Posted on 05/06/2014 8:28:57 AM PDT by equalator
In a new paper submitted to the arXiv preprint service, astrophysicists Timothy Brandt and David Spiegel of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, New Jersey, focused on the hunt for the chemical signature of oxygen, water and chlorophyll in the atmospheres of Earth-like exoplanetary atmospheres. Oxygen and water are essential for life as we know it, and chlorophyll is a biomolecule vital for photosynthesis on Earth. Photosynthesis is the extraction of energy from sunlight, a process employed by plants and some microbes, such as cyanobacteria.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Chlorophyll would be a strong indicator.
Now all we need is warp drive and we can tell the libs to go pound sand
I can’t imagine how they’d get reliable spectroscopic information on something that small, faint, and distant. Imagine something the size of the Earth orbiting Proxima Centauri (the closest star to our sun). I doubt that they’d be able to distinguish it from (say) something like Venus.
I’d be more impressed if they could find life in a human womb.
There certainly isn’t any intelligent life on this planet.
The problem is how will you keep someone alive long enough to get there. Its not like there’s a Walmart out there to stop and get gas and snacks and oxygen...rebreathing apparatuses won’t do the job for that long of a trip. What if they start out when the planet is primitive but by the time the get there they’ve advanced enough to strip citizens of their rights and become O’bummerland 2. Its not like they can whip that wagon around and head back home. I say we just take care of our own planet, depopulate voluntarily to keep from killing and wasting our own planet and we’ll be fine...: )
Or we could just use hammers and pointed sticks.
Or expose them to daylight...
It would be speculation at best. Since chlorophyll absorbs light (except for green 500-600nm) saying that astronomers have 'found' chlorophyll means that they simply have found nothing in that spectrum. It would have to be comparitive spectrometry between reflected red and blue wavelengths (<500nm annd >500nm) but that could be practically anything without direct observation.
For a while, it was claimed that having a lot of free oxygen in the atmosphere (which would be a lot easier to detect using wavelength spectra) was evidence for photosynthesis and light. The thing is, you can produce plenty of free oxygen from ionizing radiation splitting water molecules.
That is an interesting tactic, but would it not be rather circular giving the presumption that liquid water is the single best indicator of extra-terrestrial life?
There could be other chemicals that duplicate the function of chlorophyll in other environments, which if we detected would not mean “life” to us.
All plaints are not created equally some take more time than others to have life.
Even on Earth, there are bacteria which use molecules other than chlorophyll to build sugar from outside energy sources. A good example are the ones that grow around deep sea vents and use sulfur instead of oxygen.
The big caveat is mentioned in the Conclusion:
Finally, we show that the “red edge” of chlorophyll absorption at lambda [wavelength] of approximately 0.7 um will be extremely difficult to detect, unless the cloud cover is much lower and/or the vegetation fraction is much higher than on Earth. Assuming extraterrestrial chlorophyll to have the same optical properties as the terrestrial pigments, and assuming Earth-like cloud and vegetation coverings, detecting chlorophyll will require a SNR [Signal-to-Noise Ratio] approximately 6 times higher than for diatomic oxygen, equivalent to a SNR greater than or equal to 100 at R [dimensionless spectral resolution] approximately 20. The detectability only approaches that of O2 if the cloud covering is zero, or if it is light and a much larger surface fraction, 30%, is covered in vegetation.
Funding! That’s how they do it. And then they’ll need motivating results for more funding, so the results will be “encouraging”. By the time the fundees die, they’ll have made a good life on scamming Uncle Sugar. Let’s just be sure none of these failed AGW scientists didn’t move over to this project.
If these researchers really want to score some major funding they need to calibrate for cannabis, then liberals would be screaming for them to be given money.
you are assuming we know all there is to know about space travel.
I think Bob Lazaar’s description of the alien spacecraft as traveling with a gravity drive that essentially shrinks the distance between space between two places and you hop there in an instance is real (Seriously!)
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