Is there life out there?

[Stoned]

Is a question some people fascinated by Astronomy and extra terrestrials. While most people would say yes, there has to be. I beg to differ.

*Caution*
This may be a hope shattering post for the people who are mood swingy Lucifer Majiskus...



As I have said above, you probably all think theres life out there waiting to be discovered! Trust me its a lot more complicated to have life on other worlds. Let alone getting there :|


Atmosphere
First off, we are obviously oxygen breathers not Sulfur or Methane breathers. So it is likely that oxygen may be key in having the type of organisms on Earth. You may say "What?! That is madness! There has to be life forms out there that breath other gases!" Well you may/probably/could be right about that. But so far from what I have seen on The Universe that on other planets that would be nothing but gas (A gas giant) would be these floater type creatures. An example they thought of was a jellyfish type floater. It would propel itself by using the gases on the planet(Methane, Hydrogen, and other lighter than air gases). Then you need the right type of atmosphere that traps some heat in yet doesn't trap to much heat in. If it traps to much heat in it results in the greenhouse effect. Take Venus for example, an atmosphere that pisses acid rain, pressure that could split a space ship right in two. Volcanic landscape so hot that it could melt the coolest girl on Earth...not a pretty situation to be in. Unfortunately, we are going through the very same process that Venus under went with. Might I add this will take 1000s of years to happen.

Magnetic Field
This is very, VERY important for a planet that needs to harbor life. The Earth's magnetic field gets generated by the core of the Earth spinning (Or it could have been the Mantle..) magnetizing and producing this field around the Earth. This repels solar particles from the Sun which keeps our planet from becoming something similar to Fallout 3's wasteland Without this it will just devastate the planet, absolutely NO chance of life. But im 100% positive all planets will have a magnetic field, as long as they have an active core.

Environment
Another important factor to include. Face it, no luscious environment with water and forestry, no life. As I have mentioned above, Venus, has an inhospitable environment. Non-stop Volcanic activity, scorching hot conditions, sulfur stained into the very rocks. You know, all the bad stuff. BUT there are most likely extermafiles (organisms that can live in the harshest of environments) could survive in a sulfur enriched environment. Still, they would need to find a food source and deal with the volcanoes...

The Golden Zone
The goldy lox zone is a special area in which a planet is the right distance away from its parent star to stay at a habitable temperature. Take Pluto for example, its so far away that on its farthest distance from the Sun, the damn atmosphere freezes over. Yeah, THE ATMOSPHERE! Then theres Mercury, the big ball of hotness. Way to close to the Sun obviously. Scorched straight to the core. This is very crucial to the planets habitability.

Oh yeah,

The crew..?
Im not quite sure what to call this factor. But anyway, you do need other planets to par take in roles to preserve the other ones. You know Jupiter? Hes the big tough guy who would pull all the planet threatening comets away from other planets. After all, space is just one big shooting gallery. Then theres other jobs the other planets do but I have seem to forgotten them

Need the right star
Yup, you need a particular star to do us in. Our Sun (if I remember correctly) is a class-M star. This is just there brightness and stuff. You cant have a Brown Dwarf, a Red Dwarf, a blue super giant. No just no...

Size
You cant have a Jupiter sized terrestrial planet, thats far to big to harbor life. Nor can you have a Pluto sized terrestrial planet either, thats far to small. There was a particular range that the planet needed to be in but I have lost that information long ago.

Thats all I can think of for the basics. Now to the matter of getting there.


D i s t a n c e
I hate to admit it but, we have piss poor space traveling technology. With our rocket engines today it would take about 2 or 3 months of travel time to get to Mars, at its closest point to the Earth! If you want to visits other worlds, you need better engines. take Gliese 581 for example. It has 4 planets orbiting it and its 20.3 light years away from earth. A light year is 6 trillion miles, you do the math. There are theorems out there like worm-holes, traveling as fast as light, etc, but im not going to go into that since its irrelevant.

Now lets say there was other life out there, this is what might be needed...

