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Solar Systems Like Ours Are Likely To Be Rare
KentuckyFC writes "Astronomers have discovered some 250 planetary systems beyond our own, many of them with curious properties. In particular, our theories of planet formation are challenged by 'hot Jupiters,' gas giants that orbit close to their parent stars. Current thinking is that gas giants can only form far away from stars because gas and dust simply gets blown away from the inner regions. Now astronomers have used computer simulations of the way planetary systems form to understand what is going on (abstract). It looks as if gas giants often form a long way from stars and then migrate inwards. That has implications for us: a migrating gas giant sweeps away all in its path, including rocky planets in the habitable zone. And that means that solar systems like ours are likely to be rare."
Get Bruce Willis on the phone, time to go "Armageddon" on Jupiter's ass.
Sig? SIG? We don't need no stinkin' sig!!!
I didn't RTFA, but I will when I get home.
But on the surface it seems more to me that they're just saying that solar systems have a life cycle that is marked by the location of gas giants. I don't really think that means that our setup is rare.
But if I am misinterpreting the blurb and that is what they're proposing I would still say we need to hold our horses on any real judgement. We've found these solar systems because our current method of seeking these solar systems out is going to be more likely to find this kind of activity as opposed to what we have here at home. I think we're jumping the gun a bit on this one. I say let them work it out for a couple of more decades and even then we should be a bit more cautious about such sweeping statements.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I for one welcome our hot jovian overlord.
when they have capability of detecting Earth > Venus > Mars size planets
they don't have much data do they to base their theory on?
If gas and dust get blown away, what's to say that rocky planets weren't originally gas giants? It could be that the gases were (mostly) stripped away, leaving the core. Perhaps our rocky planets formed further out, migrated in, but found steady orbits as they lost mass.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
I thought it was commonly understood that for a solar system like ours to exist, that there needs to be a gas giant to act as a "protector" for the habitable planet(s). That is, the larger planet acts as a gravity well to lure some of the larger objects that could collide into the habitable planet. From the summary, it merely seems to be saying that the gas giant forms closer to the star than originally thought, but that it migrates outwards later in its life and helps to clear a zone for the habitable planet to exist.
I know there are many solar systems with inhabitable planets in the galaxy and others, I know it!
I've seen the documentary on TV!
What was it called... hmm Stargate, yes, that's it!
And the Ancients seeded life over all of them, they said so in Stargate Atlantis!
I suppose they didn't watch TV enough to have missed such a proof.
I can't follow 100% the article, so hopefully someone can clarify this point of curiosity for me.
Is one of the implications that solar systems could at one point be similar to ours? Gas giants far away with smaller planets towards the sun? And then the gas giants slowly creep towards the sun, wiping out the smaller planets that get in the way?
I think we're only seeing what the aliens want us to see.
That does not imply ours was created by a giant invisible bearded guy.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
... or should I start welcoming our Jovian overlords?
I just felt a great disturbance in the force, as if a great cry went up from thousands of dissapointed sci-fi geeks all at once.
"... Everything looks like a nail" situation to me. We've only really had the ability to discover LARGE planets around solar systems. Also, the shorter the orbit period, the easier it is to detect.
So logically, the planets we've found to date look NOTHING like those of our solar system. Jupiter's orbital period is 4332.71 days!!! And we are comparing that to the VAST majority of discovered planets(hot Jupiters) with orbital periods of less than 10 days?
Seems like this article belongs in the "Are US Voters Informed Enough About Science?" thread if you ask me.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Let's wait for another millennium before we jump to the answer.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
What will it take (global disaster?) for people to have enough evidence that we aren't going to be here forever and that it's time to wake up and move as quickly as we can toward the stars?
We won't be here forever. It may be a bit of an extreme notion, but perhaps the only truly useful pursuit (apart from Cowboy Neal jokes of course) for anyone is to try and get our civilization into space. If that's the next step in our evolution and we're not helping that, then (in a Nietszchean sense) then we are useless. Of course, it could be argued that various pursuits support this aim in a very ancillary way. What are YOU doing to help the pursuit of space?
Ok, now I'll go out on a limb. In a civilization that seems so bent on war and power and infighting, myabe the best thing really would be some sort of creepy world order that controls everything. Stay with me here a moment.
If this "world order" maintains fairly rigid control of people, what do they have to gain? Where can they go? Why have more wealth and power if one controls the world? The next step just might be the stars. If we can't get together and do it peacefully, is it better (or the only way) to be forced into it?
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I guess that means the chances of finding INTELLIGENT life out there just went UP a notch or two.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Even if solar systems configured like ours are rare, it doesn't suggest that is a problem for either the development of life or intelligence as we'd recognize it (and really is no problem for any other forms of "life").
A gas giant in the "habitable" zone may have multiple moons that end up habitable. If Jupiter was in Earth's orbit its entirely possible 2-3 or more of its moons would be habitable in some form.
That both increases the odds by having more places habitable, but increases the possibility of panspermia, so you could actually have greater diversity in that situation.
What should I be most afraid of, earth swallowed by a dying sun or swallowed by a wandering jupiter?
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
+1 informative
Actual data is highly biased towards gas giants in close orbits because that's what's easy to detect.
Simulations like these don't have sufficient real-world data to make any reasonable statements about what kinds of solar systems are likely.
Also, "rare" is a relative term; if 1% of all planetary systems contain a habitable planet, there would be a lot of them and they'd be rather closely spaced.
There are a multitude of reasons the formation of our habitable environment, and its intelligent habitation, are dependent on a finely-tuned universe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe
I'll avoid taking time now to argue I think this is indicative of Design, because I expect to see the usual spontaneous compulsory posts insisting it isn't indicative Design, as sufficient psychological indication of it being considered plausibly Design.
Methinks Thou Doth Protest Too Loudly.
If you think this off-topic, well, one question. Why would it matter how rare such events are? Just state it in your own words. There, thought so.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Nothing says "sanity" like a preemptive defense.
Ok, given that habitable (whatever that means) planets are rare, and life quite possibly more rare than that, is it naive of us to assume that every civilization's structure will allow it to move into space? On the other hand, what if ours is an ad hoc, inefficient way of being that will probably just get us wiped out in the end?
Also, until we can propagate beyond where we are now, aren't we essentially non-existent on the universal stage? We look for other forms of life, but if they suffer the same BS we do, then they might as well not exist in the first place either.
Pardon being off topic, but I just wanted to ask the questions.
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The reason we see so many hot Jupiters is because, having large masses and being close to their parents, they are by far the easiest planets to detect.
We won't be able to draw any real conclusions about other solar systems for quite some time yet.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Are you suggesting that Jupiters migrate?
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Incoming!
Diamond formation requires life? I never knew this.
And just for the record, I'm not an atheist but I do respect their ideas on things. It certainly doesn't hurt.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
It must be true, so far I have only found this one.
The Electric Universe theory contradicts Time Cube theory, and thus cannot be valid, as Time Cube theory encompasses everything.
In this incredibly vast universe, the coincidence is easier to believe.
Unless you're yanking our chain, then, I believe it's the work of Lord Brahma. He's sleeping now and dreaming of our existence.
No, I got a better one: we're the result of a particle physics experiment and due to relativity, our universe will last only a millionth of a second to the experimenter's frame of reference but to us, it lasts for billions of years.
It could be possibly that there are other life supporting planets in the galaxy and the planets' top scientists are saying the same thing about their solar system.
The problem with these sorts of conjectures is that 400,000,000 doesn't fit into our mind's eye, and so our feeling about what will fit within 400,000,000 years is wildly inaccurate.
