She is the dawn of a new type of gal, the large adult faildaughter.

It would be extremely funny if he tried to actually launch a Mars mission and just after clearing the atmosphere his ship gets shotgunned by a cloud of his stupid little satellites.

This is basically it. Astrobiology is actually a course in a fair few places, a friend of mine has a degree in it, and you're right, it's relatively new and varied, but it's basically planetary science, biochem and environmental sciences. No it is not drawing theoretical aliens.

yeah, there seems to be a lot of strange moves in undergraduate program development with creating "grabby" program titles that sound cool and have some curious career tracking baked in, because we all know the most important part of a program title is being able to rapidly and cleanly articulate what your career will look like to your parents and what sort of salary it will command.

The average Astrobiologist in the US makes $143,786.

I have a degree in astrophysics, so here’s my perspective.

Whether, and how much, a field is speculative has little scientific or practical bearing on whether it is worth studying. I’ll throw out the obvious reason first: you don’t know what you don’t know. Much of science lies in pushing boundaries even when there is no specific discovery in mind.

Astronomy as a whole has always been challenged for relevance to “real” studies here on Earth. Many people think that astronomy is a waste of money.

Was it pointless to send multiple spacecraft, including COBE, WMAP, and Planck, just to figure out how uniform is the cosmic microwave background radiation? Or to devote similar efforts to researching the flatness of the Universe? To image black holes and measure gravitational waves? These things are about as speculative as astrobiology, but they sound more “serious.”

I believe all of these things are important to study because the laws of physics are, as far as we can tell, the same everywhere in the universe. Therefore space is simply another laboratory in which we study the Earth; an invaluable one, actually, because there is far more exotic physics happening around galactic nuclei (for example) than we can ever come close to simulating in a laboratory on Earth.

Astrobiology is not merely looking at spectra. The spectra are only an indirect measurement. The difficulty lies in understanding the non-biological processes which could produce a signature that otherwise appears biological in origin. Until you’re holding a little green alien, you can’t really prove that a measurement is definitely life, but with solid science you can be pretty damn sure that there is no other explanation.

I saw one space chemist describe their job as discovering everything that isn't alien life. We have a recent, huge, and growing pile of exoplanet data which is going to show different chemical signatures. There's practical scientific value in finding the interesting candidates and for narrowing down what could make those compounds under wildly different conditions that an Earth-centric chemist isn't specially trained in. I think that apart from the microgravity effects on earth biology studies, there's value in understanding how those different conditions would or wouldn't allow for an atmospheric signature to be biological. If it's something benign we didn't rule out, that's a 10+ year space mission or telescope time wasted when we could have been replicating those chemical conditions in labs here.

i can confirm she is enlisted in the space janissaries

Have you seen Turkish Star Wars? Space is zany if you're Turkish and proper training is essential.

At least one. There are dialects after all.

(For re-nomination for speedy deletion due to WP:G11.) This page is not unambiguously promotional because it does not list any achievements of Carson's that are unsourced, it does not advertise for any product/service, and it has no external links except for the official website in the infobox (so cannot be external link spamming). Per WP:WEIGHT, "If a viewpoint is in the majority, then it should be easy to substantiate it with reference to commonly accepted reference texts". Everything is cited. The sources back up all claims made in the article. Also, the article was not intended to be promotional. I have no connection to Carson and merely made the article because I had seen a plethora of articles about her (ie. more than enough to meet WP:GNG). To the best of my human ability, the article is written with NPOV. Furthermore, even if the article was written in a promotional tone, the arguments I have just made show that the article is not so overly promotional that it could not be fixed. And according to WP:G11, "If a subject is notable and the content could plausibly be replaced with text written from a neutral point of view, this is preferable to deletion." Samsmachado (talk) 18:19, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

Yes