Food Chain
Yeah, you definitely need a food chain. Other food sources equals survivability and other things like Natural Selection and I suppose Evolution(I am not 100% sure on Evolution, if im wrong please correct me). You cant just have one dominate species or they would end up dieing off and start hunting each other :| Probably not a good way if they want to evolve and start becoming sophisticated

Natural Selection
Yup, need this bad boy to kill off the dumber species. This is bound to happen if theres predators and other hunters. Hey, its just Natural Selection


Thats just some factors you need to take into perspective. Without those, well...you got yourself a dead planet. But there are many extra solar planets being discovered, like Gliese 581 a, b, c, d. 51 Pegasi b, etc. But there all uninhabitable planets. 51 pegasi b being a super hot Jupiter on super-steroids.


A little light for the darkness...

But sometime ago Hubble saw a patch of sky about 1/4 smaller than the full moon and it appeared to be empty blackness...it was quite the opposite. For 2 weeks (I could be wrong on the time period) it let in all the light it could get. It found The Ultra Deep Field image.

Each dot is an entire galaxy...each galaxy harboring trillions of stars! Each with the possibility with planets that could harbor life! Its all very exciting.


/giantwallofperpetualtext

Thats the end...for now at least. If you want to know some more random space shit just watch this video. Its very exciting.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxAETS9nTNM

 

[zeus9860]

Yeah i know, it's exciting and all but imagine if we were to discover other life species out there. Could be trouble for us if their reaction turned out bad against us, or our reaction with them aswell >_>
Just can't say it wont be all that exciting if you end up facing some advanced alien species that could take us whenever they wanted to for meals and such. Anyways this is just my imagination, can't really say that's going to happen in the future rofl. :roll:

 

[PBarnum]

I think there is definitely life out there. Now whether or not it is intelligent is the question...

My father used to be a project manager for the shuttle program at boeing (before it was considered old technology and shut down). And he told me one of the ways that they were looking for intelligent life is if they could see smoke or exhaust on another planet, from a factory or something of the sort. Which I think greatly reduces their chance of finding life.

 

[Stoned]

I think there is definitely life out there. Now whether or not it is intelligent is the question...

My father used to be a project manager for the shuttle program at boeing (before it was considered old technology and shut down). And he told me one of the ways that they were looking for intelligent life is if they could see smoke or exhaust on another planet, from a factory or something of the sort. Which I think greatly reduces their chance of finding life.

Yeah i know, it's exciting and all but imagine if we were to discover other life species out there. Could be trouble for us if their reaction turned out bad against us, or our reaction with them aswell >_>
Just can't say it wont be all that exciting if you end up facing some advanced alien species that could take us whenever they wanted to for meals and such. Anyways this is just my imagination, can't really say that's going to happen in the future rofl. :roll:

ill start with Zeus's comment first. This could be true Zeus, if were unlucky and the only intelligent life we encounter would be a malevolent race that could start a war, enslave, or kill us. Thats if they are more advanced than we are. But I doubt this would happen because if the species has an ounce of intelligence in them they would most likely come to reason that a malice personality would make other races hate you/stay away from you. And im not sure on how they would detect smoke from other planets THAT far away :? I think smoke would be to small to be detected 20+ light years away lol Now Barnum, I personally think people should ask "How can life be out there?" and if you have been paying any attention to the discovery of extra solar planets you would know all were finding are these uninhabitable monsters :| But a bit of light to sprinkle on the subject, it is believed that both Gliese 581 c and d is a very likely candidate to support life. Be it intelligent or an extremaphile(I spelt it right!) the planets are in the star's habitable zone which means they could form liquid water on it. I cant wait for extra planetary exploration

 

[Marisa]

Just to throw in a coin for the opposite side, there's life on earth that thrives and excels living off sulfur and in 500+ degree deepsea volcanic vents.
That and the amount of times earth itself's been reset, so a "why not" possibility.

 

[PBarnum]

And who says that life must be carbon based?

 

[Stoned]

And who says that life must be carbon based?