For example, you can't feel about how many marbles will fit into 400,000,000 cubic feet without reconstructing the problem into mathematics.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Isn't this conclusion mainly inferred from our means of detection?
We most easily detect planetary systems with a big wobble due to a gas giant near the star, so those are the ones we see, and from that we conclude that most planetary systems have a gas giant near the star. Whoa.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What if scientists are just really wrong and turns out once you sample past those 250 that there are millions of solar systems like ours? then you would either have to think its not that far fetched that coincidences happen or that the Creator has OCD.
It's much easier to equate reality with coincidences
than the paranormal....
But as long as people want to believe in Santa Clause...why not.
End of Line.
Really, in terms of the universe, EVERYTHING is rare. Galaxies are rare. Stars are rare. Matter is rare. About the only thing that isn't rare is space itself. Draw a line segment across the universe, make it trillions of miles long. How many atoms did you actually touch with that line?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Seems like a whole bunch of unscience to me.
They're making ridiculous extrapolations based on observation biased evidence without having seen the full picture yet!
Basically we don't know how or why yet and we have to wait until we have big ass telescopes that can see ALL planets in a system orbiting the majority of stars we look at before we can even begin to make a decent theory.
Of course, researchers want publicity and funding so they make headlines and hype over nothing
*palms face*
Do you honestly believe they didn't take that factor into account ?
Astronomers would be the firsts to enjoy a theory that says that We Are Not Likely To Be Alone. Be sure that if this discovery is peer-reviewed, all these arguments have already been opposed.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I'll have you know that I have a nice summer home on the Red Spot of Jupiter and have lived there happily for quite some time so anytime you feel like dying please do drop by.
As it would to me.
The problem with these sort of assessments, particularly when it comes to understanding the universe around us at that scale, is that we are constantly working with what little "facts" that we have.
I am not saying that we should not be constantly guessing how the universe interacts around us, only that we take it with a grain of salt and think critically.
Essentially the less we know the more wild our guesses. The more assumptions that have to be made the the less likely whatever we come up with will reflect reality at all.
I would chalk all this up as "common sense", though that value seems to be a variable in many cases.
With every time that modern science is wrong, I'm more and more convinced of how little we really understand, and how we were irrefutably engineered and not the result of some random joining in a soup of amino acids.
How? When? Who? I don't know. God is as good a guess as anyone has at this point. If something went through the trouble of creating all this, wouldn't He/It give us some kind of advice, even if we didn't want to hear what He had to say? I know my 4 year old doesn't want to hear what I have to say either, but I'm trying to see that the boy sees 5 -- and that is a challenge.
Search, the answer is out there and the answer likely includes "keep searching".
Now we are told that our solar system with its incredibly beautiful planet that is our home might itself be very rare.
Don't believe everything you are told, question the article (like other commenters have done) and you might not end up blindly believing everything you read.
Recent analysis of ancient diamonds
Case in point: you're attaching quite a lot of weight to one article that "suggests that life may well have appeared on Earth long before the period of heavy-meteorite bombardment" based on the interpretations of light carbon values.
This is a big deal, because back when we only knew about our solar system, we formed theories to explain it. These theories imply that we wouldn't find many cases of large gas giants near suns. The current observations falsify these theories. We don't have to have a total picture of every planet in the vicinity to know that; detecting too many large planets is sufficient.
Your issue of our ability to detect only these types of planets is totally irrelevant to the main point about our theories making now-falsified predictions... which makes your accusation that others are misinformed about science that much more ironic. Perhaps you should be sure your ducks are in a row before accusing others of not understanding science.
I don't see any coincidence here. The probability that we were born on an habitable planet is 1.
Well, with trillions of planets and moons in our galaxy and trillions++ galaxies, you're saying there are a pot full of places in the universe like ours then?!
Seems like this article belongs in the "Are US Voters Informed Enough About Science?" thread if you ask me.
If you're an American then you made your own point. TFA isn't talking about observation, but theory and computer simulation.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Any argument concerning the improbability of life being created on its own can easily be eliminated by just adding an infinity into the equation. Whether the infinity is a universe of infinite size (which scientists believe is not the case, but there are a good bunch of theories that still allow for it by differentiating between the "universe" and the "observable universe", an infinite number of parallel universe, or an infinite number of "big bang-big crunch" cycles, once you have an infinity in the equation, the chance of life existing becomes 1.
I am an orthodox Jew. Nonetheless, I strongly believe that you can never prove whether or not a Creator exists.
The interesting data is not how many hot Jupiters are found, but how many stars do not have hot Jupiters.
Here's a list of extrasolar planets (last updated in January); and another list. Note the large number of stars that have planets found with mass less than Mj. The converse of that is that those stars do not have planets of mass greater than Mj. The problem, of course, is that negative results are much less published than positive results. However, here is a list of three published papers that listed stars with no planets found (that is, no planets large enough to detect-- which is to say, no hot Jupiters. This list is somewhat out of date, as of 2006.)
So the story is a little incomplete. Some solar systems have hot Jupiters, which in their migration inward disrupt smaller, earthlink planets... but by no means all.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Best estimates put us at 30 billion planetary systems in the Milky Way galaxy alone. If only 0.0001% of those planetary systems holds an Earth-like planet capable of sustaining life, that's 3 million Earths, just in the Milky Way. Now consider that figure holds for all galaxies. A conservative estimate from Nasa's scientists puts the universe at 125 billion galaxies. That's 3 trillion 750 billion planetary systems. If only 0.0001% of those systems are host to life-sustaining Earth-like worlds, that's 375 billion Earths in the universe. Perhaps that is rare, considering how stupidly big our universe is... but that is still a hell of a lot of Earths.
I want to know why no one is talking about vibrations!
Vibrations are all that matters...vibrations are the ripple-effects of the big bang - or did the vibration harmonics actually start the Big Bang?
Or are the vibrations just an on-going thing without beginning or end - just more cycles?
how many stars are in the Milky Way? 200 billion? So, if only one in a million produces an Earth like planet, then there are 200,000 Earth like planets in the Milky Way.
Not that it matters since there is no way for us to get to, or communicate with, even the nearest stars.... right now.
These ideas aren't _directly_ coming from the admittedly biased detection of large gas giants with close in orbits. Everyone knows that the detection scheme we use is biased to find them, and it would be impossible to find many systems like ours using it. But that doesn't really matter at all. The very fact that Hot Jupiters exist at all, have big implications to how systems form.
Finding these big planets close in meant that old planetary formation theories had to be revised. New theories, based off how these planets could form at all, state that planets don't form in place - they form farther out and migrate in. It also means the Solar System is lucky Jupiter stopped where it did - if it migrated further inwards all the planets in the inner solar system would've been flung into space...
It seems like every other day there's a new article/paper/prognostication conclusively demonstrating the rarity/abundance of Earth-like planets/systems. Honestly, at this point I'm just going to hold my judgment until I can get out there and see for myself.
If you're wondering if Earth is going flying into space during the lifespan of our species... probably not. But over the lifespan of the Sun... there's a good chance that one or more of the inner planets is in trouble before the Sun goes nova.
If the universe is truly infinite, then even if our solar system is a rarity, there is still an infinite number like it.
Outsider theories always have the burden of proof on their own shoulders. To paraphrase someone famous, "there are many questions fools can ask that wise men struggle to answer." There's no where this applies more than in science. Creation Science can throw out some sticky questions and make some points that are hard to disprove.
