Printing more money also devalues all the previously issued dollars, such as in savings accounts and your paycheck. So it's kind of equivalent to a flat tax.
> Can't we just print more money to pay off the debt?
Indeed
> And there will be no consequences since we're the reserved currency for the world backed by the most powerful military in human history.
Yup, and it works until you're not the reserve currency anymore, which ... happened before quite a few times (Dutch guilder. French franc. British pound)
The US dollar being the reserve currency means printing more of it will add to inflation slightly slower than otherwise. It doesn’t mean we can just add trillions or quadrillions of dollars of liquidity to the economy with no added productivity and see no impact.
> It implies life was seeded on earth and not generated via abiogenesis.
I don't think this conclusion is correct. The abiogenesis/panspermia debate is about where life formed. This article only says "we found all the DNA/RNA bases in an asteroid," but there is a HUGE gap between DNA bases and life(ie self-replicating organisms).
Making a crude analogy you could say they found Lego pieces in the asteroid, but that doesn't imply that the first 'Lego kits' on earth came pre-assembled. They might, or might not. We don't really have enough information to get a definitive conclusion. What we know is that we can't discard the panspermia idea yet.
Let me put it in another way, imagine we find clay in an asteroid. Does that alone imply the existence of ceramic in other places of the universe?
We need these molecules to build build a DNA strand, but their existence doesn't imply the existence of other life forms. Maybe exists a process that produce these molecules naturally and we just don't know about yet.
And remember that life(self replicating organisms) is way more complex than just DNA/RNA. In another crude analogy you could say that DNA is just the source code, to have life you still need to have all the hardware to run this code on. (fun fact: that is the reason why people argue about virus being something alive or not. Generally it has only the RNA necessary for the replication, and this is why it can only reproduce if it is able to take over another cell. In this analogy it has the source code but not the hardware, so how do we classify it?)
We didn't find evidence of life on the asteroid; rather, we found the necessary building blocks for it, which, in the right environment (e.g. earth), could become life.
If anything it slightly moves the scales toward abiogenesis, since it implies the necessary precursors to life were common in the early solar system, though it's certainly not conclusive either way.
Or the warm early universe hypothesis. In its early life, the entire universe was at a temperature that could sustain liquid water literally anywhere. The idea being, in this hypothesis, life was literally everywhere and then went dormant.
All through history groups of people thought they were the population and surprised each time to find others in other parts of the land, other islands, other continents. At some point you recognize the pattern and think Earth could just be another more distantly separated island. The difference would be that the next other people may be almost inconceivably different than us.
It is indeed big news IF the sample is not polluted from the ample existence of nucleotides in earth. Using the Bayes theorem the possibility of seeded life from the universe is not negligible any more. But the geological time scales bring us not far more.
Similar molecules have been found in meteors for a long time so it is not a surprise. There is no proof life started off planet but it is also possible.
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