biotechnology. The people in charge have a good case (to them) for dominating humanity to prevent worse chaos. No alien technology is needed to build killbots or supersoldiers. I think overpopulation is an overrated concern, but you could easily see a cabal disagreeing and doing whatever they can to keep parts of the world at war (wow, so difficult). If shit really hits the fan, maybe the elites will move to Mars. They might have luxury beer [newsweek.com] there at least.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @02:24PM
The people of this world do not need to work to be fed. They are made to think that no work means no food and that we all need to secure employment otherwise we won't be able to afford food.
Machines make building stuff easier, but in the wrong hands (as now), machines can be harmful. A killer robot could have been a farm robot growing food. A giant aircraft carrier could have been a robot building housing for people to live in.
It is a possibility.
They start wars in different places and see what the effects are. Then they gather results of that war and decide the next step. Some members of the cabal may suggest civil war, an invasion or a nuclear war to further the agenda. The implementation details are left to the cabal members. The agenda was decided long ago between the forefathers of the cabal members and alien races.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 29 2017, @03:25PM (4 children)
"faster-than-light travel is real . . . colonizing every rock in the solar system"
Seriously, Takyon? FTL, and colonizing shitty rocks that won't support life without a LOT of time and effort expended? Tell ya what - I'll take the FTL, you can have all of the solar system's rocks. ONE of the rocks will be useful, I suppose, as a forward base, or outpost, from which to head out into interstellar space. The earth is pretty far down in a gravity hole. The moon is better than the earth, Mars is better than the moon, and it only gets better going further out. I already gave you all the rocks - I'm willing to sign a lease for a few square miles on one of them. Make it cheap, or I'll just build a huge-ass habitat to use for my outpost.
You should read the Expanse series, or watch the movies. Inhabiting rocks with microgravity has some rather serious drawbacks. I'd rather go to Alpha Centauri, look around, and if I don't like what I see, I can move on, toward the galactic center. Somewhere down there, where stars swarm like bees, there have to be several hundred easily colonized earthlike planets. We can probably even take our choice of the number of moons, and still be very much like earth. The distaff portion of our species seems to put a lot of importance on the moon's cycles - why don't we pick a system with six moons, and really confuse the girls? "Not tonight, honey, moon number six is partially occluded by moon number 4, and I'm never comfortable having sex when six is occluded!"
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Wednesday November 29 2017, @04:00PM (1 child)
That PARENTHETICAL and COMMA are there for a REASON.
Even if aliens have visited or crash landed on Earth, there is no guarantee that faster-than-light travel is possible. Which means that going anywhere, even Alpha Centauri, will still take a long ass time. The aliens could have gotten here by sending out thousands of probes to nearby stars. What's more likely to crash in Roswell, the FTL-capable ship with alien pilots, or the throwaway "unmanned" probe controlled by an AI?
Colonizing or mining every rock in the solar system is today's goal based on today's assumption that we won't have FTL, possibly ever. I think we can safely assume that if the aliens don't come packing FTL, they would still have better propulsion than us. Without FTL, even places with craptastically low gravity like Ceres or Pluto are much better colonization targets than the nearest "Earth-like exoplanets". You see rocks, I see REAL ESTATE and RESOURCES. They're relatively accessible. Even places around 1,000 AU away (possibly including Planet Nine) are less than a half a percent of the distance to Proxima Centauri. If you can somehow get to Planet Nine's hypothetical location in 10 years, it would still take thousands of years to get to Proxima Centauri.
That said, even with FTL + EmDrive we get a good deal. We could mine all these rocks and credibly bring the material to the surface of Earth. Iron, gold, platinum, titanium - it's all out there for the taking. Put it on the Moon or Mars instead. There's no biomes to disrupt, and industrial greenhouse gas emissions on Mars are desirable.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday November 30 2017, @11:37PM
> the FTL-capable ship with alien pilots, or the throwaway "unmanned" probe controlled by an AI?
After needlessly offending AI (duly noted) parent travels into his ABS ESP parking sensors automatic transmission car, following the gps instructions.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 29 2017, @05:25PM (1 child)
Once you've got the habitat, then all you need is raw materials. Dead rocks will offer that just as well as a living world. Not nearly as exciting, but if you're going to wander between stars without already having a good idea as to whether there's anything interesting there, then even with FTL you're going to spend a long time living in a cramped tin can, when you could have been living in a much more spacious and luxurious tin can back home (at least assuming mass constraints still apply to FTL)
Also, you might not want to pin too many hopes on the galactic core for life - where the stars swarm like bees, so do the frequency of world-baking, atmosphere-stripping supernovas.
(Score: 1) by Crash on Wednesday November 29 2017, @08:48PM
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday November 30 2017, @11:31PM
> and the universe is teeming with intelligent life.
Unfortunately for this planet, intelligent life is not distributed evenly.
Account abandoned.