Well...since water if key to the growth of life on other planets. Then yeah, they will be carbon based life forms.

 

[PBarnum]

No one knows whether or not there is *something* else that could sustain a certain type of life form.

 

[Stoned]

No one knows whether or not there is *something* else that could sustain a certain type of life form.

That could be the case. But so far we have seen life thrive in a water enrich environment while we have seen extremaphiles do the same thing. The only way to know is to actually go to that planet and see for ourselves.

 

[jon50559]

I recently read somewhere that it's possible for a different form of life to survive based on even a radically different solvent, something like methane. So don't rule something like that out even if we have no proof as of yet.

 

[Stoned]

I recently read somewhere that it's possible for a different form of life to survive based on even a radically different solvent, something like methane. So don't rule something like that out even if we have no proof as of yet.

Were did you read it?

 

[Tentadrilus]

Well, in which case, there could well be life on Titan. That's an intriguing thought.

 

[Stoned]

Well, in which case, there could well be life on Titan. That's an intriguing thought.

Yes! Thats very exciting. Lakes of liquid methane...freezing cold methane tho. But I think Jupiter has other more promising moons. Like Callisto or Ganymede. Callisto I think was the one that had jets of water-ice that was being caught in Jupiter's gravitational pull. Then Ganymede has what is believed to be an ocean of water 200 KM bellow the surface. NASA is planning an exploration with a probe on Callisto or Ganymede.

 

[jon50559]

Well, in some science magazine. But here's an article: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/03/life-of-saturns-titan-could-it-be-methane-based.html

There's also some speculation on yet more elements life could be based on.

 

[Thothie]

I’m fairly certain there’s life out there, but how much we would recognize as life, and how much we’d recognize as intelligent life – I’d be guessing next to none, and none, respectively. Certainly there is nothing in our galactic neighborhood compatible enough to make intelligible contact with us when no species on our own planet seems to live up to that expectation, even when trained to do so. We’ve got apes and dolphins that communicate so well that they’ve described their concepts of god to us, and we still consider them animals, so I don’t think there’s any other species that would satisfy our requirements for sentience; if not here, certainly not anywhere else.

Also: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5705&p=94820&start=2

Our science is in its infancy. All this talk about what is and isn't possible as "scientific fact" is hogwash, especially given the fact that, for our current scientific theories as to the nature of the universe to work, 90% of it has to be made up of a particle with properties unlike that of any other particle or matter we've ever detected, with an anti-gravitational nature we've never seen in anything else in nature, and that we've never been able to detect. (Even when risking collapsing the planet into a misplaced singularity at CERN in the effort to do so.)

There's about a dozen different chemicals with the potential for complex self-replicating algorithms similar to our own RNA at various temperatures and environs, but such structures may not even be a requirement for life. Larger, more complex entities may exist over unimaginable areas no more capable of perceiving us as intelligent life than we are them, entities may exist in different time frames or states of being rendering us similarly unable to perceive, and so on and so forth. And like I stated, if we can't recognize intelligence in creatures we are actually related to, there's no chance at all at us finding said in anything truly alien, assuming we can even recognize anything truly alien as even alive. We aren't going to run into anything like Roddenberry's Romulan's or "The Grays", unless we are somehow directly related to them or spawned by them.

 

[jon50559]

That's a superb post Thothie.

I also once watched a documentary on alternate dimensions, and say in your mind you crossed the street before looking and got hit by a car, but never actually did that before looking both ways, then in some alternate dimension you actually did get hit by the car and die. Then perhaps alien life we imagine up do all exist somewhere in an alternate dimension. But I'm kinda done with all this speculation, I doubt anything profound will be discovered in my or any of our lifetimes.

 

[Stoned]

Well...hm. I dont know much about Biology nor Astrobiology. But might I add something to that Thothie? I heard from a respected Astronomer (or scientist, astrobiologist, what ever the hell he or she studied) that we will NEVER encounter a life from that looks like us or resembles us in any way.

