Slashdot Mirror
'Hundreds of Worlds' in Milky Way
Raphael Emportu writes "BBC news is reporting
that rocky planets, possibly with conditions suitable for life, may be more common than previously thought in our galaxy, a study has found.
New evidence suggests more than half the Sun-like stars in the Milky Way could have similar planetary systems.
There may also be hundreds of undiscovered worlds in outer parts of our Solar System, astronomers believe.
Future studies of such worlds will radically alter our understanding of how planets are formed, they say."
No shit that there are other planets like ours out there. The incomprehensibly massive scale of the universe dictates it to be true, statistically-speaking.
Today, children receive next to no education in the field of astronomy. Were they to have a proper understanding of what lies beyond Pluto, they'd probably grow up to realize how silly it is to believe that there is only one planet like Earth.
Now, if we only had some means of reaching it...
The speed of light is a barrier like few the humanity has ever found.
Interesting, considering that just last night I was watching a documentary, on BBC4 no less, about rare earth theory and how miraculous it was that the conditions on earth are as they are.
...
Funny but, I couldn't shake the feeling that the reason conditions here on earth are so 'perfect' for life as we know it was more to do with life as we know it evolving to fit the conditions
Invaders must die
Wouldn't it be feasible that intelligent life could arise on a planet that is liquid?
... I'm not so sure, probably depends on your definition of intelligence. Complex social structures and communication ? Possible. Tool use ? I'd say that is less probable. In an aquatic environment, fins beat tool-compatible appendages any day.
Complex life, certainly. Intelligent
Wouldn't it be feasible that intelligent life could arise on a planet that is liquid?
Our own earthly cephalopods are pretty darned smart. Given the right conditions, it's not difficult to imagine a similar species attaining greater intelligence. Of course, such an intelligence, having developed in such an alien environment, would be radically different from ours. As Larry Niven says, there are brains out there that think just as well as yours...but differently.
Also, although an aquatic species could conceivably develop intelligence, I can't imagine what form its technology would take. With such elementary things as fire denied to them, it's doubtful that they could progress to any reasonable level.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The speed of light is not a deal-breaker. It means that, from *our* perspective, we'll send people to distant planets and never hear from them again. But from their perspective, it may be a few years. If interstellar travel actually happens, then the speed of light issue is just a managable logistical issue. It means that space-farers must be able to think for themselves. They already must be self-sufficient in other respects.
If there is a deal-breaker, then it is contruction and propulsion of such a craft. The vaster the craft, then the more unlikely it's construction. We might be able to fire ourselves off in a single direction, but how do we slow down, and what if we need to change course. If we need to come home, then we've doubled the energy required!
Then there are complex issues with people - our fragile minds and bodies. How do we react to the stress of space-travel, can we do it?
The speed of light seems like a comparatively simple issue.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I disagree. I understand the argument you are trying to make, but your "1 in a million" suggestions are really more akin to wild stabs at the biggest number you can think of, than they are reasonable guesses. 1:1000000 is really an unusually small ratio, and not as common as you intimate. It certainly has no actual relation to the situations that present themselves in the formula.
You can't simply spout a bunch of hyperbole and expect to be taken seriously. Especially in reply to an article that attempts to actually determine those numbers and percentages based on facts. This kind of talk is really no different from the comedy statement that "90% of people know that you can prove anything with statistics." It's meaningless.
While we will likely have to wait a whole lot longer for meaningful answers to the Drake equation, attempts at putting fact-based numbers on the variables should be applauded, and discounting them with what amounts to emotional hyperbole should be discouraged IMO.
>If we assume that the life we know started it's existence on earth, than the odds seem pretty
>damning. All known life on earth very likely comes from one source. It all has DNA and other
>similarities. After all these billions of years that life could come to exist on earth, it may have
>only happened exactly once.
