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Habitable Planets May Be Common
swight1701 writes "New Scientist tells us, "one in four of the planetary systems identified to date outside the Solar System are capable of harbouring other Earths, say astrophysicists, a much higher proportion than anyone expected." Two seperate groups have come up with results that line up with each other, the latest one using simulations of 85 systems. Warm up the warp engines, time to go planet hopping!"
"one in four of the planetary systems identified to date outside the Solar System are capable of harbouring other Earths"
The operable word here is capable.
Half of these planets won't have oxygen, another 49.9% will be too cold.
This study is referring to the distance of the star to the planet being far enough that the sun doesn't fry the planet.
They say their are habitable for life...why do we always assume every life form will be exactly like us and need our environment to thirve? For some other form of life they may thrive on Venus or Jupiter.
The researchers found that around a quarter of the systems contained regions where life-friendly planets could in principle exist.
If the requirement is that there be a "region" around the star where a planet could have water in liquid state all-year-round, wouldn't almost every star satisfy this? Every heat source has a distance at which it feels "nice" (as anyone who's been at a campfire can attest to). :-)
Maybe I'm missing something here (which has been known to happen
The Raelians have announced their first colonizing ship full of expectant clone mothers is due to arrive in the nearest system in question sometime next month.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
I took a college course called "Intelligent life in the universe" (god I loved college). Where we learned basically:
1. What we know it takes to support life
2. What living objects are typically made of (carbon based compounds)
3. What percentage of stars have planets around them, what percentage of those planets are the proper distance away from the star the orbit (which changes based on the size of the star)
4. a bunch of biology, and some other related stuff
It boiled down to the idea that the universe is soo huge that IF we're the only intelligent life in the universe, that there must some type of "god" and if we're not, well then the evolutionary theories are probably fundamentally correct (doesn't mean there isn't "god", but not in the literal old testament sense).
see, no real hard conclusiions only questions, cause there is always another level deeper to go.
No matter how many statistical guesses different scientists make, the question of habitable planets, not to mention the question of other intelligences, will not be answered without actually going out and visiting them. This will not happen in your lifetime. You will not know. Sorry!
First they tell us the earth ain't flat, then the Universe doesn't resolve around our planet... then the fake moon landings, now this. Good thing we have fundamentalists around telling us it isn't so. Seriously, unless there is a nature of physical or sound travel that we are unaware of, it really doesn't matter much to us that much if there is a civilization 1000 light years away. In the 2,000 years it would take to get a super amplified light message to them and back, will we still be around to listen?
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When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
A theory I once heard:
Universe is about 15 000 000 000 years old. If habitable planets are common then there has to be much older races than we are. Let's say that one of those races is capable of space traveling and it takes 1000 years for that race to spread from planet to another. If they were 1 000 000 years older than us then they would've spread around the universe to 2^1000 planets. Even if it took 10 000 years to populate a planet after reaching one, they would have populated 2^100 planets. Now think about a race that would've been around for a 1 000 000 000 years. They should've populated every habitable planet in the universe.
I can't remember the name of this theory, but please tell me if you do.
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I wonder what life will look like on planets that don't have a moon like ours. The moon is very important in keeping the earth's axis ariented in the same position with regard to the sun. Without the moon, earth's axis could tilt so that one of the poles can be positioned towards the sun, thereby illuminating one side of the earth constantly while keeping the other side in the dark. If life can evolve on such a planet I would very much like to see what it looks like.
-- Cheers!
Although the prospect of other stars that are capabale of supporting Earth-like planets is facinating, we need to ask some fundamental questions: 1. Do they also host responsible civilizations; 2. If not, then are these civilizations developing Weapons of Mass Destructrion? If so, then it is imperative that we begin preparations immediatly. If not, then it is still our moral obligation to eventually begin the design and test of Planet-Cracking Weapons to neutralize whatever violent civilizations we may encounter. In the meantime, I believe we should also implement a 7/24/365 inter-steller broadcast of our intentions so that civilizations who could cause potential conflict will "get the message": "Dont F__K with Earth". Specifically, I reccomend that we immediatly begin to repeatedly broadcast the "Planet Cracking" scene in "Star Wars"; although we don't have this technology yet - the Death Star, the aliens won't know that: it will be an adequate bluff.
