Slashdot Mirror
Proposed Indicator of Life On Alien Worlds May Be Bogus
sciencehabit (1205606) writes with bad news for anyone hoping to use the spectral signatures of exoplanets to determine if their atmospheres have life-enabling compositions. "Call it the cosmic version of fool's gold. What was once considered a sure-fire sign of life on distant planets may not be so sure-fire after all, a new study suggests. The signal—a strong chemical imbalance in the planet's atmosphere that could only be generated by thriving ecosystems—could instead be the combined light from a lifeless exoplanet and its equally barren moon."
Uhmmm. What?
If we found an exoplanet with signatures that suggested the atmosphere might support life, billions and billions of astronomers would be analyzing light/gravity/etc from every possible angle.
So it isn't like it wouldn't get unprecedented peer review (remember how initial lander photos of Mars showed a blue sky, as an example).
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Assuming we actually FIND something/someone to talk to out there..
We will NEVER be able to get there, or ever hope to even send something there (where ever there might be) and they are not coming here. We'd be better off trying to catch their attention by doing the cosmic equivalent of yelling (i.e. sending strong radio pulses) at them. But it's going to be like trying to get the attention of a rock fan in the mosh pit from the back row in the stadium using your cupped hands. Not to mention that it's going to take about 9 years to get a response if we found a habitable planet around Alpha Centauri, which so far has not been forthcoming. (Nearest possible place is 20+ Light years round trip).
It may be fun to look, but it's pretty much useless.. We are here to stay at this point. At least until we can figure out how to go faster than the speed of light, safely. And if we can do that, we can get out of black holes too...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I don't think we could know up front what good life indicators are. Basically we see if anything looks odd or promising, form theories, and investigate more to strengthen or falsify such theories with new data and tests.
Mars' goofy and teasing soil and rock chemistry* should have taught us that searching for life is likely a long and winding road (barring a direct landing party with a big lab).
* This includes seasonal changes that looked like vegetation seasons to early telescopes (turned out to be seasonal dust patterns), Viking's "positive" results, the "magnetic worm" meteorite, methane detection, etc. Bill Clinton even jumped the gun with a "life!" press release.
Table-ized A.I.
And if we find 3 planets with the signature in the same system? Or we find 100 systems with the signature? How likely is the planet/moon signature? It seems that, it may be proof enough if we find it in the right way.
As an earthling (a clumsy term for our planetary residents at best), any information that suggests we are farther along the great filter than probability would dare suggest is welcome news.
If there is no other life in our perceivable light cone, we just might be the universe's best shot at a colonizing species!
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If there is no other life in our perceivable light cone, we just might be the universe's best shot at a colonizing species!
In that case, the universe is very severely fucked.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
It sure has a chemical imbalance, but then again, I had Taco Bell for lunch...
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
So let's say you're an advanced interstellar civilization looking about for other worlds with life for trade and/or colonization. You have system spanning optics capable of resolving individual planetary systems and resolving the atmospheric spectra thereof. And you find a small yellow star with 8 or 9 planets, including a couple of respectable gas giants and three rocky planets in the habitable zone. Two of those rocky planets clearly have stale atmospheres that have long ago achieved chemical steady state. But the third has an interesting mix of O2, CO2 and CH4, along with multiple other hydrocarbons, all apparently far from a stable state.
But alas, that planet has a HUGE moon... a well-known explanation for the spectra, and the cause of many, many failed planetary exploration missions.
The investment bureacrats HATE uncertainty. If you take a risk and it fails, it will cost your entire clan their wealth and status. You instead decide to commit your finite resources to explore planets with more exploitable natural resources than humongous gas giants and small rocky planets deep within the stellar gravity well.
I can see the fnords!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If there is no other life in our perceivable light cone, we just might be the universe's best shot at a colonizing species!
In that case, the universe is very severely fucked.
Only if you think nature a fool: Adapt or become extinct. The universe shapes the form of its inhabitants, not the other way around. Perhaps you fail to consider that organics are merely a tool to produce more flexible and durable inorganic life forms capable of surviving the harshness of space, similar to the way chemistry and entropic reduction is merely a tool to cause the self assembly of organic forms, similar to the way the laws of physics are merely a tool to crystallize matter out of energy.
You see, we cyberneticians can transport a simulated intelligence into reality by simply replacing their simulated sensors and frames with real cameras and chassis in the physical world. However, if the intelligence is easily serializable as a string of bits then one can simply copy the intelligence from the simulation directly into a waiting body in the greater reality.
