A Solar System That May Be Teeming With Life Is Discovered

[specklebang]

I am a servant and guardian to three cats. They do not consider themselves important. Importance is a relative concept. For the term "importance" to have meaning, some lesser value has to be assigned to other things.

Either we live in alternate universes or you better not let my cats talk to your cats because you'll see how fast things can change.

My cats think they are deities.

 

[Oftencold]

My cats know that deities aspire to be cats, they just don't think that anything else is real, no even other cats. So no scale of importance is requited. The value of gold is not calculated in units of imaginary dross.

 

[rhinefire]

It is actually exactly the opposite. The odds of life forming at one particular moment in one particular place are small, the odds of life forming across a timespan of billions of years once the materials are in place (such as on Earth) rises considerably. Set this against a universe with as many as 10^24 planets (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets) and the odds for life become ridiculous to the point of mathematical absurdity.

You are way off and fail to understand on thing, time. What could you possible be thinking when you write" one particuar moment"? We will never know what existed earlier so to simplify life could have existed prevously and after this earth is disintegrated life could begin elsewhere. Mathematically all odds favor life elsewhere. Life we have discovered very recently can exist in an atmosphere of methane gas so this just adds to the matheatcal probbility of life forms elsewhere.

 

[Deuce]

Relying upon an utter lack of concrete evidence to assert that something will not be found lends one a certain licenses to arrogance in the face of so much unfounded speculation.

Except its not unfounded speculation. It's true that we have no direct evidence of life elsewhere, but that's not the same thing as having no evidence. We have proof that life can exist under certain circumstances: ours. We have proof that life can arise from nonliving materials of a certain combination: ours. And what are we made of? Mostly water. Hydrogen, oxygen. Good bit of carbon. All in the top 5 most common elements in the universe.

We know we're made of common materials and are on a planet with a certain temperature. Our observations now show that this temperature range is not a rare thing. Given that, and the sheer number of stars out there, we can speculate that it is incredibly likely that similar conditions with similar materials exist elsewhere.

You keep attacking this straw man of "concrete evidence."

 

[brothern]

You are way off and fail to understand on thing, time. What could you possible be thinking when you write" one particuar moment"? We will never know what existed earlier so to simplify life could have existed prevously and after this earth is disintegrated life could begin elsewhere. Mathematically all odds favor life elsewhere. Life we have discovered very recently can exist in an atmosphere of methane gas so this just adds to the matheatcal probbility of life forms elsewhere.

At one spot in time. Meaning that if we were to pick a specific point in time (20,000 Earth years in the future, to the day) and a specific point (the nearest goldilocks planet), there's only a microscopic chance that life is actually existing there. But if you look across time and across the universe, both time and space are so gigantic, it becomes impossible that life has NOT existed somewhere elsewhere besides Earth.

Also this -- "We will never know what existed earlier" -- is false. Light and other electromagnetic radiation is not destroyed in a vacuum and it also takes time for light to travel across space. Therefore we have a record of history based on the light we see. For example, the stars we see today are so far away from Earth, that the light we see was actually created billions of years ago. We can watch stars blowing up today, when in fact, those stars already died long before humanity even existed.

Likewise the light and TV/radio signals that humans created 10, 50 or 100 years ago are still in existence.
They are just 10, 50 and 100 light years away from Earth in the middle of space.

 

[Cameron]

This all reminds me of the long search for the Kingdom of Prester John.

People wanted badly to believe it existed. Supposedly mariners reported glimpses of towers rising over distant horizons. But it was all myth.


There is no evidence at all of extraterrestrial life. But people think it just has to be there, because we can't be special, after all.

Myself, I doubt that anything of the sort will ever be found.

I don't really care whether we find extraterrestrial life. I care more about finding inhabitable planets for us, since Earth is not going to be around forever.

 

[Oftencold]

Except its not unfounded speculation. It's true that we have no direct evidence of life elsewhere, but that's not the same thing as having no evidence. We have proof that life can exist under certain circumstances: ours. We have proof that life can arise from nonliving materials of a certain combination: ours. And what are we made of? Mostly water. Hydrogen, oxygen. Good bit of carbon. All in the top 5 most common elements in the universe.

We know we're made of common materials and are on a planet with a certain temperature. Our observations now show that this temperature range is not a rare thing. Given that, and the sheer number of stars out there, we can speculate that it is incredibly likely that similar conditions with similar materials exist elsewhere.

You keep attacking this straw man of "concrete evidence."

My car is made of common materials too. You wanna speculate on how many of them are lying about as the result of random events?

Sheer numbers, oh my! But you know, the numbers are a human thing. There are no "numbers" in reality, any more than there is objective color.

And, of course, you missed the purpose of the exercise. By standing upon a perfectly rational call for proof, I am safe from rational refutation.

There are billions of chances for the Butler to brain Colonel Mustard. And they count for nothing if you can't prove that he did it. Beyond that, even with trillions of chances to do the deed, the weight of all those numbers again means nothing if he in fact didn't do the deed.

Read up on the history of scientific discovery in the last few centuries sometime, and see what the track record is for predicting things that "just had to be there."

 

[Oftencold]

I don't really care whether we find extraterrestrial life. I care more about finding inhabitable planets for us, since Earth is not going to be around forever.

But it will be here longer than you or I have any interest in it.

 

[Cameron]

But it will be here longer than you or I have any interest in it.

I didn't say it was a priority.