No, you're overlooking something very important. Firstly, the chemisty of the Earth now is radically different to what it was when life first appeared. This difference is largely due to... life! Life has changed the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, the soil, even the rocks and the seas over the last however many billion years.
more importanly though, and perhaps not unrelated to the above point, is that new instances of life could be spontaneously emerging on Earth right now from whatever source originally spawned our microscopic ancestors. Maybe some new miracle is occurring in that unwashed coffee mug on your desk right now! However the environment in which any life arose would already be populated by bacteria, which are present just about everywhere on Earth, but which thrive particularly well in the kind of environment that would be friendly to an emergence. The newly emerged life form would be so incredibly basic- little more than self-replicating molecules- that they'd be utterly helpless against these more evolved life-forms and would be digested and made extinct almost instantly.
In short, once life has emerged and gained a foothold, you can expect it to spawnkill any subsequent emergences of life. This means you're unlikely to witness a second spontaneous emergence of life on any given world (Unless the first ecosystem is somehow wiped out altogether, down to the very last microbe, giving the second emergence a safe environment to develop in. This would be surprisingly hard to achieve. A nuclear war almost certainly wouldn't be enough. A nearby gamma ray burst, maybe?)
Except, we are in the midst of people arguing about exactly how intelligent cephalopods and sea based mammals are.
The truth of the matter is that we have no real way to gauge the intelligence of other alien life forms. Almost all tests are based on a set of assumptions. It is only fairly recently that we have even defined classes of intelligences within humans (Linguistic, Spatial, Musical, Body-Kinesthetic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Logical/Mathematical). It is entirely possible that intelligent life could evolve in aquatic environments that score extremely high in multiple categories there and we would have no real way of knowing. We know that there are a number of species that have highly evolved linguistic characteristics. But, what are they saying? Is it "See Spot Run"? Is it something profound? Is it elaborate fart jokes? It is entirely possible that the social structures are subtle enough that we have no means of determining how complex they are. When whale song can be heard from thousands of miles away, how do you determine the society that hears it and responds and the relationship between the one singing and the ones listening?
Someone once said that either we are alone, or we are not. Either answer is mind boggling.
My view is that we don't even know if we alone here on Earth, much less the universe.
#1 Never said it was impossible...only very difficult to maintain.
#2 A cycle DOES care how large it is. The larger, more complex the cycle the more places there are for slack in the system, the more complex it is the more control points you have and the larger the volume the more time you have to fix it before it starts reinforcing itself.
#3 In a larger system the materials and energy reuierments wouldn't be nearly as stringent and the system could have compensated before it crashed.
#4 Please site a reference for you comment on chaos theory. Everything I read suggests a very strong predictaive value (everything from projecting battery life to environmental effects)
#5 Exactly, I mean exactly like earth. Humans have had a reckless abandon for the care of the planet for well over 10,000 years. For example, before humans got there, the Saraha was about the size of New Hampshire...but with our greed and goats we over the last few thousand years finally got beyond the lands ability to recouperate and thus the current dessert formed quickly. If it wasn't for the self supporting and very large system of the earth, we would have made the planet unihabitable eons ago.
If it weren't for the size of the planet there would be no possible way we could see the change and fix it before the planet turned into an oven. As an example of how fast things can change read up on the precambrian explosion. The current geological evidence suggests that the earth's surface competly froze which locked away the biosphere to undersea volcanoes etc then drove the global temperature below -50 C. After a few 10's of thousands of years enough CO2 from volcanoes and dust and others caused a massive greenhouse effect which melted the ice and increased the global temperature by over 100 deg C in as little as 50 (thats fifty) years. After the biosphere was releaseed it was able to accomidate to the changes and tamp down the extremes.
#6 I was referencing the size quoted in the original comment. But as I already proved, smaller will be less stable, harder to maintain and more prone to accidents.
#7 Countries are actually VERY easy to leave. I can leave this country today if I want. The issue is taking the land with you. Once all the planets have been made into the cylinders, don't you think someone will object to one group trying to split one up? Remeber the Civil war was fought with a huge unexplored and availible bit of land nextdoor but they decided to fight over their current homes instead.
