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Weird Exoplanet Orbits Could Screw Up Alien Life
astroengine writes "Life is good in the Solar System. We have Jupiter to thank for that. However, if the gas giant's orbit were a little more elliptical, there's every chance that Earth would become rather uncomfortable very quickly. Researchers looking at the zoo of exoplanets orbiting distant stars have simulated several scenarios of differing exoplanet orbits and find that many don't resemble our cozy Solar System. In fact, weird exoplanet orbits may be the deciding factor as to whether extraterrestrial life can form or not."
Dear friends,
The aliens of our galaxy have had a hard life. Please send donations to the buy-a-Jupiter-for-the-aliens fund. Your help is greatly appreciated.
If anything, all of this could be mean that our system is quite weird; at least on average.
And probably still wouldn't be a problem for "life" in general, considering there are several places suspected of harboring life in our own system, all of them quite "hostile" at first sight.
Complex life is another thing, of course... (or - we're frakked, because the aliens will turn out to be total badasses; due to evolving in very harsh conditions ;p )
One that hath name thou can not otter
If you lived on tropical shore where the climate was practically unchanging from day to day throughout the year, it would probably be hard to imagine life could exist in Canada.
"Captain. The orbit in this exoplanet is a bit weird. Summer might get be a bit warm"
"Let's surf in the beach, warm? Or Today we all stay in the fridge, warm."
"Sir, it'll be Hold your rifle with extended arms so the metal drops don't make holes in your boots, warm."
First, Although the smaller inner planets would be hard pressed for life the moons of the gas giants orbiting closer to the sun could harbor life. There are only 8 (Or 9) planets in our solar system but there are over 300 moons.
Add to this that scientists seem to expect that life will only evolve on rocky earth like planets so it seems like a small chance. I know that the earth is the only example of life bearing planet that we have but to expect all life in the universe to exist in the same way that we do is narrow sighted. It would not surprise me to find out that there are fish swimming in a methane ocean on a distant planet in temperatures that would kill us.
Some day I fully expect to hear "It's Life, but not as we know it" and it not be a star trek reference. Well, Ok, how about only 1/2 a star trek reference. ;)
Of course, the fact that we are finding these weird systems may simply be because they are the easiest to detect and all the stars with planetary systems like ours are thought to not have planets because we can't detect the planets using current methods and data.
Remember, Jupiter orbits the sun once every 12 years. So, if we were trying to detect our own solar system at 10 light years, how long would it take to detect Jupiter's effect on Sol's position?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Is it really a surprise that Life on earth is ideally suited to the environment in which it has evolved for four billion years, but would find other environments difficult?
That wording is still a bit unfortunate, almost itself...a display of what it warns against.
More simply, "what's known to us is perceived as the expected way of how things can be"
One that hath name thou can not otter
Necessity is the mother of invention = occasional environmental disruptions are the driver to complex life and intelligence. I think we have ice ages and meteorites to thank for intelligent life on earth. Without the need, why evolve past single cells?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Either the difference between "a" and "the" completely eludes our submitter, or the submitter completely fails to comprehend, you know, what the heck he's talking about.
I know, it's Slashdot... I should expect it to be both. If only there were some way to complain about the editors and moderators for this....
seriously
in toronto and montreal, they started building malls underground, and linking them up, so now you can practically roam the entire downtowns of these cities, all underground
in the distant future, us heroic stoic freedom fighting american movie hero archetypes will have to face invasions of the evolutionary future: the fearsome greater northern Canadian Humanoid Underground Dwellers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.H.U.D.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why do these people consistently think that they can prove/disprove extrasolar life based on next to no information, and what little information they do have is based mostly on unproven theoretical models. Until we actually send a probe/go there or develop some awesome telescopes capable of imagining the actual planets at a few megapixles all of this conjecture is moot. I would compare it to someone taking a photo of a rock in their back yard with one of those $10 digital cameras from the checkout, looking at the picture and saying "that rock is completely sterile" because it looks desolate and cold, when that same rock examined under a microscope would almost certainly reveal bugs, bacteria, moss and other life almost immediately.
Sure, so now when the world ends, we'll just blame it on Jupiter! "Hey, Jupiter, why'd you lose weight?" "Hey, Jupiter, how come you eat so much?" "Hey, Jupiter, what happened to that cute red spot? Did you get it removed? Because I really thought it was sexy." Why don't we just leave Jupiter alone, and quit being so judgmental?
"No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing." -Emperor Claudius 10 BC - AD 54
Not really, no.
Vernor Vinge - a Deepness in the Sky
On a planet whose atmosphere freezes on a 500-year cycle. Nice read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky
If Solaris can do it, other exoplanets can probably do it too.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Obvisouly, our gas giants are nothing more than alien umbrella forcefields collecting star dust.
Other large exo planets are just other umbrellas cast into the solar wind.
It makes sense now, doesn't it? It's a fact then.
From the linked article: (it says it twice)
WTF?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/exoplanet/id327702034?mt=8
This is something I see when I read articles about life beyond Earth all the time. The conditions for human survival are not possible, so it gets marked as "No possible way there could be life here and if there was life here, it was not complex".
I understand we know what we see, but I also think it is a very narrow and almost egotistical view and way of seeing things. Earth and our life is not the only life on any planet. We are not the only planet with life. I have no proof of complex life on other planets, but you would have to be out of your mind to assume that this is the only planet with life on it.
We compare everything to what is on Earth, but at the same time completely ignoring the fact that not every single planet is Earth.
It might be very possible for an entire complex species to exist on another planet without water. Maybe they require something else, something very different to us, like Helium or something.
With how much of a small percentage of the galaxy we have mapped, thinking that the conditions on Earth are what is needed for every single other complex lifeform just seems very egotistical. One of those, "If it is not like Earth, it can't happen".
The world is how you make it
give it enough time, and will became self-aware. And then we will realize that the very equation for finding intelligent life in the universe is the intelligent life that we were searching for.
"I spent my life savings on a month in the tropics to recover from the deadbeat job I was just sacked from, but my exoplant just decided to go elliptical a trillion miles from the sun. FML"
We see the Universe the way it is, because if it was different, we wouldn't be here to see it.
On the contrary, we would be perfectly suited to survive in any universe that spawned us.
A few years ago, it was reported that without a moon life on earth would be impossible.
Now we are told any little difference in Jupiter's orbit would also render life impossible.
There seems to be a great tendency to suggest we live in a giant "Just So" story and could not exist in any other scenario, while at the same time we are finding life in the most inhospitable places imaginable.
"WE" might be a different "WE" if we evolved in slightly altered environments but never the less the belief that conditions must be just like earth for something nearly human in capabilities, chemistry, and societal structure is pretty close to the geocentric view of the universe so handily debunked by Copernicus.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I guess one of the mods must have been unimpressed, despite the fact that the linked fiction discusses a whole lot of stuff that other commenters mentioned farther down. Not a bad mod; if he thought it was overrated, so be it. Still disappointing (the story is exactly one week old; I hacked it out in about half an hour).
Oh well. There'll be more where that came from. I don't need the karma but I thought some of you might be interested. At least it wasn't modded "offtopic."
Free Martian Whores!
This whole observation bias (we can only wonder at how lucky we have to have Earth because we had it in the first place) has a scientific name, but I can't remember it... Help?