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Saturn moon 'able to support life'

bbc.com

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Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#201

Post by rspeer »

ufo wrote: post #34
nzonbi wrote: post #4

If life is there, completely disconnected from earth life, it would be dramatic. That would mean that our solar system, has life on at least two, out of nine planets. That would seem to indicate that life is a fairly common things on planets. It would allow to adjust the drake equation, to easily predict millions of planets with life. And that would mean a high probability of many advanced, intelligent civilizations…

Technically, there are only 8 planets now :)

I would say nearly everyone in astronomy and education is in agreement right now that there are at least 9 planets. The only question is which ones they are.

(Mike Brown, the "Pluto killer", is searching for the distant gravitational influence that he believes to be a legit ninth planet.)

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#202

Post by Stanleyc23 »

smdz wrote: post #178

I always had this question - Can life exist outside our perception of biological life? Intelligent life might be an anomaly, and rare in the universe - but is it possible that life exists outside our perception of biology? Afterall everything is just rules and actions that lead to predictable reactions (unless quantum physics says something else) I look at artificial life - that exists in virtual environments. It loo…

You mean like the silicon based rock creatures in that one star trek episode? :)

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#203

Post by Symmetry »

nnq wrote: post #198
Symmetry wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that basic microbes only resperate over their surfaces so they have big square/cubed law limits on how large they can be and, by extension, on how complex their genomes can be. You need a hopeful monster that can run its metabolism throughout the cell to develop large genomes of the type that can support differentiated cells in multi-cellular creatures.

> You need a hopeful monster that can run its metabolism throughout the cell to develop large genomes of the type that can support differentiated cells in multi-cellular creatures There are a quite a few creatures sitting at the boundary between unicellular and multicellular like colonial algae ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvox ) and hydra ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_(genus) - I call this one "at the b…

I'm not talking about the difference between unicellular and multicellular life. I'm talking about the difference between small cells that resperate over their cell walls (prokaryotes and archaea) and cells that resperatory organelles (eukaryotes). Both algae and hydra are already over this barrier and I agree that once you're a eukaryote or the alien equivalent there's an easy path from there to complex multi-cellular interactions.

So certainly there's no missing link there. Heck, you've even got prokaryotes forming bacterial mats. The clear boundary is, again, between small cells that resperate over their surfaces and more complex cells that can resperate using structures throughout their interiors.

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#204

Post by nkrisc »

knightofmars wrote: post #190
tcfunk wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat related - I posed this question to my 4th grade science teacher. She was quick to shoot me down, and I'll never forget it.

I'm not saying the following is what happened in your situation. As an anecdotal insight, I have friends who are K thru 8 school teachers teachers and they have to be extremely careful with this type of question. The reason is religion, specifically Christian religion. If they misstep and posit a view that contradicts a child's parent's religious views then they are, best case scenario, going to hear about it or, wor…

Critical thinking is the greatest threat to religious indoctrination as it relies on the acceptance of teachings as fact from authorities at face-value without question. If a child learns to be skeptical and questioning, they'll never learn to believe something that can't be supported given the currently available evidence, or may very well be contradicted by it.

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#205

Post by bonzini »

ageofwant wrote: post #79
jerf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought about this and my conclusion is that we will likely leave behind a very strange pattern of certain natural resources. "Oh, look, here's a vein of copper! It's getting better, and better, and, that's weird, it's gone now and there's a complete break in the strata for some reason." Over time new mountains may form some new deposits, but it may be noticeable in the older mountains (that are today the younge…

If there were any high-intelligence species before they must have exited in a time predating current coal and oil formation, or were not technologically capable, or found some other way of harvesting energy. The fact that we found massive amounts of planet-killing coal and immediately started exploiting it with abandon means that that did not happen before, ergo no technologically capable species on this planet for a…

1000000 years ago, homo erectus was bashing rocks. You cannot really know what Bonobo chimps are going to evolve into so far in the future.

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#206

Post by CapitalistCartr »

Stanleyc23 wrote: post #202
smdz wrote: post #178

I always had this question - Can life exist outside our perception of biological life? Intelligent life might be an anomaly, and rare in the universe - but is it possible that life exists outside our perception of biology? Afterall everything is just rules and actions that lead to predictable reactions (unless quantum physics says something else) I look at artificial life - that exists in virtual environments. It loo…

You mean like the silicon based rock creatures in that one star trek episode? :)

That was the Horta in the original series. It finally said "No kill I" after Spock mind melded with it.