Oxygen and water? Again, people are assuming that earth's atmosphere and other conditions need to be recreated to sustain any life--bullshit, honey. remember, oxygen is a corrosive gas. And many organisms even here survive fine without it; even without water. Once and for all, this paradigm of everything having to be like us needs to be blown out of our systems like an explosive kidney stone. Think outside the box, or don't think at all.
Didn't mean to tear ya up if it came across that way; I just get frustrated very easily.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0210006
Note that you can download the full original in PDF, Postscript, or other scientific formats. The PDF is about a half meg in size. and is about 38 pages long.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Just because it's habitable doesn't mean it has life. Odds are it's just got an atmosphere with oxygen, and liquid water. The land would be bare rock. There's nothing there to destroy. Perhaps we could relocate humans to non-earth planets and preserve earth.
Yeah, just because it's in the habitable zone doesn't mean it has life or is habitable to humans. Too little atmosphere would make it freeze like Mars (mars is in the goldilox zone) or a dense greenhouse gas rich atmosphere would make it bake like Venus. (Venus is in the habitable zone, also)
Anyway, I think by the time we have the technology for manned missions to other stars, we won't be at all like today's biological humans. We'll probably be hyperintelligent machines or something more intangible. It's hard to grasp the difficulty of intersteller travel. The stars are so distant. But we'll have the technology someday. If we move fast enough, perhaps the first intersteller colony will be established in this century.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Read Manifold: Space by Baxter. There's some very good theory in there that basically states that "life will find a way" It's like a cancer, if there's any concievable way for it to flourish it will.
The other big idea is that in order for intelligent life to exist for more than an intergalactic blink of an eye it has to expand to other star systems, eventually it needs to expand at a rate faster then the speed of light or it dies, basically making the foot print of intelligent life look like a circle. The outer fringes are where life it, the center is where intelligent life can't exist for lack of natural resources.
Anyway, it's a good read with some interesting ideas.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
The Oxygen in earths atmosphere came from the earliest living organisms. They metabolized CO2 and released waste Oxygen. Oxygen is too reactive to nature naturally in large quantities in an atmosphere. If we find Oxygenated worlds, we found life of some kind, and life that has been established for billions of years no less.
There was a great deal of contention prior to 1950, when the Church officially announced that it would tolerate its members believing in the Theory of Evolution. This ocurred when Pope Pius XII produced the papal encyclical entitled "Humani Generis". His statement said, essentially, that it was alright for Catholics to believe whatever scientific theory they wanted... then went on to stress that the Theory of Evolution was still unproven.
The above poster may be referring to the much more recent (1996) statement by Pope John Paul II entitled "Truth cannot contradict Truth". In this document, the pope not only accepted the ToE as being in line with Catholic beliefs, but he stated that it was "more than a hypothesis". This was the first time that a Pope officially supported the ToE, rather than merely tolerating it.
So it's more or less correct that the Church only officially got behind Evolution recently, though I don't know if it's accurate to say that they disputed the existence (and extinction) of the Dinosaurs.
The same applies to fossils. If fossils found far far back didn't belong to deceased animals, then that means (to religious people) that God put them there (the bones). But then that contradicts the watchmaker theory. Why would God create essentially fraudulent records?
It seems that the existence of fossils could be construed as incompatible with the Watchmaker theory anyway. Why would God, in the process of creating an intricately designed world, feel it necessary to create creatures (actually, entire ecosystems) that would ultimately be unable to survive?
You could respond that God is ineffable, but that same logic pretty much works for the folks who think God created fake fossils and buried them in the ground. The point is, once you allow for the existence of God, rational arguments are pretty much always vulnerable to the divine wild-card.
By the time the complete history of the human race human race can be written there won't be anyone interested enough in us to write it.
The history of the human race already has been started, written by the only creatures in the multiverse likely to find us interesting, rather than fascinating (or appalling?)
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