Alyssa Carson (born March 10, 2001) is an American space enthusiast who has attended numerous space camps and has visited every NASA visitor center.[1] She has been profiled by a variety of news outlets, public interest publications, and interview shows as an unofficial astronaut-in-training.
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While frequently described by the media as an “astronaut in training”,[20][10] Carson is not affiliated with any national space program.[21][22] NASA has publicly stated that the organization “has no official ties to Alyssa Carson”,[22] and separately that “although Ms. Carson uses ‘NASA’ in her website name and Twitter and Instagram handles, we’re not affiliated at all.”[23] In 2019 Newsweek corrected a headline that had implied that Carson’s training was affiliated with NASA.[9] Snopes.com also has dedicated a page to clarify such claims, which says: “Carson is not in training with—or being prepped by—NASA to become an astronaut, or to take part in the first human mission to Mars.”[24]
I need one of these for myself. I know hella rocks and will probably be the lead of the smithsonian or something if I become a geologist someday.
edit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssa-carson-87b874152 Can someone with a Linkedin account confirm that she doesn’t actually have any work experience whatsoever? I think that part might be hidden for me but I only see bullshit awards, her own org about wanting to be an astronaut when she grows up, volunteering one day per year at space camp, and inspirational articles from 2018 about how she wants to be an astronaut when she wants to grow up. There’s no “internship at [legitimate company]” which is a required class for any BS degree at my university.
it is absolutely wild that a whole bachelor’s degree exists entirely on a hypothetical, the existence of life outside earth, with very little to even work on. maybe i’m just being a hater, and i do love hypothesizing about potential life in space, but genuinely what is there to study or do as an astrobiologist aside from spectroscopic analysis of exoplanetary atmospheres that is already being done by many astronomers. all we really have is a few planets where there MIGHT be some molecules that usually originate from from life on earth specifically and the previous existence of water on mars, of which neither are conclusive of anything. for other natural sciences such as biology, physics, or chemistry, there will never not be a time when the laws of physics (on earth, at least) stop applying suddenly, or the laws that govern chemical reactions, or the functioning of life because these are tangible things you can observe. even specific sub-fields within them are still studying specific phenomena we know happen. what is there to observe for something that we know very little about and probably will always know very little about.
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.