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New "Drake Equation" Selects Between Alien Worlds
An anonymous reader writes 'A mathematical equation that counts habitats suitable for alien life could complement the Drake equation, which estimates the probability of finding intelligent alien beings elsewhere in the galaxy. That equation, developed in 1960 by US astronomer Frank Drake, estimates the probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere in our galaxy by considering the number of stars with planets that could support life. The new equation, under development by planetary scientists at the Open University in Milton Keynes, England, aims to develop a single index for habitability based on the presence of energy, solvents such as water, raw materials like carbon, and whether or not there are benign environmental conditions.'
zero. Zero worlds containing intelligent life of any kind. Earth included.
"under developed" ?
In this case, maybe they should continue working on it before we talk about it, don't you think ?
based on the presence of energy, solvents such as water, raw materials like carbon and whether or no there are benign environmental conditions
Aren't there extremophiles on Earth that already lack some if not all of these attributes? Really, the presence of energy seems like the only real requirement for life here on Earth. Who knows what other extremes may lurk extra terrestrially.
today is spelling optional day.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_drake_equation.png
To what extent are "benign conditions" suitable to the formation of life? Without an environment that exerts selection pressure on existing organisms, there would be nothing driving the development of more complex and adapted organisms. Of course too much environmental volatility is a problem as well, but it can't just be a completely sealed biosphere or evolution could never happen.
Hopefully they've detailed somewhere that they're only taking into account the habitability by known possible life forms.
There's no way of knowing whether there's an intelligent life form we've not detected yet, in this very planet. For as much as we know, Earth itself could be a "cell" of a galactic sized life form that has stars as neurons and light as nervous signals.
A mathematical equation that counts habitats suitable for alien life could complement the Drake equation, which estimates the probability of finding intelligent alien beings elsewhere in the galaxy
Lets see, Peru is in a different part of the galaxy than the US, even though by galactic standards it's REAL close. I talked to an intelligent alien* on the phone yesterday -- he was looking for his ex-wife, who's been living with me lately.
Of course, he's not a space alien, he's a human. The space aliens are in the ISS. They're human too.
*Well, he wasn't very intelligent on the night chronicled in the linked journal, but anger never made anybody very smart.
Free Martian Whores!
We have Drake's equation which may be fundamentally sound, but the variables are truly guesswork. Now we are going to add another guesswork variable. Guesswork squared?
I'm no expert, but isn't our "planet" really a binary system, since the Moon contributes so much to the habitability of the Earth by stabilizing our rotational axis?
I realize the precision needed to detect the tiny wobble of an exoplanet is beyond our present capacity, but shouldn't our search planning include factors like the above (if they don't already)? I'd greatly appreciate an informed opinion on this.
Without any idea of how life started HERE, we have no way of making any meaningful conjecture about how common life may be out there. Drake's equation, for all its apparent elegance, is essentially meaningless. Basically, we only know that somewhere between 1 and 10-to-the-12-power planets in the universe support life. This is all we can know now, and until we can understand conclusively how life began here, it's all just masturbation.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Hey, Moonfruit, the sixties are over. If the planet was an organism it would have gone to the galactic doctor and got something to clear that nasty infection.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Unfortunately, the Drake equation is bullshit, because there is no real way for to know most of the actual values that are in the Drake equation. But that doesn't stop people from thinking that it is somehow scientific.
Michael Crichton has a great essay on what happens when people start taking formulas that are impossible (currently) to solve and applies the same methodologies to other subject areas.
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html
that life requires carbon or water? Life on Earth does, but that's just because our planet happens to have a temperature which allows for liquid water, a large amount of water and an atmosphere which is 21% oxygen and 78% nitrogen. We have 4.5 billion years of experience with this kind of life but absolutely nothing in terms of any other form of life.
bobbledorm 7, I find your lack of faith disturbing. We need no solvents
Apply scientific methodology to a completely unknown is really no more accurate.
that lame-o Fermi Paradox.
I love how people act like some physicist's smart-alec remark is somehow gospel.
Treat this as a bit of fun, but don't spend any money on it.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Really? I would have thought the "Der! Hooman iz teh stoopid" posts would be Redundant around here by now. Or have they ascended (read: descended) to the rank of Obligatory?
And I always suspect most posts like that translate to "Other people dare to deviate from my perfect, genius opinions, dammit, and therefore humanity has no intelligence!"
