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Alien Life Could Thrive In the Clouds of Failed Stars (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: There's an abundant new swath of cosmic real estate that life could call home -- and the views would be spectacular. Floating out by themselves in the Milky Way galaxy are perhaps a billion cold brown dwarfs, objects many times as massive as Jupiter but not big enough to ignite as a star. According to a new study, layers of their upper atmospheres sit at temperatures and pressures resembling those on Earth, and could host microbes that surf on thermal updrafts. The idea expands the concept of a habitable zone to include a vast population of worlds that had previously gone unconsidered. "You don't necessarily need to have a terrestrial planet with a surface," says Jack Yates, a planetary scientist at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, who led the study. Atmospheric life isn't just for the birds. For decades, biologists have known about microbes that drift in the winds high above Earth's surface. And in 1976, Carl Sagan envisioned the kind of ecosystem that could evolve in the upper layers of Jupiter, fueled by sunlight. You could have sky plankton: small organisms he called "sinkers." Other organisms could be balloonlike "floaters," which would rise and fall in the atmosphere by manipulating their body pressure. In the years since, astronomers have also considered the prospects of microbes in the carbon dioxide atmosphere above Venus's inhospitable surface. Yates and his colleagues set out to update Sagan's calculations and to identify the sizes, densities, and life strategies of microbes that could manage to stay aloft in the habitable region of an enormous atmosphere of predominantly hydrogen gas. On such a world, small sinkers like the microbes in Earth's atmosphere or even smaller would have a better chance than Sagan's floaters, the researchers will report in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal. But a lot depends on the weather: If upwelling winds are powerful on free-floating brown dwarfs, as seems to be true in the bands of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, heavier creatures can carve out a niche. In the absence of sunlight, they could feed on chemical nutrients. Observations of cold brown dwarf atmospheres reveal most of the ingredients Earth life depends on: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, though perhaps not phosphorous.
Where would they get the proper matter to feed themselves and reproduce with?
And if it developed space travel I wonder if it would notice our kind. Would it even interact as well as the aliens in Blindsight?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Science really should read science fiction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Table-ized A.I.
... it might not.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The Integral Trees/The Smoke Ring, Larry Niven.
Wait a minute. Maybe alien live could BE the clouds of a failed star. Think about it!
>> Alien Life Could Thrive In the Clouds of Failed Stars
Yeah I think they're called Scientologists.
Oceans have life at different layers, so why not gaseous atmospheres of varying densities?
Unless there is something magical about life, its seeds are embedded in the fabric of the universe. Earth coalesced out of a dust cloud and without any human intervention, life appeared and evolved to what we have today. This is a natural process. That it could occur in circumstances other than earthlike does not strike me as farfetched. OTOH, we still can't spontaneously make life in the lab so we don't know all its secrets, and perhaps in reality, our knowledge is very limited (you don't know what you don't know).
No phosphorous, it's as absolutely essential to any form of life as we know it as carbon is for more than one reason. It's a dealbreaker not to have it. No phosphorous, no life. And no there is not replacement for it, the hoopla over supposed replacement of it with arsenic in a certain bacteria has proven to be false. Replace phosphorus with arsenic and you get dead organism.
The Integral Trees/Smoke Ring books explore a similar idea, though it is based around a gas torus surrounding a neutron star. Definitely a fun read as Niven incorporates the physics of such a system in his world building. He did the math and thought through the model exceptionally well.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
This sounds like it would make an absolutely amazing VR world that you could cruise around in. Even more fun would be designing such a world!
I can see how theoretically some balloon type structures could float on Venus ... but on a brown dwarf those structures would get quickly yanked down into the high pressure death zone.