But Science is about proving things, not suggesting every possible idea and disproving them one by one. For a well established idea that has made a lot of successful predictions, even a known incomplete idea like the standard cosmological model, to be tossed aside, there needs to be an overwhelming amount of evidence, not just some compelling questions.
If an alternative model of the universe explains the preponderance of evidence we already have (such as the background radiation, the count of galaxies, the scarcity of structures above a certain scale, the calculated mass of galaxies, the total amount of gamma radiation etc.) as well as a current theory, as well as making successful new predictions that existing models failed to make, then over a process of several years, people in the field would become convinced, and as the literature is peer reviewed, the dogma would shift. But established scientific ideas are SUPPOSED to be dogma. It isn't politics. Equal time isn't given to competing ideas, that's not the way it works. There are too many bad scientists and professional crackpots, the system would collapse without a hierarchy of opinion.
And all science works this way and always has. Even the sciences that cure disease and deliver technological miracles. Since those things keep happening, I'm confident as a semi lay person that science, while certainly getting many small details wrong and making mistakes and sometimes taking too long to come to the right conclusions, is still heading in a monotonically positive direction.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
in a (nearly?) infinite universe. More like "really far apart".
> Be sure that if this discovery is peer-reviewed, all these arguments have already been opposed.
I'm professional astronomer and have been for nearly 20 years. I've published dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles, including a dozen about exoplanets. I've been the peer-reviewer for many journal articles. Astronomers (and probably scientists in general, though I can't say that for sure) do not necessarily reject a research paper just because we disagree with some of the assumptions or inferences. Peer-reviewers critique methodolgy and discourage over-interpretion of data (or models, in the case of this paper), but scientific progress requires broad discussion of new ideas, so even speculative papers get published. This system places a burden on those who read journal articles. The reader must evaluate the methodolgy in the paper and decide whether or not the result is credible.
Yes, our theories were WAY off. No one predicted that these hot Jupiters were out there. Now they make up almost all of the planets we've detected to date. The point I was trying to make is that we can't detect solar systems like ours yet. Unless MAYBE it was in the alpha centaurus system and then MAYBE if it's Jupiter equivalent were to pass in front of one of the stars.
Please, tell me how many exosolar planets we've found with orbital periods greater than 365 days? How about 4000+ days like Jupiter?
Talking about how rare we are, without even another example, because we lack the ability, is just another theory that will fall - kinda like the planet formation theories that lacked the ability to predict "hot Jupiters". Now they have gone to the other extreme and theorized that EVERY solar system starts out with hot Jupiters. You know, because that is all we can presently detect.
How is that irrelevant? It's EXACTLY the "To a hammer, all looks like a nail" analogy I started with. Since that is all we have the ability to find at present, now all solar systems must start out that way?!?!?!?
This is the same mistake all the theorists made to start with, since all we had was our own solar system to base this upon. Now they have gone exactly the opposite way in their theories which is repeating the same mistake they initially made.
Yes, you adapt your theories based upon more and more observational data. But when you KNOW your observational data is limited to one subset of possible outcomes(which makes our own solar system damn near impossible to form) and you claim "victory", that's just very illogical to me.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
While there may be lots of systems like Sol, there is really no reason to expect there are. Here is another difference, our system formed shortly after a near by supernova. How do we know this? Because of the decay remnants from short lived isotopes in meteors. Because the isotopes are so short lived and occur in such relatively large numbers we know the supernova must have been recent. The energy from this decay melted the early earth. That, btw, is why most of the iron is in the center.
Look up the term "iron catastrophe" for more information.
Of course, the universe is pretty big I hear so if you look far enough you will find another earth I guess. Still, keep good care of the planet we have. It just might be really valuable.
everything looks like a good vibration" situation to me.
But Science is about proving things, not suggesting every possible idea and disproving them one by one.
Where on Earth did you get that idea? One of the first things you learn about science is that it doesn't prove anything, only disprove. The scientific method is a three step process:
You observe phenomenon, create a theory that explains it and makes some predictions and then test these predictions. If the observations don't match the predictions you either discard or refine the theory. If they do, then you keep it around until you find some new observations that don't match up with the predictions.
The reason creationism is not science is that it makes no testable predictions. Whether it is true or not can not be tested and so is an irrelevant question to science.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Lipid membranes can be generated in laboratory conditions in a few days. I'm pretty sure 400 million years provides plenty of time for it to happen somewhere on the earth.
FFSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. I hate teh universe. fuckccccckkiiiittttttttttttttt shit stars my asssssszzz.
(From the Galileo Wiki) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_probe#Galileo.27s_atmospheric_entry_probe
"The 339 kilogram atmospheric probe, built by Hughes Aircraft Company at its El Segundo, California plant, measured about 1.3 meters across. Inside the heat shield, the scientific instruments were protected from ferocious heat during entry. The probe had to withstand extreme heat and pressure on its high speed journey at 47.8 km/s.
The probe was released from the main spacecraft in July 1995, five months before reaching Jupiter, and entered Jupiter's atmosphere with no braking beforehand. It was slowed from the probe's arrival speed of about 47 kilometers per second to subsonic speed in less than 2 minutes."
Do you know why they though solar systems like ours would be common? Computer simulations of solar system formation. In fact, the "standard model" was even published in Creative Computing, back in the day...
What were these models based on? The only example of a solar system we knew; our own. "Of course" there will be rocky planets near the sun and gas giants further out, it only makes sense.
So then we get better telescopes that can detect Jupiter-sized planets, and they show us lots of systems with gas giants in close. The model, based on a single example, is wrong. So we re-jigger the model to match the new observations, and conclude THAT one must be right.
$50 says once the interferometric planet finders come online this model goes into the trash heap as well. The universe clearly doesn't give a crap about our models, and builds whatever it wants.
Maury
Why not send a large enough vehicle to launch an orbital string of probes, some of which are repeaters, some of which are trackers to receive from and monitor other vehicles until they ARE crushed. One or two vehicles could be of extraordinary strength, maybe Sputnik-looking spheres to withstand as much as a gas giant might dish out, or maybe Jupiter, or Uranus. Of course, i expect there to be a lot of puns about spheres and Uranus-gazing.
But, as for probing gas giants, aren't they so vastly far away from us that any data they return home would be outdated by the time humanity (if it) progresses to that point, technology and better materials might make personal travel more feasible, and touchy-feely -- assuming no black holes or no wormholes open up near the Moon.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I wonder how common it is for there to be a reverse of our solar system? That is, as observed, gas giants migrate their way into the inner solar system, but some dynamic allows rocky planets to form outside their orbits? Would the new pull from the star destabilize the orbits of moons like Io and Ganymede and occasionally send them into a stable orbit? Or, would the gravity crush them into dust allowing new planets to form?
Science is about proving things, not suggesting every possible idea and disproving them one by one.
Exactly the opposite is true. Science is never about proving anything. Mill's "black swan" analogy illustrates how we can make reasonable inferences and still be wrong because nature is otherwise. Every swan you've ever seen is white, so you think "all swans are white, and certainly none are black!" Upon discovering that some swans are black, the rule is not so fast. It might be tempting to claim that no swans are plaid, but even this is not provable. Nature could turn out to be different than it appears.
Creation Science can throw out some sticky questions and make some points that are hard to disprove.
They cannot be disproven, even in principle, and this is the last bastion of special creationists; they know nobody can prove so much as "the world wasn't created 5 minutes ago, with all its state and photons in flight and past memories in place", and they prey on people who think this is a failure of science. Doing science is about making wise inferences, and claiming special creation is not wise inference because empirical evidence detracts from (but does not *disprove*!) it.
established scientific ideas are SUPPOSED to be dogma.