1. Life that is intelligent and we can communicate with.
2. Life which creates a biosphere where we can live.
3. Life that creates sexy green alien women.
4. Where shall we take her out to lunch?
5. Profit! (Of a sort)
How would you go about communicating with an intelligent dust cloud, for example, that had neurone-equivalents a light-second across and finished a complete thought every few years and couldn't perceive anything smaller than a planet?
Patiently?
http://tinyurl.com/knkvop
Many people use the giant number of suitable stars and planets to rationalize the question of likelihood away. But what if the development of life as it happened e.g. on Earth is itself a ridiculously complex and unlikely process, so unlikely that it may only have happened on a few or even just one of those many planets?
We know how to build many essential building blocks of life, and we are aware of many possible models to make them react in ways that could be beneficial to the development of life. But the fact remains that we don't understand how to put them together. Whatever early intermediate steps happened in Earth's past are gone. We can only speculate about early steps like protocells, RNA world, and so on. There is a huge "grabbag" of partial ideas, but no complete model.
One thing that speaks for easy origin of life is simply that it happened early in Earth's history (geologically speaking). However, there are still dozens of approaches to creating building blocks and putting them to use, and maybe it took a very unlikely combination of many of them to make it happen.
So the me the more interesting question is whether life arises "automatically" if you slap a few favorable processes together, or whether it takes a giant number of environmental parameters that have to act just right at just the right time.
If you add 2 + 2 and get 4, you can say that this is true in a way that almost nothing else is true. And people seem to think that this means that math means truth.
But Frank Drake created his famous equation to organise his thoughts and get a handle on what is and isn't known. As time has moved on, we have gotten better estimates of the terms. For example, actually discovering 300+ planets around other stars gives us a handle on the fraction of stars with planets. And the Kepler mission should improve things even more. If Drake's equation did nothing more than inspire the launch of the Kepler mission, it would be very important indeed.
But as the Drake equation is filled in with better data, there's a next step. And it's interesting that people are thinking about what those next steps might be.
Attributed to Mark Twain: "There are liars. There are Damned Liars. And then, there are statistics."
-- Stephen.
The V shape gives it a little asymmetry of charge. If I remember correctly, that's the cause of many interesting properties such as the fact that it doesn't mix with oil and that it dilutes things that it would not otherwise. Methane (CH4) doesn't have that property.
Aliens Cause Global Warming by Michael Crichton:
"This serious-looking equation gave SETI a serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we're clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be "informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It's simply prejudice."
Squirrel!
The new equation aims to develop a single index for habitability based on variables totally unknown to anyone within many orders of magnitude.
Wow! Sounds very useful... </sarcasm>
Honestly, I'm not surprised people are finding fault with the Drake Equation. I mean, it was written up by Ludwig Von Drake! He's not a proper scientist at all, he's just a cartoon! You can't rely on cartoon characters to do your science for you, it's not sensible... And you've got to question the repeatability of any experiment taking place in a cartoon environment...
Bow-ties are cool.
because beings light decades away are now beginning to receive early Open University Broadcasts. So presumably OU should start seeing applicants soon, attracted by a desire to wear a kipper tie and discuss differential calculus after coming home late from the pub.
Nullius in verba
I think simplifying something as complex as this to a formula is just asking for a failure.
I mean if we can't even find a formula for weather... And this thing is vastly more complex. (If you don't think so, you've got no idea of the sheer number of stars or even galaxies out there.)
Additionally, the whole thing is strongly tainted by the inside-the-box thinking of seemingly everyone in that area. They limit themselves to "only where water is, only where oxygen is, only where the planet is thisandthis far away, only at that temperature, etc, etc, etc".
If you gave the chance to bet money on something to be proven wrong, take this thing. It's the safest bet you will ever be able to make. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
"An illustration of an alien exoplanet orbiting a distant star." "Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)"^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H that guy with the spray can and techno music that hangs out around Fisherman's Wharf
Chemistry. You need stable enough compound as to build a stable entity , but not too stable as to be require too high energy, need a solvent etc... Sure there could be island of stability in very high pressure, high temperature , but for the chemistry we know, life will be carbon based because this is the only chemistry which has those attribute/properties.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The Drake equation is the silliest equation ever. It is little more than a statement of how much we don't know.
On brilliant thing about the Drake equation is that it's absolutely correct: but the variables can only be guessed at.
This equation seems to want to quantify variables. That seems, at best, an educated guess. This would make it very different from Drake's.
