Posted on 01/23/2011 9:38:58 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Howard Smith, a senior astrophysicist at Harvard, made the claim that we are alone in the universe after an analysis of the 500 planets discovered so far showed all were hostile to life.
Dr Smith said the extreme conditions found so far on planets discovered outside out Solar System are likely to be the norm, and that the hospitable conditions on Earth could be unique.
“We have found that most other planets and solar systems are wildly different from our own. They are very hostile to life as we know it,” he said.
He pointed to stars such as HD10180, which sparked great excitement when it was found to be orbited by a planet of similar size and appearance to Earth.
But the similarities turned out to be superficial. The planet lies less than two million miles from its sun, meaning it is roasting hot, stripped of its atmosphere and blasted by radiation.
Many of the other planets have highly elliptical orbits which cause huge variations in temperature which prevent water remaining liquid, thus making it impossible for life to develop.
A separate team of scientists recently declared the chance of aliens existing on a newly discovered Earth-like planet “100 per cent”.
Professor Steven Vogt , of the Carnegie institution in Washington, said he had “no doubt” extraterrestrial life would be found on a small, rocky planet found orbiting the red dwarf star Gliese 581 last September.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Precisely. One up, one down. Twice the baseline in half the time, and still useful data if one fails.
What we would learn from the attempt would be staggering. Personally, I think it’s too early, but then the other half of me says to hell with it, let’s go, fail spectacularly and then get up and try again.
Heaven knows that’s what happened with Apollo. But, the will for this isn’t there and hasn’t been for some time. And it doesn’t look like my generation will either, which is something I learned when the coolest space exploration ever was basically ignored while it was happening. Voyager to Neptune was really cool. Odd that this memory would surface again.
You don’t need multigenerational, but if you are putting that much into it, you might as well design it to be a self-perpetuating mission. But the reality is that the first one is likely to be a hopeless failure and doom everyone on it to a quiet death floating around the universe forever.
But you’d need the one shot unmanned probe to AC. Plus the slingshot to make it economically feasible. Which probably means it’s not happening until we’ve got moonbases.
They’d have to be very, very, lucky if people were the thing to break first. People are generally the last thing to go. How many people errors resulted in the loss of a mission while in space? Zero.
Yes, and then you get into what exactly "life" means. We think of life as something that makes itself evident when observed for minutes or even seconds. What if the workings of life in some other part of the universe take place over a span of millennia, or longer? It takes seconds for adenosine triphosphate to be converted into energetic activity in the cell of a living creature on Earth. What if it takes a million years for some analogous reaction to take place in some organism on another planet? How would we recognize that as life? How would we even observe it?
And why don't we just declare the whole universe to be "alive" since, after all, it contains us. Why put the boundary around our bodies or our planet? Isn't that kind of arbitrary?
It just seems to me that the whole question is shot through with problems arising from reference frame issues.
My personal feeling is that God made this entire universe, every last particle and physical law, for Man. This seems no more farfetched than any other theory.
No, just that if life does exist, it’s exceedingly unlikely that we are the first.
If we are first, we are likely alone. I mean it’s possible that we could be first and not alone, but that’s very much more difficult.
The more likely life occurs, the less likely this is to happen. The less likely life is to occur, the less likely that it will happen more than once and that we would be first.
I'm sorry, but in a sea as vast as the universe, that statement is illogical.
Who says that life must develop under conditions identical to those found on Earth? We have life forms on this planet that thrive in conditions that are deadly to plant, animal, and insect life.
Whole ecosystems could inhabit methane seas on other planets, as far as we know. Animal life could exist elsewhere that breathes in an atmosphere with a totally different chemical composition than our own.
The possibilities are endless.
LOL!
That is cool.
It got my 6 year old to step away from the wii. Well, once I figured out how to make something that looked like a solar system.
Thanks for sharing.
This activated my bullsh|t detector. Astronomers do not refer to other "solar" systems, since there is no such thing. "The Solar System" refers to our sun (Sol). The correct term is "other stellar systems". All real astronomers know this, and any astrophysicist should be equally well informed.
This is the kind of ignorance that would cause one to refer to other moons as "other lunas", other planets as "other earths", and other galaxies as "other milky ways". This is like an auto mechanic referring to all cars as "fords", an accountant who doesn't know the difference between debits and credits, or a software engineer who doesn't know the difference between a compiler and an assembler.
That’s the total number of stars in the known universe, according to a study by Australian astronomers.
It’s also about 10 times as many stars as grains of sand on all the world’s beaches and deserts.
Yet some here argue that there can't possibly be life anywhere else but on this one planet. The sheer scale of the numbers involved argues that life is ubiquitous throughout the universe.
Perhaps it's very different from lifeforms found here, and perhaps the chemistry of those planets is far different from ours, but life has a way of occupying the unlikeliest niches.
Question: Why is Carl Sagan so lonely? (pick one)
(a)
(b)
(c)
Let’s add (d) He wasn’t lonely. Sagan was a pothead addled, publicity seeking opportunist with a closet full of turtle neck sweaters to don during the sexed up “Age of Aquarius.”
Oops! In my post (80), I seem to have paraphrased this. I also forgot it was Clarke. If I hadn’t been lazy, I could have looked it up, or read all of the other posts first. :-)
Sure, it is cool... hugs star really mucks things up.
That may be true, but this is the only plant the Creator of that very, very large universe chose to sacrifice His Son for. That alone makes us very special.
Dead things don't become alive. Science has never observed dead things becoming alive. Yet it's assumed that it can happen? Life didn't develop.
Higher life forms have risen and fallen many times in our planet's history. The same could be true for other planets. In the big picture, I don't think it matters much whether we're first, or not.
My guess is that it's likely that life has begun on countless worlds in more or less random happenstance. Life here may be old in comparison to life on some other planets, while others may have established ecosystems that predate ours by millions, or even billions of years.
We won't really know the answer to that question until we're able to closely study life on another world. I still hold out hope that we'll find some in our own solar system.
Life has begun? It just starts by itself? Dead things just become alive? LOL
I should think that the number of stars in the galaxy would be in the billions. The number of planets, very much more.
That's what our Bible says.
I wonder what their Bibles say.
BTW, I seem to have missed the passage that says Christ only appeared here on Earth.
Would you be so kind as to cite Chapter and Verse?
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