No, scientific ideas are supposed to be meritorious.
It isn't politics. Equal time isn't given to competing ideas, that's not the way it works.
What you mean to say is that science isn't democratic. This is a result of its being a meritocracy and not a feel-good daycare where every idea gets a shot no matter how unmeritorious it may be. The following statement is a corollary:
the system would collapse without a hierarchy of opinion.
Quite right. The hierarchy of which you speak arises because not all ideas have equal merit; that is to say, not all ideas are equally scientific.
It would be saddening to me (and maybe to many others) if it turns out that there IS only EARTH. Humanity should have sentient, space-faring or space-capable counterparts in the future. Partly because there seems to be enough solar systems that *might* sustain systems like ours. Partly because humans don't singly deserve to roam uninhibited among the stars. Humans, if they/we ever make it into space will most definitely deserve or warrant having potential "keep-in-check/we'll KICK-your-ASS-if-you-get-expansionist-on-the-'Verse" guardians out there.
Human history has shown that however creative and compassionate we are as a species, there are always robber-barons, hyper-industrialists, phony or selfish mega-wealthy types, and innumerable war-mongering cretins down here who do NOT deserve to be given a legacy or say in hijacking resource out there. Maybe in our OWN solar system, but once we encounter other life out there, I sincerely hope they are more enlightened yet quite willing to put humans in "the penalty box" when humans get out of hand.
But, realistically, if they are non-interventionist (until humans royally dick-up), it could be QUITE a while before humans are allowed to find and report incontrovertible proof of non-human intelligence out there. So, the longer we are "deprived" of proof of intelligent space-faring beings out there, the longer we are granted a Nature's Reprieve to clean up our act down here. Based on my observations of history -and ESPECIALLY today's "leaders", it's a good thing that *i* am not the one (if anyone would be) designated to stand "failsafe watch", hand over the red button to shut down humans. (I am assuming the button would be watched for the time just before humans commit the worst of worst egregious acts, like trying to hijack other sentient beings' worlds...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
You don't have to disprove them all. Otherwise you'd have to prove that dew isn't formed by sad elves with green jackets crying on the lawn. Or elves with red jackets. Or gnomes with green jackets and red hats and only one leg ...
The range of hypotheses needing to be tested isn't infinite - it's informed by and based on the obsevation. Otherwise we'd be here all week.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Hmm. Every time our knowledge of the universe expands, there is always a group of scientists who rush to say that the new evidence indicates that we are, in one way or another, the center of the universe. And when that conclusion is invalidated by still more new evidence, they go hunting for another reason to reinstate their conclusion. The "Rare Earth" faction is just the latest iteration of the same deep-seated emotional bias that gave us geocentrism.
We have exactly one stellar system that we have studied in detail and exactly one example of a living ecosystem, and all our knowledge of other stellar systems comes from techniques that exclusively detect stellar systems with a massive planet in a tight orbit around its star. It seems to me that our sample size is too small to reach any conclusions at all, and until we have better tools for observing other stellar systems in high detail, discussions about what constitutes a "normal" stellar system barely rise above the level of pure speculation.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
The most important thing that you need to understand is that the large number of "hot jupiters" that have been found have essentially disproven existing theories of solar system formation. This is not a case where a new theory is proposed to replace an existing theory that already explains most of the evidence ala Einsteinian physics replacing Newtonian physics. This is a case where we have essentially no theory at all that explains the observed evidence.
The cake is a pie
I am an orthodox Jew. Nonetheless, I strongly believe that you can never prove whether or not a Creator exists.
That should read: I am an orthodox Jew and therefore, I strongly...
I am also an orthodox Jew, and the existence of God is a matter of faith. If it could be proven, it wouldn't be a matter of faith.
Doesn't seem to work out for me. Their logic is that star systems have a timeline related to gas giants, so star systems like ours are rare? I guess the problem here is the totally subjective word "rare" But I don't see how star systems nearly the same age as ours (far gas giants) can't be just as common as star systems that are older (near gas giants) So rare? probably, but same way you could say "people who live with their parents are rare, because when people get older they generally move out of their parents house" (and we're talking all people, not just adults)
Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
electric universe explains it much better.
Maybe you should elaborate on that. EU theory is pretty expansive (and radical)
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Diamond formation requires life? I never knew this.
No, diamond formation does not require life. If you RTFA, it referred to the "carbon" in the diamonds...in particular to the presence of high concentrations of carbon-12 which is a feature usually associated with organic life. The presence of the carbon-12 in the diamonds suggested that the 4.2 billion-year-old diamonds [which are composed of carbon] were formed at a time when life was present on the earth.
It begins to feel like believing that Tolstoy's "War and Peace" was written by a chimpanzee repeatedly pressing every key on a computer keyboard at random for years until the combination that created a great novel occurred.
Solar Systems Like Ours Are Likely To Be Rare
um... duh?
...I strongly believe that you can never prove whether or not a Creator exists.
Certainly not with the information available to us at present and in the forseeable future. However, as scientific discoveries have been made, it has become more difficult than it was before those discoveries were made to believe that a creator does NOT exist.
Arthur C. Clarke started doing that ages ago.
But space, the planets and galaxy are too numerous to imagine. Basically infinite.
Rare x Infinite = Infinite
They might be thousands of lights years apart, but there are still billions of them.
This is one of two truly insightful comments in the entire thread. The other post is about how gas giants that wander towards the star might have their gasses blown away by the star over time, and leave only the core.
Just because the configuration of a star system isn't exactly like ours, doesn't mean it can't support life. Our gas giants have a multitude of moons, many of whom are very close to Earth in composition. And it's not like gas giants suddenly up and leave their moons behind when they head towards the sun. If any of them wandered closer to the sun, I'll bet some of those moons will have a high probability of life.
Furthermore, the smaller rocky planets in the center certainly have a chance of becoming the moon of a gas giant as it passes by. Granted, any existing complex life on those planets might be wiped out by the change, but that doesn't mean new complex life wouldn't arise afterwards once the gas giant settles into a stable orbit.
The conclusion that our type of system is rare is probably valid based on the new models. But the conclusion that intelligent life is equally as rare is probably invalid.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Occam's Razor aside, I doubt there is one theory or computer simulation that can account for every instance of solar system formation. If these guys are right, then the old theory did not cover a great percentage of the systems that are out there. I reckon we will find out that the new theory also doesn't cover every instance, and as others have pointed out, even 1% of a huge number is also a huge number.
As far as being American, every country has it's share of idiots. Typically, it is a bell curve, with 20% being exceptional, 80% being average and 20% dumb as stumps. I have lots of observational data of this phenomenon. I also have a theory and computer simulation, if that helps.
Personally I think it's hard to decide if our planetary system is rare or not just by computer simulations. There are too many factors involved to make it easy to calculate how a planetary system evolves.
There have been many guesses over the last century about how the planets did form. But from the data we now have from a few other planetary systems we can at least say that a few of them have large planets (gas or not remains to be seen).
And what would say that a planet has to be the size of earth to provide for life? A gas giant may be good for life too, but maybe not the life we know here.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Plan to get your degree in terraforming to help create better worlds for the future colonies. Please remember to leave the pax out of the air processors though.
But that doesn't make it less likely that life cannot start or flourish in other types of solar systems?! Until we are sure of all types of solar systems that can allow for life, it's all moot.
