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Research Suggests How Alien Life Could Spread Across the Galaxy
astroengine writes: As astronomical techniques become more advanced, a team of astrophysicists think they will be able to not only detect the signatures of alien life in exoplanetary atmospheres, but also track its relentless spread throughout the galaxy. The research, headed by Henry Lin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), assumes that this feat may be possible in a generation or so and that the hypothesis of panspermia may act as the delivery system for alien biology to hop from one star system to another.
Habital planets are so rare and far apart that alien life wouldn't be able to spread across the galaxy. Hell, even earth is so far away from the nearest possibly habitable planet that if we could travel 90% of the speed of light, it would take something like 10,000 years to get there. Much less a population and equipment and supplies enough to start a society.
Actually, we don't know if habitable planets are rare. We are finding a bunch and have barely look at what the universe holds. Now the traveling thing could be a problem, but maybe there are civilization on other planets that don't waste their time and resources killing each other and actually focus on science and space.
Be seeing you...
Hell, even earth is so far away from the nearest possibly habitable planet that if we could travel 90% of the speed of light, it would take something like 10,000 years to get there.
Spores are patient.
resistant to heat, cold, vacuum, desiccation, radiation, pressure, toxins, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
you realize they could leave earth (ejecta from a sever impact) and colonize other planets
then you think... wait a second, maybe we're here because these guys colonized earth
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It seems likely that mankind, and aliens who got started before us, will eventually establish permanent residences off of their home planets. In the not-so-distant future, the majority of mankind, by percentage, will live off-Earth. However, you should think of the planets as being the bottom of very deep holes, with most of them being too hot, cold, poisonous, exposed to radiation, or too much or too little pressure. The task of getting and leaving these places is risky and expensive, too. Let's just give up on the idea of colonizing Mars for the forseeable future, please! It may not always be so, but the solar system's orbital rocks are easier resources to get, and spitting up material from low-gravity objects with mass drivers. There's no point to terraforming a planet when that will take thousands of years, and no human civillization can keep a project like that, and it's cash flow, going for so long.
In short, we're just not gonna live like pale, stick-figure trolls in underground caverns on the moon or mars. Mining will be done by pulling a big bag over an asteroid and breaking it up from the outside in. Attached refining equipment will separate useful elements and chemicals. This will be mostly-automated. We'll use the tailings as concrete to build our colonies. A gigantic mirror will heat the crushed rock and sinter it into shape, like an enormous 3d printer. There is enough material to build millions of them in OUR OWN solar system, and they'll be essentially self-sustaining once they've been established. Conditions inside will be perfect for human life. It's a far better prospect than making do with low-gravity moons and poisonous planetary atmospheres. Groups of colonies might form "countries" and others will operate independently. The colonies will be built robotically, so the cost will eventually drop to the point where one might be owned by a single family or other social group.
While most colonies will participate in a humanity-wide economic and social network, a life of physical isolation and self-sufficiency will be the norm for most. We'll be in communication, but not often physically visiting other colonies. Some of these may try hurtling themselves onward to the next closest star. They'll stay in touch the whole time, they'll just be permanently out of reach from then on.
The stars DO NOT need to be sun-like, nor do they need Earth-like worlds! They just need to have exploitable resources in easy reach. Red and brown dwarfs are more plentiful than any other type, and they'll last orders of magnitude longer, too. This is probably where the majority of intelligent life will live at some point. Not to miss out on any exploitable resource, those who live around dwarf stars will push onward to practically every type of star within reach. A million years or so, and we'll have colonies throughout the galaxy, and hundreds of alien neighbors to enrich our culture and science.
Panspermia doesn't involve a bunch of Oregon Trail style settlers heading out and populating an empty world. You fire microbes, or possibly even just the precursors of life out and they start multiplying and evolving if they land somewhere they like.
I skipped the Discovery link to avoid hype and went directly to the Harvard link.
Disappointing. One expects a certain sobriety from scientists and yet something is terribly wrong here. The article is peppered with weasel words: an unusually vague 'theory'; and words like: could, might, if, potentially, would, and the ever dreadful 'assumes'. Let's hope that the actual paper will have a more solid foundation.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Now the traveling thing could be a problem, but maybe there are civilization on other planets that don't waste their time and resources killing each other and actually focus on science and space.
This. There's 7 billion of us. I'd wager less than 100 million of us are engaged in productive activities besides life-sustention, probably less than 10 million using their immense brain computation ability to do it. But this is due to war and inequality, not that the rest of the world are idiots. Not that they were born idiots. Some may have been brainwashed so thoroughly that they might as well be idiots, but that's still not necessarily a permenant condition. If everyone was given equal opportunity, and people with brilliant ideas didn't have to struggle just to survive, the average citizen struggle just not to die from all the corporate poisoning etc, then something closer to 4-5 billion of us could be doing productive stuff. Amazingly productive stuff. Stuff that probably less than 10000 people alive today could even imagine under current society.
Were the alien's exoplanetary atmospheric escapades discovered in the Ashley Madison database?
Oh, this article isn't the hourly Ashley Madison tripe? Pardon me... I apologize. Carry on!
Beware of the Leopard.
