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Shortlist of Possible ET Addresses
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo News is reporting that Astronomer Margaret Turnbull of the Carnegie Institution has released a 'top 10' list of potential inhabitable star systems. NASA is planning on using this top 10 list as the targets for their Terrestrial Planet Finder a 'system of two orbiting observatories scheduled for launch by 2020.'"
While the chances of hearing from alien worlds is depressing small ("Rare Earth"), still the thought that a few private individuals will know first should give us pause. If there is more information in the detected signal than "hello there", who knows what could be learned? Markets may move in a big way (here's how antigravity works, immortality, existence of god, a big black hole is headed your way, etc.).
Then again if that's the only way we're gonna get these projects funded, perhaps these philanthropists should be rewarded for their risk taking.
Now, is it just me, or does the idea that life may well need some abnormal event to kick-start it in conflict with that very idea?
Perhaps include *some* of these systems?
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Life on Earth 'unlikely to have emerged in volcanic springs'
13 Feb 2006
"The latest findings of experiments to re-create the conditions under which life could emerge from chemical reactions suggest that volcanic springs and marine hydrothermal events are unlikely to have provided the right environment, a leading researcher from the United States will tell an international meeting tomorrow (14 February 2006) at the Royal Society, the UK national academy of science."
In the alternative Plos ran an interestin article titled Jump-Starting a Cellular World: Investigating the Origin of Life, from Soup to Networks which touches on the front running theories on the origin of life.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
"Any biochemists out there feel free to disagree and/or expound."
I'll take that one. In a liquid water environment it's difficult to see how you'd end up with a biochemistry that wasn't nucleic acid, protein, carbohydrate and fatty acid based. By observation life on earth seems to have explored just about every type of possible molecular structure that carbon/hydrogen/oxygen + other minor elements can produce and if there were some other useful biological molecule then it's difficult to imagine why it's not been 'discovered' and exploited already. That's not to say that the details won't differ - I'd have thought it virtual certain that a mix of different nucleic acids and amino acids would be used in different combinations with a different genetics etc etc, but I'd expect life to be grossly similar on similar planets, just differing radically in the details.
Outside that I'm very unconvinced by non-water or carbon based life. Silicon just doesn't form complex enough molecules so that's out. The next best bet seems to me to me ammonia based.
The submitter got it slightly wrong. First off, Margaret Turnbull's team came up with a list of 17,129 potentially habitable star systems in 2003, and the work she has done since has been to refine that list.
b le.shtml
What she announced yesterday were TWO "Top 5" lists. The first list includes the top 5 recommendations for a SETI search:
beta CVn
HD 10307
HD 211415
18 Sco
51 Pegasus
The second list includes the top 5 recommendations for the TPF to examine for Earth-like planets:
epsilon Indi A
epsilon Eridani
omicron2 Eridani
alpha Centauri B
tau Ceti
Why the difference? Well, the second list is of much closer stars, and much more likely to have planets that TPF can find and image. The first list has stars that are a bit farther away, but are, generally speaking, more like our Sun.
And here's a useful link:
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2006/0218habita
Bruce