You and colmore are both right. Colmore beautifuly summarized how science actually operates. Your observations reflect understandings gleaned from the philosophy of science, in particular Karl Popper's falsifiability criteria. Popper developed this idea to show how one can delineate science from pseudo-science. It is a valuable philosophical insight and is useful as a criteria of demarcation between science and unscientific ideas. But, it is not a good foundation for understanding the actual methodologies used by science. Actual science proceeds based on some assumptions such as the uniformity of natural causes that cannot be proven, but which underlay belief in the validity of probabilistic induction and the idea that science illuminates "truth" in some sense and gives us greater knowledge of reality.
But Science is about proving things, not suggesting every possible idea and disproving them one by one.
I know what you're getting at, but that sentence is just plain wrong since science doesn't prove. But it's like ripping out ten pieces of a puzzle because you insist there's one piece that fits instead and hammer it in, ignoring that now nothing else matches. Established theories are often not wrong, just limited in scope.
Since those things keep happening, I'm confident as a semi lay person that science, while certainly getting many small details wrong and making mistakes and sometimes taking too long to come to the right conclusions, is still heading in a monotonically positive direction.
What I like best is that science has become so much more accessible. Doesn't mean that everybody will care but you don't have to look very far if you're interested.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That only works if you can see the results of all the trials.
As it stands, we only have the ability to detect very large planets that are very close to their primary, and even so only a vanishingly small percentage of them. That would be like (modifying your example):
-- MarkusQ
I was under the impression that there was in fact only one "Solar" system, the planetary system based on the star "Sol". This would make the chances of another one extremely unlikely.
Our knowledge is nowhere near thorough enough to make a call like that. We've identified 250 planetary systems, all closer than 100 light years, and we haven't even begun to image terrestrial-type planets yet. Saying this would be like saying all the beaches of the Earth are composed of igneous black sand on the basis of the black sand beach in Hawaii. We still only have a couple of pieces, it's a bit premature to say what the puzzle is a picture of.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
I mostly agree with you except for some of your language use. You say that science is about proving things. This isn't the case. Almost nothing produced by science constitutes a proof. Instead, science is about argumentation to the best explanation. There is no proof that we are made up of atoms, for instance, there is only a huge body of evidence that supports the claim.
Or for another example: there is no proof that the universe doesn't revolve around the earth. Perhaps it does and the movements of the bodies in space are a lot different than we have currently imagined. What we've done by saying the earth revolves around the sun is given a really really really plausible explanation for why we observe certain phenomena but we haven't proven anything.
Proof gets a truth. Science gets at plausibility. A mathematical proof is true-is true-is true... there are no possible worlds where the assumptions made in a mathematical truth are true and yet the conclusion false. Science on the other hand tends to be called "true" but only so long as our evidence continues to support our theories.
Science can disprove certain types of claims. But proving things is not usually within its grasp.
The more you read and learn about what it took to make the Earth what it is, the more unlikely it would seem that worlds like ours would happen.
If (for instance) only 10,000 such earthlike planets exist, what are the odds that anybody with a radio has been broadcasting during an appropriate time frame that we could hear them?
www.seti.org
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Very cool idea!!
Expensive too.
Can we send an iPhone?
NO SIG
it could mean that as our solar system is quite young, the large gas giants have yet to sweep inwards towards the sun. Plenty of time yet, but I doubt I'll see it happen.
The range of hypotheses needing to be tested isn't infinite - [...o]therwise we'd be here all week.
Well color me impressed.
Your brain is not a computer.
IIRC the Milky Way has 100M stars (and is 100k light years across; call it a flat disk for an "area" of 7.8B LY^2)
Your .000001% probability works out to 1/10^8, so 100*10^6 / 10^8 = 1, i.e. us. So GWB is the most powerful guy in the galaxy
Take out a couple of zeros and it's 100, spread out (uniformly, a guess) over 7.8B LY^2, or 8,800 light years apart.
Of course who knows the real probability (it is exactly N/100M, except we don't have N) but from your numbers we won't be seen green folks for a while.
At 0.010c we'd have ~880k years to reach the next one, so it's doable (by robots) before the sun conks out or the Andromeda merger.
Proof like court, not like math. Beyond reasonable scientific doubt.
I guess this little sub-thread is about what constitutes reasonable scientific doubt.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Cassini-Huygens is orbiting Saturn right now. New Horizons said hi to it last month when it passed Saturn orbit. It's now on its way towards Pluto. But then, it's still just following in the footsteps of its brother Voyager 2, which visited all four gas giants in our solar system and is now putting around in interstellar space.
So the answer to your question is no.
It wasn't 20 years ago when we hadn't detected another planet yet and we didn't know if planets formed around other stars. Now we know they are common, but the ones we detect are large and close to the sun. There's a reason for this: the method we use to detect extrasolar planets works by detecting the gravitational tug between the planet and star by the changing of the star's luminosity over time. If there's a 72 hour cycle where the star dims and brightens, then we know there is a planet in a 3-day orbit around the star. We know how far from the star it is by using the orbital period and the mass of the star. We know the mass by how much the star's luminosity is affected.
There is noise in the observations caused by regular luminosity changes in the star, like from sunspots. The larger and closer the planet to the star, the bigger the change in luminosity and the easier it is to separate that signal from the noise. Also the closer planets give more data to work with. If the star has a 72 hour orbit, you will be able to see a complete cycle every three days. If the planet is like Jupiter, it could be 5 AU from the sun and have an orbital period of 12 years.
Their entire reasoning appears to be based on the assumption that a body the size of these 'hot Jupiters' couldn't form that close to the star because the solar wind would drive the gas away. If that were truly the case, then a star couldn't form at all because the solar wind would drive all of its gases away. If the main gas for the planet accumulates prior to solar ignition then there isn't a problem. This new survey only looked for super-Jupiters that are 5 or more times the size of Jupiter, and that are twice as far away from their star as Jupiter is from Sol. The thing is that if a planet gets to be about 13 times the size of Jupiter then it starts to fuse deuterium and becomes a star. We have found many binary stars that would meet the criteria sought, but that don't count because the mass of the "planet" was too big and it became a star.
These are great questions to ask, but I don't know why the media portrays it as such a surprise that things can be like our solar system. Is anyone really surprised that we found water on Mars? Earth has plentiful water, comets are mostly water, Cassini observed water geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. Water is simply the combination of the first and third most plentiful elements in our universe, and the second most plentiful element doesn't chemically bond. Water should be the most abundant molecule in the universe after H2.
This article is a good example. It seems to claim that a solar system would need a planet like Jupiter for there to be life. In one paragraph they say that Jupiter prevents the inner planets from being bombarded by too many space rocks, and in the very next paragraph it says Jupiter perturbs the orbit of space rocks to make them hit Earth, seeding it with water and organic molecules. We don't know enough about formation of planetary systems to say that one would need a Jupiter-like planet for life to form. It sounds like the people that claimed 20 years ago that planetary systems would be very rare before we found our first extrasolar planet (we've found hundreds now).
I'd like to see the whole paper and look at their models. I'd like to know what would cause a planet that formed over millions of years in the outer solar system to move in closer to the star. When it forms, it has an orbital velocity relative to the center of gravity of the system. In order to migrate closer to the star, some other massive object would have to slow it down, wouldn't it?
The most important thing that you need to understand is that the large number of "hot jupiters" that have been found have essentially disproven existing theories of solar system formation.
To be more precise, the existence of Hot Jupiters shows that some, but not all, of the features of older models of solar system formation are not correct,
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You can send Little Orphan Annie, if you want.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
You don't have to disprove any that don't produce testable predictions. None of your examples produce any predictions, and so are not scientific hypotheses.
