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Earth-Like Planets In Our Neighborhood
goran72 sends in a story out of the Chicago AAAS meeting contending that Earth-like planets with life-sustaining conditions may be spinning around stars in our galactic neighborhood — we just haven't found them yet. "'So I think there is a very good chance that we will find some Earth-like planets within 10, 20 or 30 light years of the Sun,' astrophysicist [Alan Boss]... told his AAAS colleagues meeting here since Thursday. ... The images from those new planets, he added, should identify 'light from their atmosphere and tell us if they have perhaps methane and oxygen. That will be pretty strong proof they are not only habitable but actually are inhabited. I am not talking about a planet with intelligence on it. I simply say if you have a habitable world. ... Sitting there, with the right temperature with water for a billion years, something is going to come out of it. At least we will have microbes,' said Boss."
and there may be a treasure chest buried in my back yard... I just haven't found it.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
The human body contains about 100g of DNA. You're saying about 2E15 grams, or 20 trillion human body's worth, of DNA is not only released into the atmosphere but then escapes the earths gravitational pull and enters interplanetary space.
Sounds unlikely.
... exchange communication once every 10 years,...
We could give them, say, the entirety of Wikipedia, and they could give us their equivalent. Write up a "rosetta stone" with a bunch of pictorial/mathematical representations of words, and so on. Probably doable. Conversation back and forth will seem frustratingly slow, but there's no limit to the amount of info that can be streamed across.
Mind you the chances that we will be in the near vicinity of a civilization that communicates by radio waves that we can pick up is possibly quite slim- we've only been doing it for less than a hundred years. They could be in our equivalent of 1750 and we'd never hear a peep.
Call-and-response would indeed be ridiculous, but that doesn't mean that communication would be impossible or fruitless. Just start transmitting, and hope they get the same idea. Anything, everything. Any questions likely to be thought up an alien culture could probably be thought up by us as well. Send the answer without waiting for the question.
It might take 20 years round-trip to get an answer to a specific question, but maybe someone on the other side already thought of it.
I would think that we wouldn't just send "Hi" and wait for a response. I think we would constantly be sending them information and let them learn what we are sending. We would hope they would do something similar.
There have been several of these stories in the last month or so. Enough to make one suspect that someone has an agenda. It's all fantasy and dreaming until there's some hard evidence. For all the theories for there being intelligent life Out There, there are as many that run against it. The simple fact is we don't know and, apart from a desire to find something, we have no reason to suspect that there is life beyond this planet. So far we have one life-bearing planet in this solar system. The others we've inspected have drawn blanks. Again, there is no good reason to suspect that we are not alone. If we aren't, so much the better. But these breathless items about how many planets *might* support life serve no purpose. May as well say they'll cure cancer.
All right, What The Hell?
For a planet to "shed" anything except perhaps hydrogen or helium, that stuff has to overcome escape velocity, which (until rockets were invented in the 20th century), requires an (volcano or meteorite) that would incinerate any complex organic compounds and render DNA a fine ash.
Plus, Google will tell you that the following comes out to 44%, as an above poster already said:
(4 billion years) * (2 billion tons per day) / (5.9736Ã--10^24 kg) in percent
Less than 1% of Earth's mass is at a temperature that even permits life to exist. As for the part that actually consists of life, you can measure it in parts per million and still need scientific notation.
People were doubting planes only a couple of years more than 100 years ago! Let's keep it in proper perspective!
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Or they were advanced enough at some point and have since bombed themselves back into the bronze age and are building themselves back up again. We really have no data about how stable a technological society is, if it turns out to be a hundred years of advanced technology for every 10,000 of savagry, it would be quite fortuitous to exactly line up with a suitable conversation partner.
http://notanumber.net/
That sounds a lot like instant messenger.
if it turns out to be a hundred years of advanced technology for every 10,000 of savagry
Who says the two are mutually exclusive?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
we have no reason to suspect that there is life beyond this planet.
No reason to suspect? It goes like this. There is life on this planet. Therefore probability of life > 0. There are many, many, many stars in our galaxy, countless in the universe. No matter how small the chances are, given the size of the universe and since we have proven that the probability is greater than 0, it's inconceivable to imagine that we're the only ones.
In fact, the only reason to be arrogant enough to say that we're the only ones would be religious nonsense.
Actually, it's more like "one is one, two is many". Until we have some kind of proof of life beyond this planet, the reasonable assumption is that life is peculiar to this planet. Sure, from what we know of how life on this planet developed, it seems reasonable that we're not special. However, we don't even see it in other "reasonable" places in our own solar system. It's not evident on Mars, even though certain earth-like bacteria could probably thrive there. It's not evident on Venus, which despite having a crushing, corrosive atmosphere, appears to have pockets (floating in the high clouds, on high mountains or plateaus) where earth-like life could grab a foothold. The one thing we know about life is that it spreads to fill all niches. There's almost literally no place you can look on the surface or immediately under the surface of this planet where you won't find it.
I'm not saying we shouldn't look. We should. Finding non-terrestrial life would be the biggest discovery in the history of everything as far as we are concerned. I'm just saying our default position shouldn't be "We exist so others must!" That's not really a reasonable assumption, even though it would appear to be so to many people on the face of it. A zit on your nose doesn't imply a zit on your ass. Two or three or four zits on your face may well lead a person to believe you're just a zitty bastard, though.
Making fun of dumb people since 2009
Sure, from what we know of how life on this planet developed, it seems reasonable that we're not special. However, we don't even see it in other "reasonable" places in our own solar system.
It has nothing to do with what we know of how life on this planet developed. It just means that unless you assume development of life requires conscious divine intervention, it happened as a result of certain conditions. We could be very special in the sense of life being an extremely low probability, even given the right conditions. However, given the size and age of the universe, it doesn't matter how low the probability is: if it happened once, it's happened multiple times.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying we'll ever meet E.T. If the universe is mostly uninhabited, there might be nobody close by. Even if there's any life "close by" they're not necessarily intelligent. Even if there's intelligent life "close by" they're civilization does not necessarily need to be alive simultaneously with ours. Even if they are, "close" in the scale we're speaking of is still impractically far for travel or even conversation.
A zit on your nose doesn't imply a zit on your ass. Two or three or four zits on your face may well lead a person to believe you're just a zitty bastard, though.
Your argument is actually sound, but it's not arguing what you think it is. A zit on my nose doesn't imply zits are common in the rest of my body. Similarly, life on Earth doesn't imply the universe is full of life everywhere. And that's not what I'm arguing.
What I am arguing is that a zit on my nose implies the existence of zits elsewhere in the human population. If you see a zit (or even something extremely rare that you've never seen before) on my face, it's illogical to assume I'm the only person in the world to ever have gotten that particularly thing, and that nobody else out of billions of people that have ever lived and will live will ever get it. And billions is a very small number when you're talking about stars in the universe.
Our Sun isn't that special of a star. There are many others that have been identified that are just like it. Countless others that we have never seen. It's completely unreasonable to assume that none of those have a planet in the sweet spot. Out of those that none of them have developed life. I'm not saying it's common, I'm not saying life is everywhere, I'm not saying we'll ever find it, but regardless of how common it is: you have no reason to assume it doesn't exist.