"The Devil in the Dark" Season 1 Episode 25

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#207

Post by bonzini »

winfred wrote: post #89
Houshalter wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read an interesting theory about this before but I can't remember the source. If there was intelligent life on Antarctica, it would be impossible for us to detect it today. Antarctica was warmer once and could have supported much more life. It's plausible any life that evolved there would be restricted to that continent. Humans evolved in warm climates and could adapt to cold climates by building shelters and we…

Here you go: http://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/scien... Mining wasn't banned until 1991. And as the article outlines, Antarctica is a really, really inhospitable place, to the point that it might be easier to colonize a different planet than to colonize Antarctica (I'd probably prefer equatorial Mars over Antarctica) and even mineral extraction would be very complicated.

At least if you get to Antartica you don't need a pressurized suit and an airlock to go outside. It's difficult to imagine a less hospitable world than one without an atmosphere and a magnetic field (well, not talking about Venus-level inhospitable).

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#208

Post by tmahle »

tcfunk wrote: post #180
smdz wrote: post #178

I always had this question - Can life exist outside our perception of biological life? Intelligent life might be an anomaly, and rare in the universe - but is it possible that life exists outside our perception of biology? Afterall everything is just rules and actions that lead to predictable reactions (unless quantum physics says something else) I look at artificial life - that exists in virtual environments. It loo…

Somewhat related - I posed this question to my 4th grade science teacher. She was quick to shoot me down, and I'll never forget it.

That's a shame! I've had the privilege of having and hearing many great discussions with scientists and their answer is almost always quite humble on this, but perhaps requires a bit of lateral thinking to arrive at. The idea is that yes, life could take forms we haven't thought of or forms that are extremely different from the life we see on Earth, but two things stop that from being studied as much as we might hope given how fundamentally interesting the concept is.

First, we simply don't have evidence for such life, so we can't say that it does exist. We also can't say that it doesn't, and certainly not that it couldn't, but those are topics that make for good science fiction rather than incredibly fruitful topics for scientific inquiry. With that said there's certainly some really interesting stuff going on all the same! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobiology

That leads to the second thing that's stopping it from being a heavily studied topic, which is that it's currently getting crowded out by the search for conventional life that happens to not be on Earth. The argument here goes 'yes, life elsewhere might not look like life here, but we know a heck of a lot more about life here than we do about how other, highly different life forms could work, so it makes more sense to focus our study on life that looks like the greater 'us' of earth-bound life.'

I've really enjoyed the discussions I've had on this topic, so I hope this was interesting to you. Sorry your teacher acted like a jerk!

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#209

Post by bonzini »

mcbits wrote: post #129
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference is in degree, not of kind Everything is a difference of degree. At a certain point, a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind. There is a difference of kind between a fungus altering its environment through enzymes it produces from its genetic programming and people inventing steam engines.

I think written language is our primary difference. Prehistoric wild humans had spoken language for hundreds of thousands of years, but we didn't have the explosion of "intelligence" until the advent of written language ~5,000 years ago. Or in more general terms, we have the ability to use our environment as a durable supplemental memory. This is what I would look for in assessing whether another species has the pote…

While I agree in general with what you wrote, there are examples of orally preserving collective memory. Think of the ancient epic poems for example.

Painted or etched drawings on cave walls came long before writing, and no other existing species on Earth does that except if we teach them.

Non-homo species also do not domesticate fire. Fire means not being afraid of something that you usually have seen only in scary situations, and it can lead to writing tens of thousands of years down the road (papyrus happens to preserve well in a pyramid in the desert, but cooking clay tablets or melting metals works better everywhere else).

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#210

Post by smdz »

nkrisc wrote: post #204
knightofmars wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying the following is what happened in your situation. As an anecdotal insight, I have friends who are K thru 8 school teachers teachers and they have to be extremely careful with this type of question. The reason is religion, specifically Christian religion. If they misstep and posit a view that contradicts a child's parent's religious views then they are, best case scenario, going to hear about it or, wor…

Critical thinking is the greatest threat to religious indoctrination as it relies on the acceptance of teachings as fact from authorities at face-value without question. If a child learns to be skeptical and questioning, they'll never learn to believe something that can't be supported given the currently available evidence, or may very well be contradicted by it.

Critical thinking is good - but kids can ask questions that are very difficult to answer (but we think of those as common knowledge)

For example: This question

> Why is 1+0 = 1 and not 10

Attempt to find an answer will generate more questions and it is a journey down the rabbit hole. Sometimes you don't want to do that.

And upto high-school I learnt things that were based on assumptions that I kept questioning. Internet brought be some peace in my college years. Unfortunately, nowadays internet is also filled with fake/wrong/hoax/biased stuff.

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