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When the Earth Was Purple
Ollabelle writes "It's always been a bit of a mystery why plants absorb red and blue light, reflecting green, when the sun emits the peak energy of the visible spectrum in the green. A new theory offers one possible answer: that the first chlorophyll-utilizing microbes evolved to exploit the red-and-blue light that older green-absorbing microbes didn't use, eventually out-competing them through greater efficiency and the rise of oxygen."
I agree. I sometimes wonder if there could even be upside-down life under us, at the interface of liquid vs solid rock. What would such life forms think the universe was like? Too bad there's no such evidence in lava-rock :-)
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
I can't understand people who think that to find life on other planets we have to look for conditions similar to Earth. All of the hubbub over liquid water seems so silly to me. We have *no idea* what life on other planets might be like. I think that the only thing to look for is patterns which we don't believe could occur in nature, suggesting that the anti-entropy force of life might be present.
That idea comes from the time before we started realising that the nutty Gia concept (of the earth as a living entity) was actually a hypothesis with more than a little proof to back it up. I'd go so far as to say it's a theory.
Thing is, no matter how far down we drill, we still find life, and no matter how cold or hot or dangerous (to us) an environ we find, there is always life there.
It's taken a long time for this realisation to permeate through the wider scientific community, and it's a long way from becoming accepted fact for the general public.
Anyway, I'm kind of a skeptic already, I don't think that looking for life outside our galaxy is particularly interesting or useful anyway, considering that the nearest life would be millions of years away by interstellar travel. Even if it's out there, we'll never meet it or communicate with it.
Given how many planets exist in our galaxy that are already inconceivably far away, including this new wet planet just 20 light years away (or 4 billion years travel time away at current technology levels that are capable of carrying people), you're right, inter galactic travel is something we shouldn't waste time thinking about.
Even if we did manage to find a way to do it, we could do little more then explore the minutest fraction of another galaxy. It would be pointless for all but a minority of pioneers willing to take the risk.
The problem with travel methods that let you go huge distances (wormholes, whatever, jolly fast stuff anyhow) is that they miss all the stuff between you and your destination. That is not the way true exploration works, likely we'd miss lots of interesting things.
Your idea of looking for non-natural patterns is interesting but note that it would very much limit search results to life so intelligent that like ourselves we would consider it above natural.
Non-natural patters wouldn't be some grid-shaped city. The basic non-natural pattern you can get is chemical non-equilibrium: if let alone, all the Earth oxygen would combine with some rocks and disappear. The presence of oxygen in the Earth atmosphere is a condition far from chemical equilibrium, and inequivocable proof that *something* keeps throwing the chemical balance out.
Hey, have you read Thomas Gold's book, THE DEEP BIOSPHERE? He believed that there are micro-organisms; just as you've described, living all through the Earth's crust, that excrete hydrocarbons and thus are the source of natural gas and petroleum. Thus there never was or will be "peak oil"; we'll never run out of "fossil" fuels because they're always being replenished.
Remember the future...