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Water Not a Good Enough Guide To Find Alien Life
An anonymous reader noted an article in Cosmos that questions the conventional wisdom of the "follow the water" strategy of seeking extraterrestrial life, saying "There's an awful lot of places where water could exist — either on the surface of the Earth, or deep within it — yet life is largely concentrated in a small sliver of this."
It seems to me that "follow the water" is better than seeking randomly -- if you find no water, then there can't be any life (as we know it) anyway.
Sure, if you find water, it's not a guarantee that there *is* life -- but it seems like a good way to weed out "definitely no" prospects.
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
So my layman's knowledge of how we gather information on the composition of a planet involves with analyzing the spectrum of light reflected by the surface of that planet from its nearby star. While molecules in the atmosphere also reflect the light and influence it, what's below the surface is based on that assumption. From there we can use other methods to determine its size and how far it is from the star it orbits to check pressure and temperatures.
... so why is this even being brought up? The article even ends with the researchers agreeing that presence of water is still our best approximation and that there should be no change in strategy.
We cannot measure the water beneath the surface (to my knowledge) so the example of the earth's composition of water is moot. If you were to take the surface of earth covered by water and then that amount of water that contains life, I think the percentage would be much higher. The microbes and small organisms that our oceans are teaming with alone would be a scientific goldmine on another planet. Of course the deep trenches of the Atlantic and Pacific will throw off your rates but we can't measure them anyway on another planet or even water in the mantle
If water isn't good enough, what is better?
My work here is dung.
You know, the earth has bacteria and fungi floating around high in the atmosphere and deep undersea -- probably even under the deep ocean, though we haven't looked there yet.
Tiny sliver... HA!
-l
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Everywhere on Earth we find water, we find life.
He's an idiot. Nothing to see here, move along.
ever bother to read them? I haven't had an article accepted in over 10 years and I suspect it's because I read the link I am referring to and write an appropriate headline.
It simple states that water can exists in environments that is hostile to life as we know it.
No shit, Sherlock.
I do take issue with the idea that only 12% of the water on earth has life. AFAIK, a cup of water from any natural source in or in the ground has some sort of life in it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Thats very possibly true (thus the appended "as we know it".) Unfortunately saying "Here are all the reasons you might be wrong" is a lot easier than determining new approaches and going out and looking, and you've got to start somewhere.
So until new evidence points us in another direction, "follow the water" is the best direction we have.
Yeah. "Questioning the conventional wisdom" has become a worthy pursuit for its own sake. The part of questioning the conventional wisdom where you first understand the conventional wisdom, and then come up with an informed question, seems to have fallen by the wayside. But if you point out this distinction, then you're apparently attacking the idea of questioning in the first place.
The enemies of Democracy are
Comparing silicon to water is wrong - silicon based life could exist, but we are not water based life, we are carbon based. Water is a solvent which we use, so where we'd need to look is where there are other liquid solvents and enough energy to allow the required reactions to happen. As already said, liquid methane might do the trick as a water substitute, but silicon wouldn't.
I remember a few years ago many were saying that slashdot jumped the shark, to the point where saying it jumped the shark had jumped the shark.
this story submission is sharks jumping sharks jumping sharks {...} sharks all the way down
Well, it wasn't long ago that we were finding the first exoplanets. Now, we've found a whole lot of them.
However, damned near everything is anomalous since some of these planets are pretty extreme in terms of temperature, proximity to sun, what have you.
I think we're going to need to catalog lots more planets before we start seeing patterns that might point us to lifeforms we can't fathom yet.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I just want to reiterate what the parent said, as I'm becoming frustrated with all of the "why do we assume it can't exist if it is not like us" posts.
No one is claiming life cannot exist without water, we are only stating that life as we know it cannot. Since we have no idea what the hell we would be looking for otherwise, and since we have limited (and in the search for ET life, extremely limited) we have to determine some heuristic for our search. Since water is A) easily detected with telescopes, and B) a requirement for life as we are aware, it is so far our best means of refining our search. There may be some amazing form of X based or X requiring life out there, but since we do not know X, it is not at all helpful to acknowledge its possible existence. If, on the other hand, we happen upon X based/requiring life, we can then include X in our parameters.
Please stop assuming that this is some circa 1900AD Newtonian Physics style oversight.
Your signature contains a syntax error in most languages, but I imagine that DoWhatIWant() returns with a functioning closing parenthesis when you want one.