Ignore The Org Charts: Let’s Get Back To Actual Exploration

Keith’s note: I was planning on retiring and writing my book on Astrobiology expeditions to other worlds. Then Trump 2.0 happened and everyone suddenly wanted NASAWatch back. That said, I am still trying to escape reality for several hours a day and travel on a personal Away Team sortie into the future. I hope y’all can do that too. I just posted this NOAA discovery of an alien-looking species on Astrobiology.com with an editor’s note: “One day we will begin a detailed exploration of ocean worlds other than our own. Hopefully they will be habitable – and inhabited. Given that we still find new life forms on Earth – things which also seem strange by comparison to what has already been discovered, we have along way to go – on this world. As such it make sense to practice the skills of exploration and discover on a world close to us and our tools. In so doing we need to develop some translatable skills that we can apply to the robotic and human exploration of these other worlds. Expeditions and discoveries as describe below still happen. And the more we look, the more we discover. This story is about the newly-named Advhena magnifica (Advhena is derived from advena in Latin which means “alien”). How are we going to name the new life forms that we discover offworld? Will we use the same Latin-based binomial naming system that is used on Earth, perhaps adapt it with a new prefix or suffix, or pick another language? Or go digital? Something to think about.” Full post