Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chances of E.T. Living Subsurface Ocean of Enceladus Given Major Boost

newsweek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 99 posts

Re: Chances of E.T. Living Subsurface Ocean of Enceladus Given Major Boost

#21

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #17
drewrv wrote: post #15

If alien life were discovered within our solar system, I wonder what the implications for the Drake Equation would be. Assuming panspermia is ruled out, the fact that abiogenesis occured twice within a seemingly ordinary system would imply life is incredibly common.

Aren't we discovering that our solar system isn't very "ordinary" at all after detecting that most of the systems with extra-solar planets are very different from us?

How do you figure? Are you thinking of the fact that most discovered planets are gas giants? This is due to the sensitivity of our equipment moreso than an insight about the distribution of planets in the universe.

Re: Chances of E.T. Living Subsurface Ocean of Enceladus Given Major Boost

#22

Post by svachalek »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #17
drewrv wrote: post #15

If alien life were discovered within our solar system, I wonder what the implications for the Drake Equation would be. Assuming panspermia is ruled out, the fact that abiogenesis occured twice within a seemingly ordinary system would imply life is incredibly common.

Aren't we discovering that our solar system isn't very "ordinary" at all after detecting that most of the systems with extra-solar planets are very different from us?

Do you have references on that? I was under the impression that as our detection improved, the systems we found around stars like ours were starting to look increasingly like ours. (But, at the same time it's looking like smaller, colder stars may have the bulk of inhabitable planets.)

Re: Chances of E.T. Living Subsurface Ocean of Enceladus Given Major Boost

#23

Post by delecti »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #20
delecti wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well one factor would go up (planets with life 1>2) and another would go down (planets with life developing intelligence 1>0.5), resulting in a wash. It does move towards giving additional degrees of freedom on those terms though, making the equation as a whole slightly less pseudo-science.

Depends on their intelligence if we find them, right? They might be intelligent and tool-using, but hampered by their aquatic origins.

The relevant terms (paraphrased) are: number that can have life, percent of those which do have life, percent of those which have intelligent life, percent of those that release signals into space.

So that would just move the same math down one more step. Twice the number of planets which have life (whether you adjust "can have life" or just the percent of the above which do), but that cancels out with half as many either being intelligent or releasing signals.

Re: Chances of E.T. Living Subsurface Ocean of Enceladus Given Major Boost

#24

Post by pavel_lishin »

svachalek wrote: post #22
pavel_lishin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't we discovering that our solar system isn't very "ordinary" at all after detecting that most of the systems with extra-solar planets are very different from us?

Do you have references on that? I was under the impression that as our detection improved, the systems we found around stars like ours were starting to look increasingly like ours. (But, at the same time it's looking like smaller, colder stars may have the bulk of inhabitable planets.)

This articles concludes that we are average, but I don't really understand how - we're only average in age, but we differ in just about every other data point (no super earths, low-eccentricity orbits, no close-in planets): http://aasnova.org/2015/09/25/how-normal-is-our-solar-system...

This article says we're definitely weirder, but points out that the detection technology matters, and we may not have the full picture yet: https://planetplanet.net/2016/07/12/exactly-how-unusual-is-o...

Re: Chances of E.T. Living Subsurface Ocean of Enceladus Given Major Boost

#25

Post by f2f »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #17
drewrv wrote: post #15

If alien life were discovered within our solar system, I wonder what the implications for the Drake Equation would be. Assuming panspermia is ruled out, the fact that abiogenesis occured twice within a seemingly ordinary system would imply life is incredibly common.

Aren't we discovering that our solar system isn't very "ordinary" at all after detecting that most of the systems with extra-solar planets are very different from us?

We keep getting less and less extraordinary the more we look. Whereas at the time of Asimov's or Sagan's writings (a few decades ago, the first exoplanet being detected in 1988) we didn't know of a single planet orbiting another sun, nowadays telescopes such as Kepler have pushed the estimate of the number of planets _just_ in the goldilocks zone to several billion inside the milky way. One in five sun-like stars may contain a planet capable of holding water:

http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-earth-like-planets-201...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potentially_habitable_...

https://www.universetoday.com/49605/how-common-are-solar-sys...