It's a scientific imperative, and a recurring theme on Slashdot, that a sufficient sample size is necessary to draw a meaningful conclusion. And when it comes to planets we've sufficiently explored, our sample size is somewhere between 1 and 3, including Earth. We *believe* the moon is devoid of life, which is probably accurate since it's the moon is a relatively static environment, and life tends to alter its environment. We *suspect* that life is absent from Mars, but we don't know for sure. For all we know, there are planets in our own solar system that are teeming with life. The only thing we can say with any degree of confidence is that the odds of life inhabiting a given body are less than 1 and greater than 0, and that we have yet to observe extraterrestrial life.
Now it makes sense to extrapolate from our observations, but only when we have sufficient data, and drawing *any* conclusions from 1-3 points out of of billions is insane, no matter how rational it may *feel*. It's the very root of superstition. If we count the moon as a second data point, and that's still a leap of faith, then the incidence of life is 50/50. If we found bacteria on Mars, then we suddenly have data showing that life is more likely than not, and confirming evidence that 100% of worlds containing water also have life.
Given the above, trying to make predictions based on the observed data is worse than useless -- it's detrimental. It limits our focus and makes us oblivious to alternatives. It's the scientific equivalent of believing that a broken mirror brings bad luck, or that angry gods cause lightning. After all, why investigate the source of lightning when we already know that it was caused by our sin? Why investigate arid worlds when we know that life requires water? Such beliefs make us oblivious to the truth, even when we're staring it in the face.
The Drake Equation, and its variants, are nothing more than a roll of the dice or the flip of a coin at this point. Let's treat them as such, and move on.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I wonder what definition for "life" they happen to use? I'll bet its a fairly standard one and that White Dwarf Matrioshka Brains, which are presumably the longest lived (and perhaps the most knowledgeable) civilizations in the Universe (to date), would score fairly low on a "Habitablity Equation".
The problem with almost all discussions related to non-Earth life, habitability, SETI, etc. is that they all start with the fundamental (and highly questionable) assumption that there is nobody "out there" significantly more advanced than we are.
'whether or not there are benign environmental conditions'
The earth hardly has benign environmental conditions.
In fact, the extreme and repeated violence of it is widely considered essential to advanced life.
But it is awesome that most of us remain so optimistic that our universe teams with life.
You're looking through the wrong end of the scope.
'energy','solvent' - these are all our assumptions and definitions. each 100 years we are discovering a new energy form, and each 20-30 years a new substance or a molecule. only thing this equation will estimate will be planets holding life/civilization SIMILAR to our own, because the equation is being constructer with our current understanding and science. life on any planet will depend on whatever materials available on that planet. even in our planet we have single cell organisms that have different basis then the common basis.
Read radical news here
We have exactly one sample of a planet sustaining life.
Trying to generalize from this and make predictions is rather an exercise in futility.
ALL curves fit a single point of data equally well, there is no way to determine the accuracy of your predictions.
It might get headlines, but it's ....drum roll.... JUNK SCIENCE!
James Lovelock wrote the Gaia Hypothesis AFTER being hired by NASA to invent equipment to search for life on Mars. He studied life and realized that you could find evidence of it by spectrography. The extremophiles on Earth cannot last more than a few generations without the recycling and delivery services performed by the rest of 'life.' Life is an interpendent group thing and not merely a single biological specimen loitering in a cave as the rusting of rocks removes oxygen from the atmosphere.
New and improved untestable bullshit hits the front page. This is crap.
I'll grant you that Ethanol is a toxic substance to possibly every organism on Earth, and that methanol is toxic to many things, but not necessarily everything. Not every alcohol is toxic. According to you, glycerin, an alcohol, is toxic. So we should stop using it as a medicine. Furthermore anything in sufficient quantity is toxic. Oxygen is toxic to humans in sufficient quantity. Which is why divers don't use pure oxygen for diving. We need a little nitrogen in our oxygen (although there are certain medical exceptions to this rule). It seems to me, you are the one not being scientific. the NOVA organism you're looking for is the one I listed as living in rock. As I said, I'm no biologist, and thus can't really debate how much water any given bacteria may have in it.
While I can't prove that there can be live that is not based on water, you have not offered any theory to prove that silicon based life using an alcohol is not possible. Once you rule out the impossible, anything left is possible. It is unscientific to preclude or conclude, without evidence or defensible theory, that something is impossible.
In fact, I'll submit that intelligent life is not possible without alcohols. For example you would quickly die, after your neurons stop firing, if all sources of the alcohol choline were removed from your diet. This would be a very difficult thing, almost any food you eat will have some choline source in it. I know of no advanced lifeform that could survive without alcohols. Therefore, by your own standards, alcohols are essential to life.