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Astronomers Look for Potential Life Zones
js7a writes "An Australian team of astronomers has an article in the latest edition Science describing a 'Galactic Habitable Zone,' which contains about 10% of all the Milky Way's stars including the Sun. Stars within this band are likely to have rocky planets large enough to hold atmospheres, are sufficiently distant from supernovae, and have existed for at least four billion years. They haven't actually found any life or earth-like planets yet, but presumably this zone is a reasonable place to narrow such searches."
Life "as we know it" zone. Someone is going to totally flip the first time they step on a talking rock while mining some nanotube ingredients on some distant heavenly object in the "no life" zone.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Imagine someone said 30 years ago that life is likely to be found on "terrestial planets" and we should concentrate on such and convinced key decisions makers about it: There would be no Pioneers 10 and 11, no Voyagers 1 and 2, no Galileo and no Cassini, and no one would be bold enough to even propose JIMO; and we would have no idea on the existance of "a little solar system in the solar system" in the form of the Jovian moons, and we would not have come to speculate that currently, the most likely site in our neighbourhood to find some form of life outside Earth is on the moon Europa.
Just concentrating on finding "live as we know it" might mean we may miss something right in front of our noses. Somehow it makes me think of those floating jellyfish like creature living on a habitable zone (for them, at least) at some depth on a gas giant that Dan Simmons wrote about in the Endymion books... and that real extraterrestial life, if it exists, may take forms more exotic than even what our imaginations can create. Keep an open mind, and two open eyes.
I know what you mean, telescope time can be really, in the spirit of the moment, precioussss. Actually getting time to do any experiment on any piece of expensive equipments from academics can be very frustrating. Kind of resulting in what those SETI people do at Arecibo - stick a receiver and whatever people are looking at, record and analyse it - when you have telescope time you follow your hit list, but be prepared, in case you lucky when you are not expecting it.
and inconclusive results at best
That's the reason I want us to go back. If you get weird results, you shouldn't shrug and go on to the next planet; you should find out exactly why the weird results happened. (That is, without interrupting any work for current missions, missing any favorable planetary alignments, totally blowing the budget, or rushing off without careful planning of how to avoid the ambiguous results with the next mission.)
What I was saying is that we should not be too preoccupied by it alone. Keeping in topic, if we start producing, at exponential rate - as Prof Hawkings observed - scientific journals; some of them like these kind of "habitable zones" thingy, sooner or later people, and more importantly policy makers do get into the preoccupied mode - a tunnel vision - and losing the greater picture at the periphery.
There has been two scores of missions to Mars. Jupiter, despite the complexity - was only visited by 3 crafts (2 Voyagers and Galileo), Saturn 2, Neptune and Uranus - once, and Pluto and beyond - sadly none. We are talking about an order of magnitude difference here.
The thing about Europa is that it is the place many people think to find life outside Earth, at this moment and we know that only because we had the sense to look and poke beyond the most likely targets - Mars, Mars and Mars. Cassini may find if Titan or any other Saturnian moon may be as interesting... but we will not know about the Neptunian and Uraninan moons.
I would say we should boldy explore forward... what are we doing, as humanity is that betting on only Cassini to Saturn, forgetting the rest of the Solar System beyond Mars and are very happy that somehow, against all odds, we still have Pioneers 10, Voyager 1 & 2 leaving the solar system - almost like basking in past glories - those were launched a generation ago, before the internet was unleashed on the general public. When will a man made ship pass Pluto's orbit again? When will we try to look at the Kuipers belt, if there is an Oort cloud, or try to find the termination shock? If we don't have the vision to think of going there - because it is not the most likely place to find life, as we know it-, what is the chances of securing the funding, the resources, the inspired commitment of scientists and engineers to propose, design and fight for the means to get there?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against the search for extreterrestial life form - just had my SETI 4th anniversary and currently beta testing BOINC. But the search for life is only a small part of exploration of the universe as a whole, and rightly so. For if it is out there, and when we have explored far enough, long enough, no matter what form they take - we will find it.