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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."
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
"640 lightyears ought to be enough to keep away anyone!" - Billeep Gatezog
Seriously, a multi-generational nuclear powered colony or unmanned space probe going roughly 1% to 10% of the speed of light is not completely outside of possibilities. Arguably we could build and launch such now if we had 50 trillion or so dollars to blow. That's what, 20 years worth of world-wide military budgets?
Maybe someday fairly soon the Mormons or a new cult will try such. Since it's not gov't funded, they can accept more risk to keep it cheaper.
Table-ized A.I.
Any astronomer knows the meme "billions and billions". I think there was even a Carl Sagan skit on Saturday night live. In fact, Carl Sagan wrote a book in honor of the meme called "billions and billons"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billions_and_Billions:_Thoughts_on_Life_and_Death_at_the_Brink_of_the_Millennium
It is an astronomer inside joke. I made no apologizes any more than a programmer on slashdot making an inside C, or Perl or SQL joke.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
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!
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'
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