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."

Comments

Missing the forest for the trees

[mhw25]

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.