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Astronomers Look for Potential Life Zones

Posted by michael on from the speculative-thinking dept.

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."

9 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. No life? by FesterDaFelcher · · Score: 3, Funny

    They haven't actually found any life

    That's good, because I'd be pissed if they had and I hadn't heard about it.

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  2. More like.... by Sevn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:More like.... by TrueBuckeye · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Very true, but I guess we have to start by searching for what we understand.
      The better question is, how do you define life?

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  3. Missing the forest for the trees by mhw25 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I would think of classifying and concentrating our efforts on such a zone can be a little too presumptuous.

    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.

  4. Missing the facts for the theories by Eevee · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well, 30 years ago people did say that life was likely to be found on "terrestial planets." That's why the Viking missions to Mars had experiments to try to detect life--and why the Voyager and Pioneer missions didn't.

    Now, if we have a near-infinite amount of resources, then narrowing the choices down is silly. But, as you might suspect, if we have a very limited amount of resources--and you'd better believe time on the large telescopes is pretty scarce--then trying to use that small amount of resources on the best canidates is sensible.

    1. Re:Missing the facts for the theories by mhw25 · · Score: 3, Insightful
      The preoccupation about Mars is exactly the sort of thing that we should avoid - missions after countless missions and inconclusive results at best; and at its worse it spawned those drivels people write about on enterprisemission.com. It may be the second closest planet, conveniently so, arguably Earthlike - and that is the problem - we go there looking only for Earthlike life forms. Not that I'm saying we should not be bothered with Mars anymore, but since we spending so much money going there we shouldn't only be thinking the only form of life to expect is the complex hydrocarbon based, water dependent ones that we know.

      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.

    2. Re:Missing the facts for the theories by mhw25 · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I'm not saying that we should not be focusing on Mars. It is conveniently close, as I said, and considering what people say when looking at that old, boring, disproved "face on Mars" at Cydonia - sending something like Surveyor which did and beaming back new photos to discredit that crazy old theory alone was worth the price of the entire mission - almost like "showing the better photos to the believers and seeing their reaction - priceless". And the Vikings did present some questions worth of answering once and for all.

      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.

  5. A Fire upon the Deep- Nice guess! by ControlFreal · · Score: 3, Informative

    It is nice to see that sometimes SF authors, maybe by accident, invent some pretty accurate ideas...

    Case in point here is the book A Fire upon the Deep[1] by Vernor Vinge. The book describes our Milkyway galaxy at least 30,000 years in the future. The galaxy is divided into a number of concentric zones (the zones of thought): the Unthinking Depths, in which no intelligent life is possible, the Slow Zone, in which only moderately intelligent life such as ourselves is possible, and after that the Beyond and Transcent.

    The first two zones seem to pretty accurately be fitted by the results in the article. I do not know where Vinge originally got his ideas, but it's a nice match anyway.

    In Vinge's outer two zones, the Beyond and the Transcent, additional nice tricks such as faster-than-light travel are possible. Personally, I can highly recomment this book: it is well written hard technological SF.

    [1] A Fire upon the Deep.

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  6. Completely different attitudes. by Eevee · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.)