 

[Thothie]

Isn't that what I just said? :|

 

[Tentadrilus]

Our science is in its infancy. All this talk about what is and isn't possible as "scientific fact" is hogwash, especially given the fact that, for our current scientific theories as to the nature of the universe to work, 90% of it has to be made up of a particle with properties unlike that of any other particle or matter we've ever detected, with an anti-gravitational nature we've never seen in anything else in nature, and that we've never been able to detect. (Even when risking collapsing the planet into a misplaced singularity at CERN in the effort to do so.)

I must be the only person who doesn't particularly care whether CERN will destroy the world or not, purely because it won't. Sure, there's a CHANCE of it generating a mini-Big Bang big enough to muck everything up, but in the same way that there's also a chance of being randomly hit by a falling piano. The Doomsday Theory states that we will destroy ourselves one way or another (said theory is also used to explain why we haven't found any extraterrestrial life by some scientists - because all the other races have destroyed themselves) eventually, so who gives a damn?

 

[jon50559]

Okay F*** my last post, I never thought about that Tentadrilus! That's an interesting thought, that all other E.T. life eventually destroyed themselves.

 

[FER]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouZkkIsLiNg

 

[Thothie]

I must be the only person who doesn't particularly care whether CERN will destroy the world or not, purely because it won't. Sure, there's a CHANCE of it generating a mini-Big Bang big enough to muck everything up, but in the same way that there's also a chance of being randomly hit by a falling piano. The Doomsday Theory states that we will destroy ourselves one way or another (said theory is also used to explain why we haven't found any extraterrestrial life by some scientists - because all the other races have destroyed themselves) eventually, so who gives a damn?

I dun think it will - just pointing out the extremes we go to in order to prove an obviously flawed theory, that our very understanding of the universe depends on, and inevitably fail. Thus science: in infancy.

Okay F*** my last post, I never thought about that Tentadrilus! That's an interesting thought, that all other E.T. life eventually destroyed themselves.

There's an accepted (if goofy) formula for the odds of there being intelligent beings in our galaxy called "The Drake Equation". It seems to assume they are *somewhat* similar to us, carbon based, and similar chemical make up and social structures, so it's kinda bunk right there, but one of the prime components is the odds of self-annihilation. Granted, it's usually thought to be from nuclear holocaust, but of course, that's just the first quick-and-dirty way we found to kill all ourselves off - obviously there are more to come. Again, theories that assume you know all there is to know, die off real fast.

The Drake equation states that:
N = R* x fp x ne x ne x fe x fi x fc x L
where:
N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;
and
R* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fe = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space before self-annihilation.

Needless to say, a lot of assuming going on here. Depending on what you plug into it, it can go anywhere from a 0.0002% chance of there being another civilization in our galaxy, to the odds being that there'd be over 20,000. Although given how many planets around stars we're detecting, and some really goofy estimates for the average length of a civilization's survival, The Drake Equation is generally thought to come to 2.1.

@ The Thing Trailer: Ya ever notice how back then that movie trailers never showed the best bit of the movies they advertised? Spoiler sensitive, I suppose.

 

[PBarnum]

@Thothie:
Which was the best way to go. You actually see the movie in the theater instead of through advertising.

 

[FER]

The Thing Trailer: Ya ever notice how back then that movie trailers never showed the best bit of the movies they advertised? Spoiler sensitive, I suppose.

That movie is living prrof that oldschool gfx are up to par with modern CGI.

BTW here are other outer life ideas (trust me)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5I3Lt8PwyQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L86AAGZ9BBg

 

[Stoned]

The Thing Trailer: Ya ever notice how back then that movie trailers never showed the best bit of the movies they advertised? Spoiler sensitive, I suppose.

That movie is living prrof that oldschool gfx are up to par with modern CGI.

BTW here are other outer life ideas (trust me)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5I3Lt8PwyQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L86AAGZ9BBg

DUKE NUKEM IMPOSTER! HIS LINE IS "I have come here to kick bubble gum and chew ass"