If you have two hypotheses that give the same predictions then you apply Occam's razor and take the simpler one (although you often keep the more complex one around in case you find any future observations that conflict the with the simpler one's predictions). Any hypothesis which is simpler than existing ones, does not conflict with any existing evidence, and produces testable predictions, is valid science and needs to be tested.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
As a working scientist: no he (colmore) didn't. Although his intentions were good.
In science you make some assumptions when creating your theory, but if you find evidence that indicates those assumptions are likely false then it's time to make a new theory. That INCLUDES such assumptions as the universe being consistent.
An excellent example of just that idea is quantum mechanics. The universe, it seems, isn't consistent in quite the way that classical physics thought it was: a cause doesn't always produce the same effect. When we discovered this, we designed quantum mechanics to take this aspect into account.
Both you and colmore use the word "prove." Science is not about proving things, and of course you cannot prove assumptions, or anything else, for that matter. In science there is no proof, because there is always the possibility that you will find a counterexample.
I think you mean that the burden of evidence is on the challenger. A better way to say it is that a new theory must be better than the theory it replaces, where "better" is a combination of correctly explaining more old observations, correctly predicting new observations, and preferably doing so more simply.
You don't prove anything, not even in a court sense. What you do is show that your theory works better than the old one(s). If your theory involves displacing many older theories then it better work very well indeed, in all of the areas that the old theories do.
An even better idea: A pertinent end to the little bitch.
NO SIG
LOL! ROTFLMMFAO,TIME!
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
thanks for the laughs, nice entertaining way to make your point.
BTW, i think you meant "IMpertinent"...hehehe, which could justify launching her into a gas giant, or into the rings of Saturn...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The presence of the carbon-12 in the diamonds suggested that the 4.2 billion-year-old diamonds [which are composed of carbon] were formed at a time when life was present on the earth.
If the diamonds are 4.2 billions years old, ALL the carbon will be carbon-12 no matter the source of the original carbon. Any carbon-14 would have decayed within a matter of 10's of thousands of years (that's why carbon-12 dating isn't accurate past 30,000 years or so.)
...we have never (to my knowledge...) sent a probe INTO one of the gas giants.
NASA's Gallileo spacecraft sent a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere on December 7th, 1995. It entered at about 106,000mph and lasted about an hour, dropping down about 124 miles and recording winds up to 450mph until finally melting.
Impetuous! Homeric!
Define rare? I hardly think that saying 1 in ~250 systems has a structure similar to our own counts as "rare". Scientists have documented an infinitesimal number of systems within our galaxy.
I would put this one down to lack of data. We're searching a small section of the galaxy and finding nothing, when not too far away is a whole cluster of systems with Earth-like planets in the habitable zone.
True randomness has clusters, not even distribution.
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Well no, i really meant i hate her little readheaded ass i would wish she had never been here in the first place.
NO SIG
The one-in-a-trillion coincidence.
We couldn't possibly have become on any of the other 999,999,999,999 planets, and thus would totally be unable to say "I wish we were one of those lucky 0.000000000001 species".
Coincidence? More like inevitability.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
which is then savagely generalized to come up with the unwarranted conclusion that systems like ours are rare. They've got 250 systems observed, wrote a model to match that observation, then decided that the computer model is now the new thinking behind planet formation. It's only a computer model, and we have billions of more datapoints to collect. It ain't time to generalize yet.
You're 100% on target, your point is precisely what previous "selection bias" arguers missed.
But there's still a problem, not with the bias introduced by the limits of current technology to detect Earth-like planets, but with the bias introduced by being unable to detect "cold" Jupiters just like our own. If by some refinement in detection technology/technique we start finding two or three orders of magnitude more cold Jupiters than hot Jupiters then the previously existing theory of solar system formation is again preferable.
So my question would be: how good are we at finding cold Jupiters? If they were there, would we find them with current state-of-the-art, or we could be missing them even if they were relatively common?
The difference is, if Tolsty's "War and Peace" is to resemble sentient life, then only once will there be something to say "Wow, what were the chances of me existing?". There's a lot of planets out there and I'd bet every one of them that hosts life has been subject to the same incredulity.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
That our type of solar system is rare, well, that wouldn't surprise me in a bit, else, life out there could be so common that eventually, it would actually be quite, uh.. ordinary.
But then again, if one where to come up with an estimate on the odds of such systems, based on the amount of systems, galaxies, etc...
This is a rather very large universe, so I would wager there are indeed more out there.
Likely to be rare, yes, but probably still for sure.
We just eventually need to "go" out there and look for ourselves! :)
After all, what we see in the sky isn't representative of what is, but rather of "what is being projected to us" in our time, based on how long it took for this projection to be visible to us.
So, when we have the capability of visiting these systems and/or viewing them in some form of "real time" ways, then, we could be surprised! :) Don't you love sci-fi? ;)
Think of this too. One of our methods of detection is called 'occlusion'. This means that the planet has to get between us and its central star, 'occluding' it. This only works if the plane of planetary orbit of that star is coplanar with our system's planetary orbital plane. I would think that this is very rare. Also, we tend to detect large 'hot jupiters' with this method. O really!? Could it be that 'hot jupiters' tend to occlude more easily their central star, being MUCH nearer, than a cold jupiter. Also, a cold jupiter orbiting once every thirty years or so would be a bitch of an event to wait for when you could rush to publish a lot more 'hot jupiters' and get credit while you still have some career left in front of you. One more thing, if our system and the target system is even a tiny bit non coplaner with our solar system, a cold jupiter would be impossible to detect by 'occlusion', whereas a 'hot jupiter' would be more 'fault tolerant'. Our other method of planet 'detection' involves 'wobble'. This is subject to some of the same sources of error. Large object close to star will have more tidal forces and more wobble factor. One more thing, a group of planets constituting a solar system will tend to act as one large planet at the centroid of mass and orbital velocity of all the masses of the system acting together. This could be a complicated pathway, but at a distance may appear to be yet another large and relatively closely orbiting 'virtual' planet. Our total study has come up with about 250 planets among just a few more than the same number of stars. That ought to tell us that planets are the mundane residents of most stars. There are BILLIONS of stars in our own galaxy alone. Better technology and lots of time will reveal the folly of abusing the pseudo-science of statistics with small sample generated riotous conclusions. Better yet, our television signals will one day do the job for us as we alert the neighbors that one more race of idiots has arisen among them. The first face the aliens see of of us will probably be Homer Simpson or Maury Povich....or maybe Paris Hilton!?
Just wondering if, by your own logic, you would say that string theory is a science or not. For that matter, how far in to physics would you assert your position?
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Humanity is only in the beginning stages of being able to detect planet in other solar systems. I have confidence that further development and perfection of systems for astronomy of planets.
....But established scientific ideas are SUPPOSED to be dogma....
Wow! All these years I thought that science is about experimentation and observation! I have always associated dogma with religion and to a lesser extent philosophy, but definitely NOT science.
If you would study the history of science, you would quickly learn that most scientific progress was not by consensus or committee, but by individuals or sometimes small groups. Let me give you just one example:
After Galileo invented the telescope, astronomers could see the moons of Jupiter. At that time, the accepted scientific consensus was that light travelled in zero time. Experiments with lanterns with shutters on separated mountain tops "proved" this.
A lone Danish astronomer named Olaf Roemer noticed that the jovian moon Io emerged measurably later than orbit calculations warranted. Roemer postulated that this was because of a finite, not infinite speed of light. It took over 50 years for the scientific establishment to finally come around to accepting this fact.