#8 Do you really beleive socialism is the route of all evil? Take a look at the Gilded age in the US... Take a look at the feudal system... All of one system NEVER works. We need a balanced system of capitalism to create the energy and vitality, socialism to protect the weak and the occasional dictatorship to keep things dynamic. If biology and evolution has taught us anything it is that thoes who fail to adapt will perish.
The most charitable interpretation of of your comment that I can stomach is that you mean "root language" in a non-standard way. Anything else would be wholly ignorant of basic historical and linguistic facts.
Where I come from (i.e., in linguistics), English is regularly referred to as a Germanic language. In English literature courses, professors in the know will tell you that, while most of our long words come from Latin through French, the short words and the structure are derived from German. There are divergences - e.g., in German one can say Einen Brief schreibt er seiner Mutter but not the word-for-word English version A letter writes he his mother - but they're accounted for and often accompanied by complementary changes elsewhere in the language. The very history of the development of the English language and people points to the influence of German (despite what this guy apparently thinks).
To me, all of this says "root language." Mere temporal separation isn't enough to remove that relation, as you seem to suggest. Beyond that, I have no clue what you seem to mean by the same phrase, so I won't hazard a guess.
So you can laugh all you want to...
> (Sorry to pick on you but your statments are a bit too Malthusian for the facts.)
:)
> We are going to develop a reliable renewable energy source (probably fusion and solar) before we trully "run out."
And yours are too optimistic. We've been in technological stagnation since 2000 and it's only going to get worse from now on. Research is not a high priority during a depression, and we are definitely heading for one now. I rather doubt we'll have fusion. For one, nobody is seriously working on it. The few projects in existence are just token government efforts "to be doing something". I do not expect them to succeed.
> Plus the mined resources aren't gone...they are in buildings.
Yes, they are. They are also in dirt. The reason we have ore mines is not that iron doesn't exist anywhere else, but that it's concentrated there and is in an easily extractable form. Abandoned skyscrapers will indeed have iron, but at a very low density. Most of it is embedded in concrete as rebar, making it very hard to extract by hand, and impossible to extract on industrial scale. The iron that's out in the open will rust after a few decades of exposure. How long will your house stand if you never fix roof leaks? Once it's rusted, the energy required to extract it becomes enormous. Industrial ores today are sulfides, which are easily melted. Melting rust is very very difficult by comparison.
> they are just harder more expensive to tap.
But that's the whole point. To us they are too expensive to tap now. To a civilization at 12th century level of technology it is impossible to reach at any cost. In fact, even that level requires abundant metal to reach. With all the surface metal gone, civilization might not be able to leave stone age. How will you build a modern mine with a flint axe and a wooden shovel? Or an oil well under the sea? The further you fall, the harder it becomes to climb back. If our civilization falls into stone age, it would quite likely just stay there.
> Actully whe have more proven reserves now than we did 50 years ago,
I would take the official "proven reserves" figures with a very large grain of salt. Some of them are just guesses. Others are outright lies. No, I don't have links, sorry
most of the extrasolar systems we've found also tend to have Jupiter-like and larger planets and that in the majority of cases, these planets are either fairly close to their stars or in highly eccentric orbits.
That's not an attribute of solar systems in general; it's an attribute of solar systems *we can detect* by viewing perturbations in a star's relative position. There's a reason the first planets have had extremely short orbits and extremely large mass. By virtue of the methodology, the larger the planet and the closer the orbit (which makes for a larger/faster wobble, respectively), the easier we can detect them. A planet with the mass of our Sun would still take centuries to detect with current technology if it had the orbital period of Pluto.
Granted, you qualified your statement, but then you went on to describe the likelihood of an Earth-like planet based on our limited findings. That's a bit like saying "The faintest stars we can see with the naked eye are magnitude 4, therefore it's unlikely that many stars are dimmer than that."
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