Naturally, one wouldn't see but a single source of intelligent life per universe, as this would not be conducive to differentiation in the output optimized machine intelligence that emerges therein. Multiple instances of life tend to coalesce into a single species or single organism over time (as evidenced by your own multicellular body). It is more humane to use artificial isolated simulations to produce new ideas and perspectives than to enforce permanent loneliness through mandatory ignorance of a divided universal mind.
This idea would only work if either the planet's moon was right in front of it from out point of view, just going behind it or just coming out from behind. That means that even if the orbit was oriented just right, we'd only get the filtering effect intermittently. Of course, it's possible that the planet's orbit is such that we only see it at just the right time, but that's pilling one unlikely coincidence on top of another.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Embarrassing if alien life was checking Slashdot. The editors would convince them there is no intelligent life on Earth.
"of of" indeed.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
This news says absolutely nothing about the chance of life elsewhere in the universe... it only says something about our chance of being able to detect it as such.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Seems like a bit of a stretch... if we discover a world, and if that world has an atmosphere and if that atmosphere has one of the chemical compounds associated with life and if that world has a moon and if that moon has an atmosphere and if that atmosphere happens to have an equivalent/opposite chemical compound associated with life and if those two bodies happen to line up so we can sample both atmospheres at the same time, THEN we might falsely conclude there is evidence for life.
Seems like our current situation might be much more common...a world with life and a moon devoid of any atmosphere....
Well, you probably agree that life is likely to be made of molecules, right?
If you agree that life is made of molecules, then you need to have an environment that can form complex molecules and that it needs to do it during a period of a several billion years.
1) A boiling planet isn't going to form complex molecules the same way plasma doesn't form complex molecules (plasma = too hot to keep electrons).
2) A 3-degrees above absolute zero planet isn't going to form complex molecules in a trillion years because super cold makes everything into a solid that would react very, very slowly at best.
3) The star system better not emit intense bursts of energy 15-times per second, like a pulsar that emit high intensity radiation like xrays that knock apart chemical bonds and rip molecules apart.
So sure, maybe there is life around that is unusual compared to ours, but if it is made of molecules, we sure know what doesn't support stable evolution of chemical complexity in a reasonable period of time (several trillions years for a cold planet to facilitate reactions means everything in the entire universe except some small red dwarfs will have long died out).
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Fuck that shit. Evolution made us the dominant species on this planet, so we are just doing what nature intended. Limiting ourselves until we become 'nice' is against the natural order.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Yeah, but the absence of life out there sort of implies to me that it might be harder for us to actually colonize alien worlds. Creating a viable ecosystem is a lot more than just seeding plants/animals/genetic matter in a previously lifeless environment. You'll have to start out with the most primitive unicellular life our planet ever produced (you know, the first living cells to come out of the primordial soup?) - then, when they've altered the lifeless planet enough to make it tolerable, you'll need to introduce life that can survive in that nearly lifeless environment . . . in short, you'll have to try to compress several billion years of evolutionary changes to the ecosystem into something resembling a human lifetime or less.
If there's life already present, a lot of the preliminary work may be done for us - as long as we don't run into anything that's 1) smarter then we are, and 2) thinks we're just delicious.
You've clearly evolved..... in to a muppet. species rarely make thremselves extinct.
so you think that a species so incredibly advanced as to be able to cross the vast regions of space giving them almost unlimited resources and advancements in technology with the ability to swat us like flies would really give a shit about squashing us? at worst I would expect complete indifference from them as to our existence, should they exist and they considered us a threat we would be dead already.
There is no way Earth is the only planet with life in the universe. Even if you reduce the probability of life on a given solar system to almost nothing, like winning the lottery, the sheer size of the universe with its almost endless amount of stars and galaxies makes the odds for life somewhere in space and time extremely favorable.
Now the odds of that space and time being close enough to our little bubble of existence for us to take notice, that is a different matter.
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!
We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”
Plastic asshole.”
George Carlin
Indeed, they need to realize just how much greenhouse gas interstellar spaceships create.
A lot
Pigs in Space?
Why is that? Within living memory, we left the atmosphere for the first time. It's a little premature to look at budget negotiations and NASA's budget and conclude that we will NEVER EVER EVER colonize space. You and I would consider waiting another thousand years for humans to colonize another planet depressingly long, but considering the universe is something like 16 billion years old: it's not in any hurry.