There are many such instances in the halls of science where the establishment was wrong and a lone voice crying in the wilderness was correct. Nothing becomes obsolete faster than a textbook of science.
All theory is gray
Of the lost coin at night - you look by the streetlight, not because that is where it is most likely to be, but because that is where you can see. We can detect 'hot jupiters' We cannot detect Earthlike planets. Jupiters and Saturns are very hard to find, and take many years to prove, so even most of the ones found won't have been reported yet. Don't they teach logic to science students anymore? Afraid it will lead them to question the Dogma of Evolution?
The reality is, scientists do work to prove and politic to make their case. Again, I'm not talking about science in the abstract, but what the actual job of being a scientist with an up-and-coming idea means.
It's very much a matter of convincing certain individuals that you are right.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I seem to remember telling people that all this couldn't have just happened. That something like 90% of the solar systems out there contained gas giants, if any planets at all.
It's a rare thing to get several-thousands of combinations right at the same time. Not the least of which are:
- Distance from the sun/size of planet for proper G load and lighting
- Being away from black holes for obvious reasons
- Being out of nebula and such, which would prohibit exploring the universe
- Having not only water, but the right amount of it
- Having not only land, but the right amount of it.
- (continue for hundreds of items)
- Rotation of the planet so one side doesn't burn/boil, the other stays frozen
- Neighboring huge planet and/or gas giants to deflect asteroids so that life can get started and stay that way
- You get the idea
Check the fossil records. The animals didn't start small and get big- all the animals, with and without vertebrae we made around the same time, in the pre-Cambrian era. No long, slow development; that was a diagram in Darwin's work, the "Tree of Life", but has been disproven by the fossil record.
Only one book points to the Earth as "Suspended by nothing" centuries before John Glen. It also held the dimensions of the first sucessful sea-going vessel that way, too. While it doesn't detail the development of animals, it *does* detail the development of plants, and that matches the fossil record.
So why don't more "scientific" people give it a moment's notice?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Of course it is. Not just individuals, but the community in general. "Proof" has nothing to do with it though. Evidence does.
Typically, it is a bell curve, with 20% being exceptional, 80% being average and 20% dumb as stumps.
uh I think you fit into the later category...20 + 80 +20 = 120.
if science fiction and video games have taught us anything it's that aliens are horrid creatures that need to be killed.
Colmore said "not suggesting every possible idea and disproving them one by one."
And you disagreed with him.
But now you say it's only the testable ones. Which is it, then?
They are if you have an automatic elf camera and a gnome trap.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I've had enough of these motherfucking gas giants in this motherfucking solar system!
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
For millions of years while the Survival of the fittest pages continued?
Sure why not.
But comparing biology with prose is a little shallow.
Biology is so complex. Random words and letters are just that, random.
If adaptation and mutation get something right it continues, passes on the successful changes to the next variations...
If one monkey gets a word right, he won't be spelling it right again for another million years...
Cheers.
End of Line.
I thought the reason for finding large planets near to stars is that their mass and distance from their sun makes them easy to spot by watching the wobble of the sun. This might just be a case of filtering the data due to the limitations of the methods.
To make it worse, current planet finding techniques biased in what planets they find. And we had theories that are now falsified (probably) which were also biased because only based on what we see in the solar system. I do not see how we can conclude differently then to say: We do not know enough. (Not that simulations are a bad idea.)
I know this goes against the slashdot grain - but there are a lot of lines of evidence that point to the fact that intellegent (or even multicellular life) is very rare - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitable_zone - issues such as metal content of the star and orbit of the star about the galaxy are important for creating a stable environment for life to evolve - in addition there is the obvious fact that there is no alien life here or visitng the earth right now - simple calculations show that any spacefaring civilization will infest an entire galaxy quickly (on a galactic time scale) even with the very slow rate of expansion achivable today with nuclear propulsion... Furthermore computer simulatiosn of planetary formation should be pretty good - there is no "new" or unknown physics in planetary system formation - the problem in the anstronomy field was alawys how to explain how the solar sytem came to look the way it does, now that we have some observations of other solar sytems we have learned our simulations actually were not too bad and it is our solar system that is the exception... anyone who plays with simple solar system simulators will realize how hard it is to get a solar system to look like ours, large planets always fling smaller planets into crazy elliptical orbits - it is very difficult to get a stable solar sytem instead of a chaotic system.
If you look at 100 stars and find "hot jupiters" around 20 of them, that essentially invalidates any theory of solar system formation that doesn't allow for the formation of "hot jupiters", regardless of what's around the other 80.
The cake is a pie
If our intellect were perfect and we possessed all knowledge, then and only then could our intellect serve as a criterium to decide whether an idea has merit or not.
The method of science is so powerful precisely because it allows us to extract truth from the universe despite our imperfect intellects. It allows us to find mistakes if we make them, and to correct them with diligence, and gives us the freedom to admit we still don't know rather than plunging into the intellectual arrogance of claiming "God did it", which you practice with such blind zealotry here on Slashdot and no doubt against the "unsaved" "infidels" you meet in your daily life.
It is precisely because we elevate our intellect to the end all and be all of deciding whether an idea has merit, that the ideas of a Creator is summarily dismissed.
You are advocating that we use something other than our powers of reason to decide whether an idea has merit? Perhaps you could tell the world what else we have. Before you do, consider what Ethan Allen had to say about this:
"Those who invalidate reason, ought seriously to consider, whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle, that they are laboring to dethrone, but if they argue without reason, (which, in order to be consistent with themselves, they must do) they are out of the reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument."
If you choose to toss out "reason" instead of "precious, comforting notion of a creator god" even though you know and admit they cannot co-exist, you're an idiot advocating idiocy.
The photons in visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum just so "happen" to have the right energy to "knit" the main elements in green life forms together.
But even life-as-we-know-it, our own history of biological evolution right here on Earth, could (and once did!) survive in forms very different from those we see today. Not only are there other types of chlorophyll that respond to photons of different wavelengths (energies), there are entirely different chemicals that respond to *very* different wavelengths, including some wavelengths the sun produces little of but which are produced in abundance by other classes of stars. The bacteriochlorophylls, phycobilins and carotenoids have different intrinsic absorption spectra from the chlorophylls. Anoxygenic photosynthesizers arose on Earth before the oxygenic variety. Any of several organic molecules could have ended up as the dominant photosynthetic biomolecule; it's just an evolutionary accident that chlorophyll ended up in this role in Earthly life. If we could let the evolution of early life on Earth play out differently, a different oxygenic or even anoxygenic molecule (akin to sulfur bacteria) could just as easily out-competed chlorophylls. With anoxygenic photosynthesis monopolizing a planet's biosphere, the atmosphere would never have transitioned from reducing to oxidizing, and there would be no "free ride" for complex multicellular life to take. Such life might never achieve the complexity necessary for intelligence. That's an example of why, even with familiar biochemistry, the advent of somehow "sufficient" complexity for intelligent life in the universe is not a given: it must happen at least sometimes (at least once!), but it might not happen every time conditions are right. You don't need to believe some deity created you to believe that life is rare, precious, and wonderful.
It's especially interesting to note that chlorophyll actually rejects the wavelengths at which the sun's luminous output is the highest (those in the visible range we call "green"), absorbing principally in the red wavelengths around 680~700nm. Organisms could extract *more* energy if they used different photosynthetic molecules in their electron transport chains, but chlorophyll was simply "good enough to get the job done" rather than being optimal, and that's all that's necessary for life to produce the next generation. Like many instances of sub-optimal systems evolved in nature, this casts further doubt on the notion that any "intelligence" had a hand in evolution. The selections are random, and though they often lead to sufficient or even good performance, they seldom lead to optimality because they are indistinguishable from random decisions whose chaff has been whittled away. Some of these random choices do *not* lead to sufficient performance, so nothing remains when all the chaff is whittled away, leaving extinction.