Re: Chances of E.T. Living Subsurface Ocean of Enceladus Given Major Boost

#26

Post by sillysaurus3 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #20
delecti wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well one factor would go up (planets with life 1>2) and another would go down (planets with life developing intelligence 1>0.5), resulting in a wash. It does move towards giving additional degrees of freedom on those terms though, making the equation as a whole slightly less pseudo-science.

Depends on their intelligence if we find them, right? They might be intelligent and tool-using, but hampered by their aquatic origins.

To a fish, we're aliens. It must be terrifying.

Re: Chances of E.T. Living Subsurface Ocean of Enceladus Given Major Boost

#27

Post by mitchty »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #24
svachalek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have references on that? I was under the impression that as our detection improved, the systems we found around stars like ours were starting to look increasingly like ours. (But, at the same time it's looking like smaller, colder stars may have the bulk of inhabitable planets.)

This articles concludes that we are average, but I don't really understand how - we're only average in age, but we differ in just about every other data point (no super earths, low-eccentricity orbits, no close-in planets): http://aasnova.org/2015/09/25/how-normal-is-our-solar-system... This article says we're definitely weirder, but points out that the detection technology matters, and we may not have the full pictu…

Exactly, we're weird only in that we can only detect weird planetary systems right now. The super earths, super Jupiter type systems are so common if only because that is where our light detection is best right now.

Until we start getting probes out to solar systems or have some way to detect orbits of planets that aren't perpendicular to our own we won't have much of an idea how weird we truly are or aren't.

Re: Chances of E.T. Living Subsurface Ocean of Enceladus Given Major Boost

#28

Post by bochoh »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #20
delecti wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well one factor would go up (planets with life 1>2) and another would go down (planets with life developing intelligence 1>0.5), resulting in a wash. It does move towards giving additional degrees of freedom on those terms though, making the equation as a whole slightly less pseudo-science.

Depends on their intelligence if we find them, right? They might be intelligent and tool-using, but hampered by their aquatic origins.

Is is intriguing to me to consider the limitations of space travel if you were an aquatic organism. Simply moving that much of any fluid versus empty "air" space would make leaving your planet that much more difficult. That's not to mention the inherent issues of electricity and developing circuits underwater.

Re: Chances of E.T. Living Subsurface Ocean of Enceladus Given Major Boost

#29

Post by dogma1138 »

bochoh wrote: post #28
pavel_lishin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on their intelligence if we find them, right? They might be intelligent and tool-using, but hampered by their aquatic origins.

Is is intriguing to me to consider the limitations of space travel if you were an aquatic organism. Simply moving that much of any fluid versus empty "air" space would make leaving your planet that much more difficult. That's not to mention the inherent issues of electricity and developing circuits underwater.

Underwater technological civilization isn’t possible, tool making is very limited, no fire, no complex chemistry, no real evolutionary path to a technological advance society without uplifting.

While possibly there aren’t that many restrictions on where life can evolve and even where can different levels of intelligence can evolve there are likely quite a bit of restrictions on where and how technological intelligence can evolve.

Which puts some restrictions or bias towards both biological/evolutionary traits and as well as environmental ones.

While I think we’ll find life in very strange places eventually and life that will be very strange any technological species we might encounter would be something much more similar to us than to anything else.

Re: Chances of E.T. Living Subsurface Ocean of Enceladus Given Major Boost

#30

Post by bdamm »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #26
pavel_lishin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on their intelligence if we find them, right? They might be intelligent and tool-using, but hampered by their aquatic origins.

To a fish, we're aliens. It must be terrifying.

I get the comparison, but personally I think it only works if we found tool-using behavior in aquatic species that shows they are actively modifying their environment to improve their survivability, so that they can have some meaningful basis for judging us as like them. Such as dolphins using agriculture. Otherwise we're just part of the freak show up where there is more light and less pressure.
Post reply on HN