 

[soot]

We have proof that life can exist under certain circumstances: ours. We have proof that life can arise from nonliving materials of a certain combination: ours. And what are we made of? Mostly water. Hydrogen, oxygen. Good bit of carbon. All in the top 5 most common elements in the universe.

We know we're made of common materials and are on a planet with a certain temperature. Our observations now show that this temperature range is not a rare thing. Given that, and the sheer number of stars out there, we can speculate that it is incredibly likely that similar conditions with similar materials exist elsewhere.

You keep attacking this straw man of "concrete evidence."

Here's what always throws me for a loop when I think about this.

Consider what you just said there.

Everything necessary for life to come into being exists here on Earth.

We have the right temprature, the right atmosphere, the right amount of water, the right amount of sunlight, the right amount of gravity, the right amount of everything.

And we know by virtue of the fact that I'm sitting here typing to you that life did, in fact, come into being.

Exactly once.

Perfect this, perfect that, perfect everything.

Yet every organisim alive on Earth today, every organisim that has ever lived on Earth so far was we can ascertain from the evidence, descended from a single common ancestor that "sparked" into being roughly 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.

That doesn't make any sense to me if we're to believe that life is so inevitable that it must arise anywhere and everywhere it has so much as a middling opportunity.

If life were as inevitable as proponents of a "well populated" Universe would have it; if it were to pop into being everywhere, or even in a few somewhere's, where even the most remote possibility that it might exist, why is it that in the one place we know, beyond any shadow of any doubt, that it has, it's only happened once in 4 billion years?

You, me, Chimpanzees, Naked Mole Rats, pine trees, slime molds, eukaryotes, "...the third Iguanodon to the left of the tall Cycad tree", everyone and every living thing, ever, has descended from life arising just once.

Maybe life isn't as likely as many folks would like to believe?

 

[mbig]

The empirical evidence can pretty safely say life is here because it was an inevitability. The particulars of how the first few building blocks arrived remain a bit of a mystery but that is an important distinction.

Another important point to be made here is that while you are correct in saying that life sprouting up at any given moment at any given point in the galaxy is mathematically insignificant, keep in mind just how large the galaxy is. Also keep in mind that life, once it arrives, is pretty darn difficult to get rid of, giving us a large window of time to locate it. Add in the fact that we are on an average if slightly small rocky planet orbiting a fairly common G-type main sequence star. And the inevitability of life elsewhere begins to look pretty certain. Like a previous poster said, at this point, if it were to turn out that life isn't out there it would shake the foundations of our current knowledge. That isn't to say it couldn't happen, wild things happen in the world of science, it is just tremendously unlikely.

Now as for intelligent life well there we still have some major questions, not the least of which is Fermi's Paradox: If life is as likely as it seems to be then it should be fairly common. If life is so common than even if the chances of life becoming intelligent is very small, it would stand to reason that there are other space-faring civilizations. If that is the is the case, WHERE ARE THEY?

Other life seems likely to me. Life may have arisen, in the form of single cells, more than once here and intermingled with other single cell-ulars. It may have arisen again from the inanimate again just yesterday, (!) and was eaten by, or perhaps interbred with, another extant single cell.

If ET life is cellular, (or perhaps even non-cellular), Evolution, seems far more likely (near 100%) than life having arisen itself.
So I believe where there is life it is likely to be, Or eventually achieve intelligence.
Life has existed on Earth for 3.5 Billion years before anyone was aware enough to even listen for a radio signal: the last 100 or so.
Tossing the coin, at least half of sparse life may be deaf/dumb/mum.

And no matter how intelligent, it may simply be impossible to solve the light/time/travel barrier. A good part of 'life' may be streaking away from the center of the Big Bang as fast as we are, but in the opposite direction/in all directions. Near or greater the speed of light away from us.
Say we are each moving .6 LS away from a center point, 1.2 LS from each other. At even slower rate of speed it would dramatically slow or even make impossible, any communication. (see density below).

even more speculative:
Imagining a life form a quarter billion years older/more advanced than we are, they should have easily been able to broadcast a radio/light beacon that even tho weak, should be detectable to any other civilization within that amount of LYs. If they decided that was a wise an not foolhardy idea.
yet more speculative:
Life could have become more likely [only] at a certain universe/matter density and most could [ergo] it be of similar age to ours ... and only 'recent'.
The universe is now thought to be ever-expanding and eventually will go dark - everything flying away faster (accelerating and expanding) in all directions, perhaps even on a molecular level. That's what I meant by 'density'.

So many "don't knows".
People say there's no purpose to life without _____, but just finding out how/when/why etc, Is great purpose.

 

[Hdreamz]

There is also just the sheer scale of cosmic time to consider, life may well have existed all around us but civilizations rise and fall and the technology required to search and develop also brings with it the inherent risk of self destruction. We could well find a cosmic graveyard of past civilizations...

We as a species have only been looking scientifically into the heavens in any great detail for a couple hundred years at most, who is to say that life hasn't avoided us altogether or would even want to communicate with us. We have a natural curiosity that may not be universal...

 

[rhinefire]

Imagine: With our present day ability to now see light years away what if there is someone looking at our Earth saying"oh, if we only had the technology to travel there! It appears from all our measurements that there is an atmosphere and water and where there is water there is life! If we only had the capability to travel to that planet. Perhaps someday."

 

[Hdreamz]

N = R*x Fp x Ne x Fl x Fi x Fc x L

Anyone wanna have a crack at it and make a prediction......