["Fine tuning"] has to be built into the very core foundation of the laws of physics and the properties of matter.
It's a tautology to say that a universe inhabited by life must be suitable for life; of course it must! Nobody would be around to ponder anything if it weren't. But that's beside the main problem with your argument: the fine-tuning you describe is just one possible combination of circumstances which happened to produce us, but there are other possible combinations of circumstances which could easily produce other life, around stars with different luminosities and spectra, and with at least somewhat different temperatures, biopolymers, solvents, and biochemistries, some of which would or would not work on Earth, some of which have or have not actually arisen on Earth.
[There] are actually quite a few stars whose spectrum is too red or too blue for efficient photosynthesis.
No, there are a quite a few stars whose irradiance spectra less luminosity in the "visible" band than
[The Bible] has a very unified central authorship and message concerning the dealings of God with mankind.
But you claim that the Bible defines the message "concerning the dealings of God with mankind". You're shooting the barn and then painting a bull's eye around the place you hit. Your reasoning is circular.
Much of it depicts human history written down before it ever took place.
It is incredibly vague in general. All its predictions are of the kind "some bad stuff will happen to some people, some good stuff will happen to some people". Those aren't predictions, they're truisms.
If we squint, and want to believe, we can shoe-horn anything into a such a sloppily-made shoe as the Bible.
We can read the content of tomorrow's newspaper headlines in some of the passages of the Bible.
Again, only if we interpret quite liberally. Just think about how specific a true prophecy could be. It could contain information about the treachery at Thermopylae, the battles of Tours and Hastings, the discovery of the "new world" by Europe, any mention at all of the contemporaneous oriental civilizations which were vastly more advanced than those in Europe, the rise of modern democracy, the dangers of chemical and nuclear weaponry in the world wars, global stock market crashes, solutions to the problems of poverty and human suffering all over the world, and mathematical insights, all in esquisite detail. If such a book were conceived with true foreknowledge, it could be the most precise and useful guide to civilization ever, even after millenia of use. Instead, it is vague enough to fit most circumstances if the reader squints hard enough, makes statements that are clearly at odds with physical reality (and some of which were known by more advanced societies to be wrong even when they were written), and could easily have been written by anyone who lived 2000 years ago. Your denial of these things is either ignorant or irrational.
When the art of printing was finally invented by Johannes Gutenberg, guess which human writing was first printed? Guess which human writing is distributed more widely than any other and translated into more languages and dialects than any other?
You're appealing to popularity when it suits you. (You seem happy to drop this tactic when discussing your doubt of stellar fusion, one should note.) Christianity was spread at the point of a sword, by self-righteous Christians performing the Inquisition. When the printing press was invented, the Christian Church was the most powerful social entity in the world, spanning nation-states, languages, and cultures, after centuries of bloody conquest. It is unsurprising in the least that such a powerful tool as the printing press was abused by the most powerful human social construct.
There are many religious writings, but none of them come even remotely close to the content and distribution of this remarkable book.
And yet, "this remarkable book" (a pithy phrase you seem to like to inject whenever you get the chance) is a minority view among humans. There are more non-Christians than there are Christians, and as you should be well-aware, Christianity has been spread so widely only under threat of death and subjugation. Just because this stopped happening in the last 10-15% of the preceding two millenia does not relax the significance of this fact.
I am not trying to make religious propaganda
"This remarkable book"? Proselytizing Christianity or (theism at the very least) in myriad posts in nearly every Slashdot story that even hints at evolution, extraterrestrial life, or cosmology? Perhaps you should review your many previous posts in which you claim that Christianity is the most meritorious religion, and worldview at that. Pardon my profane response, but BULL SH
I thought this discussion was about this universe, the one we are in.
This is in reference to the concept of a "multiverse" of "universes". The idea if there are many universes each with different variations of physical laws, it is not surprising that at least one of them (and probably some others) resemble our own. But even confining discussion to "the one we are in", life is not an unlikely phenomenon:
The probability of the existence of another planet with life, that is physical life based on chemistry, is essentially zero.
The evidence does not support that claim. Whether they think the probability is "large" or "small", most people think for empirical reasons that it is certainly greater than one (let alone zero). There is a wealth of reasoned investigation on this subject, and it is telling that you disagree with all of it.
There are at least 10^22 stars in the observable part of the universe alone, and on the order of half of them are planetary systems, made of the same stuff as our solar system. Because they form the same way, other planetary systems will tend to have dozens of planetary bodies, like ours, in the form of planets and their moons. So even if only 1 in 10 stars has a planetary system, there are still going to be at least 10^22 planetary bodies. That's ten thousand million million million worlds. We know from spectroscopic observations that interstellar clouds contain copious amounts of organic compounds and (even water), many of which we don't even have a name for. And we already know of very many right here on Earth. They're there because as you're aware, carbon forms complex and diverse chemical bonds quite readily. Even if life is in some sense "improbable", the universe is simply too large for there to be only a single world with life. The building blocks of life are too abundant, too widely distributed, and react too easily and in ways too complex for life's probability of arising to be "essentially zero".
If of course you would believe as I do [that "God did it"]
You're saying the only way life could be common in the universe is if a creator god put them there. This is certainly not the only way to believe life is abundant, as I alluded to in the previous paragraph! The building blocks of life are common; the process of life are common; the energy that drives life is common (radiated by the stars); and the habitats of life (planetary bodies, at least) are all common in the universe; and the universe is exceedingly vast, filled as far as we can see with these things. If you cling to the notion that life is impossible without being created by an intervening deity, you are just deciding how reality must be based on your vested interest (your religion) and not heeding physical reality.
We read in this extraordinary book we call the Bible...
What sophistry. It is not an extraordinary book; it is a pack of falsehoods, prophecy so vague that anything might be construed as a match, scattered bits of moral wisdom promptly contradicted by orders to perform immoral acts (such as killing people for worshipping other gods or working on the sabbath), and these traits are certainly not unique to it as they are shared by many other dogmatic, fath-centric, theistic religions.
Here's an example, in the linguistic style of your sophistry from that paragraph:
"We read in this extraordinary book we call the Qur'an, that the transcendent Creator who exists eterannly beyond space and time, did send his prophet here to communicate what life is REALLY all about. His name was Muhammad, whose life affected and still affects all of humanit as no other ever has.
Muhammad gave compelling evidence to substantiate his claim of divinity, by delivering the revelations sent to him directly from god, by conquering death, and by ascending into heaven on a flying horse."
If the diamonds are 4.2 billions years old, ALL the carbon will be carbon-12 no matter the source of the original carbon. Any carbon-14 would have decayed within a matter of 10's of thousands of years (that's why carbon-12 dating isn't accurate past 30,000 years or so.)
You are thinking of carbon -14 dating which is something different than what was discussed in the referenced article. Carbon-12 and carbon-13 are both stable isotopes of carbon and do not decay. Carbon-14 (formed continuously by cosmic rays in the atmosphere) is not a stable isotope and is the carbon isotope used in the short-term 'carbon dating' you refer to. The article, though, referred to the ratio of the stable isotopes carbon-12 and carbon-13 present in the ancient carbon reservoir. Life forms preferentially consume carbon-12 so an ancient reservoir unusually rich in the 'light' carbon-12 suggests that it was created in the presence of life forms.