Given that life had to originate somewhere, and that we know next to nothing about the distribution of life in the universe, panspermia seems to me like a solution looking for a question to be the answer of. I am bemused by the fact that some people seem to find a universe having panspermia more satisfying than one without it, just as I am bemused by people who find a universe with reincarnation more appealing than one without (if you can't remember anything about your former selves, what's the difference? - they are as good as dead.)
I don't deny panspermia could happen; my attitude is essentially 'call me when you have something that goes beyond speculation.'
Indeed, especially if kept near absolute zero within a chunk of rock and ice potentially miles across . And you don't even necessarily need spores - a single strand of RNA capable of replicating itself from naturally occurring organic molecules might be all you need to jump-start a biosphere on a new planet.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The team issue is radiation. We're talking about journies of hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. I can imagine nucleotides specifically protected by some heavy duty shielding making it (in other words big ass gene pods built by aliens), but accidental hitchhikers on meteors seems far less probable.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There's something I've never figured out about this particular theory. All life, even some sort of "patient zero" alien life, had to arise from non-organic substances somewhere, right? If it can happen once, then it should be able to happen any number of times given a set of similar conditions. Given the size of the universe, and even our own galaxy, that's like to be a *lot* of places.
As such, why would anyone think it's more plausible for a chunk of life to hitch a ride on some piece of space debris, and then survive re-entry on a coincidentally habitable planet on which it can flourish... than for life to have sprung into existence here, where obviously conditions were optimal for it (or at least life as we know it)?
I have to wonder if the enthusiasm for this theory is partially based on the admittedly exciting prospect that we could be the descendants of exotic alien lifeforms rather than some homegrown slime mold.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Hate to break it you, but the formation of the Moon probably didn't seed the solar system (or anywhere else) with life from Earth. The earliest single cell life forms likely date to around 3.6 billion years ago; the Theia impact hypothesis puts the collision around 4.4 to 4.5 billion years ago (and only 30-50 million years after the Solar System even began forming). Even if both estimates are off by a couple hundred million years, there is still no overlap. Earth was an uninhabitable ball of molten rock at the time, not remotely suitable for the initial development of life remotely like ours.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
That or they fantasise about meeting women who are just like the ones here except with pointy ears, bumpy foreheads or some other prosthetics budget friendly difference. And who have the hots for nerds.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No, you sew what you rip.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There's something I've never figured out about this particular theory. All life, even some sort of "patient zero" alien life, had to arise from non-organic substances somewhere, right? If it can happen once, then it should be able to happen any number of times given a set of similar conditions. Given the size of the universe, and even our own galaxy, that's like to be a *lot* of places.
I think you are right, and probably most researchers of this subject would agree. My personal feeling is that life didn't happen because of some amazingly unlikely combination of lucky accidents, it happened because it was likely enough that it must happen almost anywhere the conditionas are right. There is a book that you might enjoy - "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane; a bit technical, but that's why I like it. According to him, prokaryotic life more or less has to happen, but he isn't so sure that eukaryotes are likely to evolve (I disagree, but that's another matter).
As such, why would anyone think it's more plausible for a chunk of life to hitch a ride on some piece of space debris, and then survive re-entry on a coincidentally habitable planet on which it can flourish... than for life to have sprung into existence here, where obviously conditions were optimal for it (or at least life as we know it)?
As far as I understand it, the current thinking is not so much that life evolved in just one place and then travelled as cells or spores to other places, but that a suprisingly large proportion of the molecules needed for life have evolved in the dustclouds around newly formed stars. Panspermia in some form could still have played a large role as well, as it isn't implausible that cells or spores could have been blasted off their home planet and survived the journey / we already know of some on our own planet that could potentially make it.
I have to wonder if the enthusiasm for this theory is partially based on the admittedly exciting prospect that we could be the descendants of exotic alien lifeforms rather than some homegrown slime mold.
Could be, but I think it also has a lot to do with the fact that until fairly recently, we didn't have any really detailed ideas about the first cells might have evolved, and there was a widespread feeling that it was a very improbable event, so the idea of life arising in only a single or a few places and then spreading out was attractive. We now know much more, and it seems like life must be widespread, maybe even universal.
This is the problem of big numbers. You're multiplying a really big number (number of solar systems) times a really big number (time) times a number of unknown smallness (chances of life emerging from inorganic materials). We only know it's happened once. We haven't seen it anywhere else in the universe. We've tried our hardest and never seen it in a lab. So we have no idea what order of magnitude that chance is. A few orders of magnitude in one direction and there's life everywhere. A few orders of magnitude in the other direction and there's life in but a handful places in the universe. Maybe even only here.
We need more data to help pin down what order of magnitude that really small number is. One thing that would help with that, though, would be what these researchers propose to look for. Once we can detect signs of life on an exoplanet (like the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere...a very likely sign of organic processes under way, because oxygen does not stay free for long), how uniformly is it distributed in the galaxy?
If life is likely to arise, like your hunch, then life in the galaxy should look pretty uniform. It's everywhere. But if instead it's clumpy (or more likely smeared as stars move relative to each other) then that indicates life is very rare, and spreads instead by panspermia.
Uniform distribution of life in the galaxy: life is likely to arise, and may or may not spread via panspermia, too.
Clumpy/smeary distribution of life in the galaxy: life is unlikely to arise, but likely to spread via panspermia.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.