Sayonara

Because it costs billions with little chance of getting anything out of it. You don't get to discard that fact just because it is inconvenient to you. Also, I would dispute that we would learn more. What we learned would be different.

No can do. If we don't consider the cost of the search for life, the discussion has no bearing on reality. Like it or not we do have to factor these things in. That's an appalling analogy. Even if we found life off Earth that was so similar to us as to be virtually indistinguishable, it would answer many fundamental questions that have been debated for centuries. It would also raise new questions and challenges. It would still change the face of our society forever.

I've already answered this. It's a simple matter of economics. You don't funnel billions of dollars of tax-payers money into looking for something that might not even exist at random locations when you have a much better chance of finding something that you already know does exist, in locations you know it has a chance of developing.

We're not talking about whether or not life is 'there'. We're talking about where we should bother looking.

Not necessarily true.

Not really. He just didn't figure on how stringently people here might do things.

Oh cruel irony.

An analogous situation: You're trying to find your car keys. You don't remember where you left them, but it's reasonable to assume that they are somewhere in the house, seeing as you had them when you got back from work the night before. Going down the road to look in the fish pond at number 78 is a big waste of your time.

The water and vegetation necessary to support your ecosystem would leave their own signatures even after millions of years. These would be manifest in highly evident ways, much more so than the presence of the fossils themselves (assuming one accepted those rocks were fossils). Where's my t-shirt?

There's a thread on using the LaTex maths renderer in the General Maths forum. LaTex is like bb code only more... mathsy.

And the reason the examples are such noted figures is because the classical civilisations didn't exactly record the living history of Geoff, the gay baker from the market opposite the big fountain.

Like Skye (I think) said in the other thread (which could have been bumped legitimately instead of making this new thread), there are few scavengers that won't exploit weak or infirm prey, and few predators that won't eat carrion.

No, it wasn't. Apparently blank quotes don't get parsed. Fixed.

...and the fact that "this word means X so therefore Y can't happen" is just stupid.

The OP didn't say anything about ships, or meeting aliens. You lot really need to read the MANY other threads on this in the exobiology forum. (Thread moved because it has more to do with Evolution than Astronomy.)

Threads merged because they are the same subject.

http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/w32soberb.html You have caught the Sober-B worm.

That's definitely do-able, but I don't see the benefits justifying the time I'd have to invest in it.

I believe HK = Hong Kong.

Arnold Schwarzenegger cries in films. End of Days for a start. He's so gay.

If you are giving opinions, don't present them as if they are fact.

History shows that civilisations are always toppling over. Big deal.

I think he meant a concentration camp with democratic internal policies, rather than a concentration camp in a democracy.